Commentary. The New Urban Politics Thesis

Abstract

Birthed by and in turn giving substantive content to Harvey’s historical materialist manifesto for urban studies, it is possible to think of the New Urban Politics (NUP) thesis as in many ways a talented sibling carrying the hopes and aspirations of an expectant parent. Harvey’s mission of course was to persuade urban scholars that there existed an inescapable embroilment of urban processes in capitalism’s histories and geographies; cities were both constituted by and in turn were constitutive of, capitalism and its trajectories. The contribution of the NUP thesis was to mobilise this analytical framework to make sense of epochal transformations in the governance of the contemporary capitalist city and therein to provide insights into the ways in which, at this historical moment, Western cities might be apprehended as key sites in the struggle over the division of the national product. In part, the popularisation of the NUP thesis can be accounted for by the worldly dramas which unfolded as they did. In the early 1970s, the mileu in which modern Western cities existed was changing rapidly; the Fordist Keynesian compromise which had underpinned 30 years of economic growth and improved standards of living for all had collapsed. Subsequently, the assault on welfare systems wrought by ascendant rightist governments began and local governments came to recognise the full import of their diminished capacity to serve as managers, administers and adjudicators of the distribution of items of collection consumption. Meanwhile, the growing footlooseness and transnational ambitions of capital served to create a new set of expectations of and burdens on cities who—whether they sought it or not—were now charged with the responsibility of spearheading national accumulation strategies. Urban fortunes and futures would increasingly be defined by the capacity of cities to register the new zeitgeist, digest its meaning and implications, and define and enact a new modus operandus.