Neoliberal privatisation? Remapping the public and the private in Sydney's masterplanned residential estates (original) (raw)
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By Design or by Default: Varieties of Neoliberal Urban Development
2016
With the onset of the Great Recession, it looked for a moment that neoliberalism had become vulnerable to challenges from the urban level. Yet, it appears that the neoliberal ideas, institutions, and policy frameworks continue to dominate urban governance. As such, there remains a need to develop interpretive frames through which to examine the construction and reproduction of urban neoliberalism. This article seeks to provide a historically grounded account of urban neoliberalization, which pays specific attention to how neoliberalism has been constructed ideologically, politically, and institutionally. Through a comparison of cases in the United Kingdom and the United States, I suggest that the respective alignment of ideas, institutions, and interests accounts for " the pace, extent, and character " of urban neoliberalization. I argue that the variation in the manner of urban neoliberalization may be captured through two key mechanisms: neoliberalism by design and neoliberalism by default.
Neoliberalization processes have been reshaping the landscapes of urban development for more than three decades, but their forms and consequences continue to evolve through an eclectic blend of failure and crisis, regulatory experimentation, and policy transfer across places, territories and scales. The proliferation of familiar neoliberal discourses and policy formulations in the aftermath of the 2007-09 world financial crisis masks evidence of more deeply rooted transformations of policies, institutions and spaces that continue to combatively remake terrains of urban development. Accordingly, the critical intellectual project of deciphering the problematic of neoliberal urbanism must continue to evolve. This essay outlines some of the methodological and political challenges associated with (re)constructing a moving map of post-crisis neoliberalization processes. We affirm a form of critical urban theory that adopts a restlessly antagonistic stance towards orthodox urban formations and their dominant ideologies, institutional arrangements and societal effects, tracking their endemic policy failures and crisis tendencies while at the same time demarcating potential terrains for heterodox, radical and/or insurgent theories and practices of emancipatory social change.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2013
Neoliberalization processes have been reshaping the landscapes of urban development for more than three decades, but their forms and consequences continue to evolve through an eclectic blend of failure and crisis, regulatory experimentation, and policy transfer across places, territories and scales. The proliferation of familiar neoliberal discourses and policy formulations in the aftermath of the 2007-09 world financial crisis masks evidence of more deeply rooted transformations of policies, institutions and spaces that continue to combatively remake terrains of urban development. Accordingly, the critical intellectual project of deciphering the problematic of neoliberal urbanism must continue to evolve. This essay outlines some of the methodological and political challenges associated with (re)constructing a Јmoving mapЈ of post-crisis neoliberalization processes. We affirm a form of critical urban theory that adopts a restlessly antagonistic stance towards orthodox urban formations and their dominant ideologies, institutional arrangements and societal effects, tracking their endemic policy failures and crisis tendencies while at the same time demarcating potential terrains for heterodox, radical and/or insurgent theories and practices of emancipatory social change.
Book Review: Neoliberal Urbanism and its Contestations: Crossing Theoretical Boundaries
Human Geography
In this edited collection, Jenny Künkel and Margit Meyer attempt the important but formidable task of grasping their subject through multiple strands of critical theory, incorporating not simply politicaleconomic with Foucauldian approaches, but also postoperaist, postcolonial, and post-structuralist feminist thought. The introduction wields Gramsci's theory of hegemony as the theoretical glue, arguing that more material accounts explain coercion through focus on external and structural forces, while post-structuralist approaches help us understand the day-today experience of consent: "The framework thus enhances our understanding of neoliberal hegemony by revealing how it is sustained not only through (external) force, but also by processes of identification and responsibilization (partially substituting Fordist-style concessions of material benefits or privilege according to the motto 'divide and rule')" (p. 6).
