Crisis-Generated Restructuring

Definition

Crisis-generated restructuring is Edward Soja's periodizing concept for the recurring mechanism of capitalist urban development: "attempts to restore the conditions for accelerated economic expansion" undertaken during the long-wave downturns of urban-industrial capitalism. Roughly 50-year cycles define the "long-wave" periodization: "Each cycle or wave begins with several decades of accelerated economic growth and expansion… These boom periods eventually peak in disruptive crises… and are followed by equally long periods of decelerated economic growth, increasingly frequent social crises, and what present-day scholars have termed restructuring processes" (Soja 2000, p. 110). Three such periods of restructuring are identified — the fin-de-siècle Long Depression after 1873; the 1920s–Great Depression–Second World War interregnum; and the wave that began in the late 1960s and produced the postmetropolis. Each restructuring generates a distinctive new mode of capitalist development: laissez-faire competitive industrial capitalism (post-1830s), corporate-monopoly-imperialism (post-1870s), Fordist-Keynesianism (post-1920s), postfordist flexible accumulation (post-1970s).

The concept is geopolitical as well as economic: the 1960s urban crisis — the uprisings from Watts (1965) onward, alongside Vietnam, OPEC, and May 1968 — marked "another critical turning point in the geohistory of urban-industrial capitalism" (p. 96), exposing "deep weaknesses and serious gaps" in a social science built for order ("a moral order in the case of the early Chicago School sociologists, a geo-statistical order for the new urban geographers," p. 97). Its theoretical lineage: Kondratieff's waves, Schumpeter's "creative destruction," Mandel's long-wave Marxism, Hobsbawm's Ages, and Harvey's crisis-driven "spatial fix." Its Los Angeles form: McWilliams's "continuous boom" — "the growth of Southern California since 1870 should be regarded as one continuous boom punctuated at intervals with major explosions" (quoted p. 122) — growth waves peaking in the 1880s, the Progressive Era, the 1920s, the postwar decades, and (most anomalously) the restructuring era itself.

Key Thinkers

• Edward W. Soja — the concept's postmetropolis-periodization author; earlier deployment in Postmodern Geographies (the prototype urban-form maps of 1820–1970, reproduced as figure 4.1).
• Nikolai Kondratieff, Joseph Schumpeter, Ernest Mandel (referenced, not paged — see log) — the long-wave lineage; "creative destruction"; Late Capitalism.
• David Harvey — the mechanism: the spatial fix; capital's knife-edge between preserving and destroying its built landscape.
• Eric Hobsbawm (referenced, not paged — see log) — the Ages framework (Revolution, Capital, Empire, Extremes) conforming to the long-wave periodization.
• Jane Jacobs / Lewis Mumford (referenced, not paged — see log) — the boom-town historiography Soja's LA periodization draws on.
• Roger Keil — the concept's downstream echo in the suburbanism cluster's crisis framing.

Related Concepts

• restructuring-generated-crisis — the concept's dialectical successor: when restructuring itself generates the crises.
• postfordism — the mode of capitalist development this third restructuring produced.
• postmetropolis — the urban condition the wave built.
• neoliberal-metropolis — the regime-side of the same restructuring.
• urban-revolutions — the epochal frame within which the waves sit.
• The spatial fix (Harvey) — the mechanism the restructuring repeatedly deploys (not yet paged — see log).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Postmetropolis (Soja 2000) — the long-wave framework and the three restructurings (pp. 110–116), the 1960s break (pp. 95–100), the LA boom-waves table (pp. 122–141), and the postscript's retroactive reading (pp. 396–397).

Source Support linking rule: All entries in this section must be wikilinks to source note pages in wiki/source-notes/ using the source-notes/ path prefix. Never link to raw files — raw files are not wiki pages.

Open Questions

• Is the long-wave rhythm causal or merely descriptive — Soja notes its "primary causal mechanisms continue to be controversial" (p. 110); does the concept survive the post-2008 period as an explanatory frame or as periodizing convenience?
• Soja's LA reading ("one continuous boom punctuated… with major explosions") makes growth and crisis simultaneous — does the concept capture the post-2008 decades, or has crisis become the permanent condition rather than the wave's turning point?
• What did each restructuring wave do to the interior — the Fordist-Keynesian wave produced the mass-suburban interior; did the post-1970 wave produce a recognizable postfordist interior (the wiki's prefab, kit-of-parts, and post-retail registers)?