Profiling ‘Red Bologna’: Between neoliberalisation tendencies and municipal socialist legacy

Abstract

This city profile frames Bologna as an appropriate context in which to elaborate reflections that bring to the same table representatives of two schools of urban scholarship: the advocates of the neoliberalisation thesis, who are predominantly Anglo-American (e.g., Theodore and Brenner, 2002; Brenner, Peck and Theodore, 2010), and those who criticise the vague and unreflective application of the concept (e.g., Pinson and Morel Journel, 2016; Le Galès, 2016), who are mainly based in continental/Southern Europe. The medium-sized Italian city of “Red Bologna” (Harvey, 2007, p. 12) is chosen because of its municipal socialist legacy, characterised by a traditional communist political subculture and a hybrid form of cooperative, market-based territorial development called the “Emilian Model”. The paper seeks to gauge some of the main contemporary challenges that the city has faced, most of which have been exacerbated by the sudden boost in tourist arrivals and the quick opening up to the visitor economy over the last decade. Ultimately, the paper explores how European third-tier cities can incorporate entrepreneurial orientations and international policy discourses into existing governance structures and modes of development while exhibiting signs of distinct and competing ideologies (Shepherd, 2018).