In the “Communist Manifesto” Marx claimed that capitalists would be their own gravediggers. In hindsight, this observation might not have been particularly astute given the trajectory of twentieth century socialism—but in a limited way it might apply to the declining political fortunes of a once ascendant Republican Party in the state of Virginia. As the results of this exploratory study show, the economic logic of the micro-politics of land use and zoning prefigured political change. Baudrillard notes that in the postmodern condition, “it is the map which precedes the territory… it is the map that engenders the territory. . .” (2006: 1). Zoning classifications as discrete entities on a map structure changing residential patterns in accordance with the logic of capital accumulation, accumulation shaped in recent years by neo-liberalization at both the local and global scales as the case of Prince William County illustrates.
It is ironic that what is in the best economic interests of individual landowners in Prince William County directly contradicts those same land owner’s avowed political interests and ideology; conservative, nationalist and anti-urban. A business friendly environment such as the one promoted by governing elites in Prince William County is however, very amenable to the types of residential development which attract exactly the demographic which is the electoral base of the Democratic Party: Black, brown, working class and foreign born. This contradiction between economic self interest on the individual level is resolved ideologically and programmatically at the aggregate through the implementation of draconian anti-immigrant legislation. The activities of nativist and neo-nazi paramilitary groupings attempting to discourage settlement in Prince William by non-white and non-english speaking minorities deflect attention from the economic factors driving exactly those demographic changes they claim to oppose. Since zoning classifications precede development, I assert that a correlation between zoning and election outcomes is causal; an example of what Edward Soja calls “the socio-spatial dialectic” or the social production of space.
Two major battles of the civil war were fought in the outskirts of Manassas located at the crossroads of two major rail lines at the center of the county.In the case of Prince William County local identity might be grounded in the imaginary of the yeoman farmer and the war for Southern Independence This historical landscape is succumbing to encroaching suburbanization driven by high technology industries, and the specific requirements of these industries linked to national security..
American defense contracting acts as a huge, implicit regional-industrial development program, with one of its central instruments being the support and relocation of scientists and engineers (Ellis, Barff, Markusen: 1993). Economic development spearheaded by the cold war defense spending and suburbanization reshaped settlement patterns, the economy and politics of the south, including the state of Virginia (Lassiter 2006).
In Northern Virginia, high technology cores are concentrated in Fairfax, most notably in vicinity of Tyson`s Corner, and along the Dulles corridor. New clusters will coalesce as DoD related agencies and contractors respond to new security guidelines and base realignment directives, moving such key agencies as the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency to Fort Belvoir. County and municipal elected officials and planning authorities across the region vie for these lucrative industries, Prince William County being no exception.
As well as being magnets for highly educated workforces of the information society, developing urbanized cores like those found in Northern Virginia are also attracting low skill workers in a global labor market. Northern Virginia is what Audrey Singer calls a “New Immigrant Gateway” giving rise to contentious politics and conflicting images of what the region is and what it will become. Many find the brave new globalized world to be threatening and alien to their imaginary of place and nation, but are unwilling to question its underlying assumptions or causes. One could speak of a politics of fear directed toward a dehumanized Other. In Prince William County, this fear has driven the implementation of draconian anti-immigrant legislation among an increasingly threatened coalition of property owners long allied with the Republican party unified by an ideology of color blind racial exclusion.
The data examined include the 2008 boundary files for voting precincts in Prince William County, 2000 zoning classifications and boundaries, and precinct level voting results from the state of Virginia for the 2000 and 2008 general elections. Several statistical and geo-statistical methods were used. The geographies of election precincts and zoning are independent of each other and are not directly comparable. A solution to this problem can be found in interpolation, converting election returns into a surface and extracting values onto the zoning features to produce a table for further analysis. As a part of my preliminary analysis a Chi square test was used. Zoning classifications are at the nominal level of measurement while election outcomes can be made dichotomous, reducing the data to a 2 by 2 table.The centroids for zoning area polygons were used as sampling points for the values of the interpolated surface and added onto the attribute table for the zoning feature layer.
Table 1 accompanying this post shows the results; a high degree of association between density and support for Obama.
Prince William County Virginia, located in the outer suburbs of the nation’s capital is one of the flashpoints where conflicting visions of national identity are playing out across the terrain of municipal politics steeped in economic insecurity. Globalized production and just in time delivery make economies of scale more profitable, and capital intensive; living labor servicing dead labor power. At the same time these flattened corporate hierarchies and flexible production models have made work at all levels precarious, heightening insecurity on both the economic and psychological levels.
Profound changes have fundamentally altered the landscape of modernity, forcing many to reassess basic assumptions including national identity and the local identities With global production chains in a uni-polar world, the identity between workplace and community, national identity and state, town and country have been destabilized leading to profound changes in everyday life everywhere including Northern Virginia and Prince William County.
The data from one Northern Virginia County suggest that the neoliberal policy proscriptions of free trade, deregulation, privatization and private property rights have been the ironic engine of electoral transformation via the micro-politics of land use. Myriad individual “rational choice” decisions concerning the profitability of raising livestock versus town homes is altering the historical landscape of Prince William County. New office parks, shopping centers, and technology incubators drive growth creating employment at both ends of the post fordist income ladder while free trade agreements such as NAFTA and CAFTA have stimulated a massive migratory movement both within the United States and from the global South to North to fill those positions. This flow is landing in single family homes and townhouses in host communities like Prince William altering the cultural and political landscape of both Northern Virginia as well as influencing the outcome of the November 2008 elections.
references:
Baudrillard, Jean (2006)"Simulacra and Simulation" Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press
Lassiter, Mathew D. (2006) “The Silent Majority: suburban politics in the Sunbelt South” Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Mark Ellis; Richard Barff; Ann R. Markusen (1993) “Defense Spending and Regional Development”. Economic Geography.69 (2) 182-203
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