Re-framing the urban blight problem with trans-disciplinary insights from ecological economics

a r t i c l e i n f o Similar to circumstances in the field of economics, market fundamentalism dominates urban blight policy spaces in the U.S. despite criticisms of the paradigm. Unlike the unified alternative that ecological economics (EE) provides to conventional economic theory, however, disagreement over the meaning of " blight " has prevented a commonly held pre-analytic vision and policy agenda from forming in critical blight scholarship. This paper asserts that " applied EE " offers a framework in which to develop such a vision, and to strengthen the inchoate critical blight policy stream. We draw on the EE theory and concepts to argue that blight can be understood as a stock that accumulates in an urban system as a result of underinvestment into real property. Our conceptualization of the problem has several important implications for public policy. A brief illustration compares the relative efficacy of one city's characteristically neoliberal blight policies with more " EE-consistent " policies in a second city to show that the latter might in fact outperform the former. What, if anything, can critical urban scholars in search of better blight policies learn from ecological economists? Likewise, what, if anything, can ecological economists attempting to influence economic and environmental policies gain from urban blight researchers? At the outset these seem like odd questions to ask. The two fields are ostensibly unrelated in subject matter, scope, and, as ecological economists ought to appreciate, scale. For example, the overarching goal of a steady-state economy is surely more complex, interdependent, and macroscopic in nature than the goal of a blight-free city. Additionally, the former goal necessitates finding ways to balance global collective socioeconomic activities against the objective properties of the physical systems that sustain and contain the world economy; whereas the latter, insofar as blight tends to be a subjective concept, requires coordinating local collective decision-making in ways that satisfy the heterogeneous preferences of a given city's residents. Hence the challenges confronting each end are highly incongruent. Nevertheless, it is claimed here that where the two diverse areas of research potentially share swaths of common ground is in their erst-while limited capacities to facilitate enaction of public policies based on pre-analytic visions that are markedly different from each field's respective " conventional " approach. Consider first the case of ecological economics (EE). Despite its well-established foundations and growing popularity in academia (Costanza et al., …