This essay elaborates a critical geographical perspective on neoliberalism that emphasizes (a) the path-dependent character of neoliberal reform projects and (b) the strategic role of cities in the contemporary remaking of political-economic space. We begin by presenting the methodological foundations for an approach to the geog-raphies of what we term " actually existing neoliberalism. " In contrast to neoliberal ideology, in which market forces are assumed to operate according to immutable laws no matter where they are " unleashed, " we emphasize the contextual embeddedness of neoliberal restructuring projects insofar as they have been produced within national, regional, and local contexts defined by the legacies of inherited institutional frameworks , policy regimes, regulatory practices, and political struggles. An adequate understanding of actually existing neoliberalism must therefore explore the path-dependent, contextually specific interactions between inherited regulatory landscapes and emergent neoliberal, market-oriented restructuring projects at a broad range of geographical scales. These considerations lead to a conceptualization of contemporary neolib-eralization processes as catalysts and expressions of an ongoing creative destruction of political-economic space at multiple geographical scales. While the neoliberal restructuring projects of the last two decades have not established a coherent basis for sustainable capitalist growth, it can be argued that they have nonetheless profoundly reworked the institutional infrastructures upon which Fordist-Keynesian capitalism was grounded. The concept of creative destruction is presented as a useful means for describing the geographically uneven, socially regressive, and politically volatile trajectories of institutional/spatial change that have been crystallizing under these conditions. The essay concludes by discussing the role of urban spaces within the contradictory and chronically unstable geographies of actually existing neoliberalism. Throughout the advanced capitalist world, we suggest, cities have become strategically crucial geographical arenas in which a variety of neoliberal initiatives—along with closely intertwined strategies of crisis displacement and crisis management—have been articulated.
Neoliberalism and Urban Change: Stretching a Good Idea Too Far?
Territory, Politics, Governance, 2016
Does neoliberalism matter for cities, urbanization processes, urban governance and policies? How and to what extent? What does this even mean? These questions are important as neoliberalism is a contentious and powerful political project and paradigm. This paper argues that: (1) it may be fruitful to be clearer about the meaning of neoliberalism rather than adopting an encompassing constructivist framework; and (2) that neoliberalism may not explain that much about the current transformation of urbanization processes and cities. Instead, these mechanisms need to be better specified and their limits defined: urban worlds and the urbanization processes of cities do not change all the time, in all ways. Rather than embracing the multiple, everchanging forms of neoliberalism and the contructivist framework underpinning this position , this paper identifies a set of central points to define neoliberalism by contrast to liberalism, as one possible working definition of neoliberalism. Secondly, it discusses the neoliberalization of cities and urban policies, recognizing that cities change for many reasons, of which neoliber-alism is just one. RÉSUMÉ : Le néolibéralisme, at -il une importance pour les grandes villes, les processus d'urbanisation, la gouvernance urbaine et la politique des villes? Comment et dans quelle mesure? Qu'est-ce que cela veut dire? Ces questions-là sont importantes parce que le néolibéralisme constitue un projet et un paradigme politiques à la fois controversés et puissants. Cet article affirme 1) qu' il pourrait s'avérer utile d'éclaircir le sens du néolibéralisme plutôt que d'adopter un cadre constructiviste global; et 2) qu'il se peut que le néolibéralisme ne dise pas grande chose à propos de la transformation actuelle des processus d'urbanisation et des grandes villes. En revanche, il faut que ces mécanismes-là soient mieux précisés et leur limites définies: le monde
In this article, we analyze the connections between neoliberalization processes and urban transformations. Cities have become strategically central sites in the uneven, crisis-laden advance of neoliberal restructuring projects. However, in contrast to neoliberal ideology, our analysis draws attention to the path-dependent interactions between neoliberal projects of restructuring and inherited institutional and spatial landscapes. Accordingly, we emphasize the geographically variable, yet multiscalar and translocally interconnected, nature of neoliberal urbanism. We also suggest that cities are sites of serial policy failure as well as resistance to neoliberal programs of urban restructuring. For these reasons, urban regions provide an important reference point for understanding some of the limits, contradictions and mutations of the neoliberal project since the 1990s.