The Relationship Between Urban Regeneration and Neoliberalism: Two Presumptuous Theories and a Research Agenda

Abstract

Most thinking about urban regeneration is undertheorized. Policy makers tend to justify their choices by referring to cognitive and normative prejudices that are widely shared amongst their reference groups (e.g. notions of ‘Global Good Practice’). But the theoretical assumptions underlying such claims are rarely exposed to examination. This paper draws out and criticizes what seem to be the two dominant theories that underpin, explicitly or implicitly, current policy thinking about urban regeneration. These are neoAustrian economics (or Normative Neoliberalism) on the one hand, and neoGramscian Marxism (or Regulation Theory) on the other. Although these present themselves as in opposition, they in fact converge for all practical purposes. The paper suggests both are primarily ideological constructions, supplying an ethical bias rather than offering insights and tools for an objective, detached framework of analysis. Their shared economic reductionism makes it impossible to grasp the ways in which neoliberalising forms of urban development are constructed as much at the ‘local’ level as the ‘global’, and that this involves a political and ethical intervention that is no less important than the role of markets. The paper concludes that, if we are to understand the drivers of current forms of urban regeneration, we should pay more attention to the growing significance of performative governance, and the related fixation of policy-makers and property developers on the visual. The profound weaknesses of the main justificatory theories of ‘neoliberalising urban regeneration’ also means that we should refute the prevailing assumption that attempts to resist regeneration proposals, and efforts to develop alternatives are necessarily intellectually ill-founded and doomed to failure.