Laws of motion: Urban politics and the production of capital mobility in the United States

A premise underlying most theory and practice of urban politics is that spatial mobility is an inherent characteristic of capital and a natural and inevitable component of economic behavior within a free market economy. In contrast, this dissertation begins with the premise that the spatial mobility of capital is enacted through specific and identifiable institutional practices and that such practices are constructed and facilitated through and with the support of the state. The overarching goals of this research are to examine how the spatial mobility of capital is constructed and mediated, to consider the connection between the way that mobility is constructed and negative place-specific consequences in the United States, and to identify new strategies for confronting those consequences through local activism. These goals are pursued through two primary research components. One component analyzes secondary literature, and archived oral histories to identify how the mobility of capital has been understood and represented by participants on different sides of two cases of locational conflict: one historical conflict (1977-1980) over the departure of the steel industry from Youngstown, OH, and one contemporary conflict over the outsourcing/offshoring of professional services jobs from Seattle, WA. This component reveals common representations of capital mobility and considers how such representations shape the process and outcome of local struggles over urban development. A second research component employs a critical legal geographic methodology to construct a legislative and judicial history of capital mobility in the United States. This history emphasizes the role of the state in constituting capital as mobile, both domestically and internationally, and illustrates the political processes through which capital's right to mobility has been achieved over time. The dissertation finishes with a concluding discussion of various approaches to challenging conventional understandings of capital mobility and strategies for reconceptualizing and legally redefining capital and/or the relationship between capital and place in ways that better reflect the needs and interests of the people and the places on which capital depends.