ABSTRACT
One does not have to accept this fundamentally polarised conception of urban interests to agree that the interests of a commercially dominated urban growth coalition do not naturally coincide with the interests of other people living in an urban locality. These local citizens’ interests are primarily ‘oriented toward use values of urban space’ (ibid.), and this orientation may take these local citizens in different directions, emotionally and politically, from that of the growth coalition, though in Molotch and Logan’s original conception there will be an inherent tendency towards periodic conflict and divergence between ‘users’ and
exploiters of urban resources. It does need to be said that there is some tension between this polarised conception of growth coalition and citizen interest and the later account which Molotch and Logan provide of the struggle in the United States in the early 1980s between cities, for new positions of influence and wealth in the reorganised national and international economy. There is some evidence that cities which were successful in repositioning themselves as what Molotch and Logan call ‘headquarter cities’ in the new, post-Fordist, global economy (like Atlanta, Georgia) were also those in which local growth coalitions were attracting considerable local support, not simply within the circles of the commercial entrepreneurial elite.
