Framing neoliberal urbanism: Translating ‘commonsense’ urban policy across the OECD zone

Abstract

The paper explores the evolution of urban policy discourses among advanced industrial nations in the period since the early 1980s, by way of a case study of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). The OECD, it is argued, has provided an arena for the consolidation of a particular form of neoliberal urbanism, conceived here as a mutating policy frame. As a consensus-finding organization, the OECD is more of a mediator than a unilateral driver of policy conventions. It is not a site of hard-edged or radical policy innovation, but seeks to define a ‘common ground’ in the form of a positive policy consensus. As such, the OECD’s coordinative discourse both reflects and refracts a particular reading of the ‘soft center’ of the urban policy consensus, revealing how (far) this has moved since the early 1980s. Hardly preordained, this transnational mode of neoliberal urbanism has been a constructed project, subject to significant adaption and evolution.