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14 market-state
I use the term “market-state” to replace the term “nation-state” at certain locales in states that are politically decentralized to the point where local or regional control over resources allows cities and provinces to work directly with multinational corporations to create local sites of production (such as BMW factories in South Carolina) and consumption (e.g., privately owned shopping malls and amusement parks). The interests of “the nation” are, at best, only indirectly served here. The market-state1 competes with the national government in constructing spaces for consumers. As more and more of the cityscape is managed by corporate interests, the public street loses the economic means to reproduce itself2, and to maintain a positive mix of economic, social, and expressive cultural uses. Curiously, while private individual expression has been curtailed on the street, expressions of market-state desires are everywhere found.
1 The rise of the market-state within the modern nation-state is a primary feature of late modernity. This process brings global flows of culture and capital to many a city, but it also interrupts the circulation of local spending, shunting this return flow of capital into the international monetary organizations that finance the market-state. The city in a market-state is a decentred space, defined not by its boulevards and plazas, but by the number of “world-class” consumption palaces it can boast and the number of minutes it takes the travel between these. The public street becomes only a conduit that takes people somewhere else. And so we cannot reimagine the public street without finding a way to release this from its service to the market-state. Note also that Japan (perhaps even more than Singapore) is a singular example of a national market-state where the national government and national corporations control local production for consumption to the exclusion of both local interests and transnational corporate interests. The slow relaxation of Japanese national cartel control, under external trade pressure, does not require the opening up to a market-state, although this seems to be what is happening in Kyoto.
2 The city that once embodied the nation-state now touts its private pleasure realms and curries corporate capital by offering tax incentives for private development of properties, development that leads to further abandonment of real estate connected to the public street and to sites of public history. Public parks that were once ceremonial centers, are now surrounded by vacant lots and shuttered businesses. Under long-term market-state conditions, the city can no longer serve as a metonymic site of a national heritage—except as a cynical mirror reflecting a lack of this—and even sites of local history fare badly in competition with the spectacles that transnational capital can provide. And so Los Angeles becomes the home of Universal City.
