In different spaces: The cultural turn in urban and regional political economy

Abstract

For many years, those involved in the fields of urban and regional political economy have called for increasing attention to cultural studies, both to add richness to contemporary interpretations of geographically uneven development and as a means of expanding class analysis to encompass more openly questions of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and everyday life. What has happened recently, however, has not been simply the addition of cultural analysis to political economy but the beginning of a radical restructuring of the very foundations of urban and regional political economy to contend with the emergence of what is now being called a New Cultural Politics. I will explore three ways in which the New Cultural Politics differs significantly from what might be called the Old Economic Politics. The first difference arises from the epistemological restructuring that has marked the shift from modernist to post‐modernist critical theory. The second difference, growing out of the first, is a rethinking of the nexus of relations defined by race, class, gender, and other axes of power inequalities and uneven development. Thirdly, I will argue that the most insightful current attempts to make practical and political sense of the New Cultural Politics are arising from a significantly different conceptualization and understanding of the spatiality of social life, from geographical imaginations that work ‘in different spaces’ from those focused on by most radical urban and regional political economists. I will conclude by arguing that the cultural turn should not be seen as an abandonment of ‘radical’ formulations, as implied in the title of the International Seminar, but as an invitation and challenge to radical scholars and activists to rethink and restructure the epistemological and spatial foundations of their theories and practices.