Casinos, Prisons, Incinerators, and Other Fragments of Neoliberal Urban Development

Abstract

Neoliberal urban development, as a set of governance practices and regulations intended to valorize cities as sites for capital accumulation, has increased social polarization and produced enclaves or “cities within cities.” Local governments have relinquished administrative and legal control to private corporations over how certain areas in the city are developed and used (or “consumed”) and by whom. In this article I examine the emergence of governance strategies around urban fragmentation in Chester, an older, former industrial city in southeastern Pennsylvania. My analysis focuses primarily on modes of state (de)regulation and intervention in privatized urban redevelopment, emphasizing how common patterns in governance have surfaced despite changing definitions of “urban redevelopment” over different time periods. In doing so, this analysis fits within critical studies of actually existing neoliberalism, in which the forms and practices of neoliberalism are examined as historically contingent and geographically specific.