Images from a Neoliberal City: The State, Surveillance and Social Control (original) (raw)

Smith (1996: 230-232) characterized the late twentieth century crusade for a "new urban frontier" as akin to the Wild West of nineteenth century America. In the last ten years, not only in the North American context but in Europe too, extending the boundaries of the urban frontier-economically, politically, and culturally-has galvanized powerful urban coalitions in the task of re-taking-both ideologically and materially-city spaces from the visible and symbolic elements of urban degeneration. The project of urban reclamation has not been neutral but has been formulated within a post welfare, neoliberal politics that has promoted a ideology of self responsibilisation within a climate of moral indifference to increasingly visible inequality. These ideological shifts have been fuelled by, and consolidated in, an evolving form of state ensemble that, as a rapidly moving target (Hay 1996: 3), has been largely neglected in criminological analysis. It is the contention of this paper that the agents and agencies of the neoliberal state are constructing the boundaries and possibilities of the new urban frontier while simultaneously engaging in a project of social control that will have far-reaching consequences for how we understand the meanings of public space, social justice and the parameters of state power.