The City as an Anti‐Growth Machine

ABSTRACT Logan and Molotch's “urban growth machine” remains foundational in urban theory, describing how coalitions of landowners, developers, and politicians promote urban growth to raise land values. This paper argues that under financialized capitalism, the dynamics have inverted: asset appreciation now outweighs productive investment, and urban land is increasingly treated as a speculative asset. In this context, restricting development—not expanding it—maximizes returns. The result is an urban anti‐growth machine: a decentralized but powerful coalition of homeowners, landlords, neighborhood associations, and local officials that blocks new construction. While framed in terms of environmental protection or neighborhood character, these efforts reflect structural incentives of rentier capitalism, in which manufactured scarcity drives value extraction. This shift has far‐reaching consequences, including an affordability crisis, rising inequality, and exclusion. The anti‐growth machine must be understood as the urban expression of a broader economic shift—in which scarcity, not expansion, becomes the dominant engine of value.