The undercurrents of entrepreneurial development: Impressions from a globalizing city

Abstract

High-standard entrepreneurial ventures are usually justified as a means of stimulating capital investment for social, spatial, and financial side benefits for the public. We show the unequal consequences of these ideas in Tel Aviv—Jaffa, where the location of the projects subject to such obligations is not really mitigated by the location of municipal public flagship projects and by the spatial distribution of the municipal development budget. As in many other urban centers, planning bureaucrats in this city advanced numerous expensive residential ventures to finance a variety of municipal initiatives and increase public budgets. Despite their success in attracting private investments, collecting developers’ taxes, exactions, and revenues, the more complicated issues and the less affluent communities see less private and public spending. We link this tendency to the growing fragmentation of urban planning, to the supremacy of the local plan—practically operating as a planning deal—and to the emergence of various municipal tools supporting the feasibility of the deal. We thus claim that while the entrepreneurial planning practice fosters the connections between flexible planning and urban economy, a short-range financial conclusion is unavoidable—most of its products are directed to attract additional similar projects. By tracing this institutional conduct, we claim that while current urban planning is subordinated to market logic and investments, it is actually trapped in a vicious cycle of deepening its own economic appeal. Simultaneously, planners are losing the ability to direct public goods to where they are needed.