ancient cities

or its style, or its placement. Some graffiti writers
take sides in such debates, whereas others work
across these different realms, putting on gallery
shows and doing legal commissions (sometimes
under the label of street art) in the public realm
while maintaining an active profile on the streets
through uncommissioned and illegal graffiti work.
More work remains to be done to bring the
insights of graffiti writers into dialogue with scholarly
discussions in sociology, criminology, and urban
geography about the urban public realm. In particular,
there is certainly more scope for research that
asks what graffiti writers themselves tell us about the
city. As they inhabit the city in different ways and
mobilize urban space for different purposes in the
face of significant normative and legal regulation,
have graffiti writers developed new insights into the
nature of the cities in which they write? Criminologist
Jeff Ferrell’s work on graffiti begins to address such
questions. Ferrell has firsthand experience to draw
on, having himself been an active graffiti writer and
arrested for graffiti writing. He situates graffiti
among a range of urban practices that point toward
alternative and more anarchic ways of inhabiting the
city and negotiating urban life.
See also Crime; Hip Hop; Urban Semiotics
Further References
Kurt Iveson
Austin, Jon. 2001. Taking the Train: How Graffiti
Became an Urban Crisis in New York City. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Cooper, Martha and Henry Chalfant. 1984. Subway Art.
London: Thames and Hudson Ltd.
Cresswell, Tim. 1996. In Place/Out of Place: Geography,
Ideology, and Transgression. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ferrell, Jeff. 1993. Crimes of Style: Urban Graffiti and
the Politics of Criminality. New York: Garland.
———. 2002. Tearing Down the Streets: Adventures in
Urban Anarchy. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave.
Iveson, Kurt. 2007. Publics and the City. Oxford, UK:
Blackwell.
Macdonald, Nancy. 2001. The Graffiti Subculture:
Youth, Masculinity, and Identity in London and New
York. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave.
Growth Machine
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McDonald, Kevin. 1999. Struggles for Subjectivity:
Identity, Action, and Youth Experience. Melbourne,
Australia: Cambridge University Press.
Sennett, Richard. 1994. Flesh and Stone: The Body and
the City in Western Civilization. London: Faber and
Faber.
Wilson, James Q. and George L. Kelling. 1982. “Broken
Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety.” The
Atlantic Monthly, March.
Gr o w t H ma C H i n e
The growth machine concept appears most systematically
developed in John Logan’s and Harvey
Molotch’s Urban Fortunes, published in 1987.
The book follows a series of research papers by
the authors and develops the ideas crafted by
Molotch in his 1976 classic paper, “The City as a
Growth Machine.” In these pieces, Logan and
Molotch proposed a distinct approach to urban
theory. This entry looks at the idea’s evolution, its
current application, and cross-national contrasts.
Conceptual Background
In the 1970s, the field of urban sociology—and
other fields focusing on urban research such as
economics, urban geography, and planning—were
proponents of the idea that cities could be understood
as mere containers of human action.
According to this idea—which echoes the original
proposals of the Chicago School—a competition
among actors takes place in the city for land and
other resources. City form, distribution of land
uses, and central place theory can be explained by
this seemingly impersonal competition. By opposing
this approach, the growth machine idea placed
social action in the urban realm at the forefront of
analysis.
Emerging to explain the political economy of the
city, the growth machine idea countered the structuralist
overtones present in urban theory since the
publication in 1972 of Harvey’s Social Justice and
the City and Castells’s The Urban Question by
focusing on urban actors rather than forces. Explicit
in the concept is the claim that land parcels are
linked to specific interests, especially commercial,
sentimental, and psychological interests. Prominent