Inter-urban Competition Research Articles

Neoliberal necropolitics and the global competition for urban dominance

I deploy Achille Mbembé’s notion of necropolitics to show that neoliberalism as an urban development strategy has resonant, however differential, impacts between the Global North and South. As neoliberalizing cities throughout the world engage in interurban competition in their efforts to achieve or maintain “global city” and “world-class” city status, this is intertwined with necropolitics in that local governments must decide whose lives are expendable and whose are not, who is valuable to neoliberal capitalist interests and who may be devalorized, excluded, and subjected to forms of violence such as expulsion and displacement—processes connected to disrupted social and resource networks, psychological trauma, disease, and death. I rely upon a series of urban vignettes (LA, Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai, London, and Paris) to articulate several resonances and points of departure between them, shedding light on “actually existing” manifestations of neoliberal necropolitics and its contemporary relationship to interurban competition.

What Los Angeles tells us about Dracula Urbanism

ABSTRACT In their piece “Toward a Dracula Urbanism: Smart City Building in Flint and Jakarta,” Wilson and Wyly (2022) inaugurate Dracula urbanism as an explanatory framework for identifying previously unnoticed dynamics in advanced capitalist cities, particularly those engaging in smart city initiatives. From the perspective of LA, a radically different context from Wilson and Wyly’s (2022) choices of Flint and Jakarta, I argue that the logic of Dracula urbanism can be extended beyond the imbrication of real estate states and smart cities to shed new light on other forms of urban redevelopment and their consequences such as gentrification and urban exclusion more broadly. Additionally, I emphasize the importance of the local in the multi-scalar Dracula urbanist imagination, and make an argument against the so-called centerless and unbounded character of smart cities, which I show are mired in forms of inter-urban competition and discourses shaped by ever-present, politico-legally defined borders.

The Los Angeles 1984 Olympics: Using a logic model as a tool to understand soft power

This article argues that a logic model is an effective analytical tool to examine the opening ceremony of the Los Angeles 1984 Olympics as an exercise in soft power. Specifically, it uses a logic model as a guide to emphasize how the Los Angeles 1984 Olympics provided a structure to share values and culture with the intention to influence. Although this is not an evaluative inquiry, the evaluative framework lends itself to identifying the resources required for the creation of the opening ceremony and the formal presentation. For instance, a review of interurban competition (competition between cities or regions that attract economic activities), management and boycotts as inputs of the Los Angeles Games reveal the presentation of American culture and values during the Olympic opening ceremony. The purpose of this article is to implement a logic model as means for understanding the cultural programming of the Olympics by first identifying the unique inputs for the Los Angeles 1984 Olympics and analysing the visual presentation of the opening ceremony.

Unpacking administrative rank: Intercity competition and the remaking of local state space in China

The literature on interurban competition emphasizes that market rules as an external coercive power dominate local state space conductive to economic growth. Is there another external coercive power, other than the market as a hidden hand, to promote and mitigate interurban competition? Addressing this question, this paper specifies that the Chinese state's political efforts to downplay the role of the market in, and remake the rule of, interurban competition could have far reaching implications for urban political economy. The two cases are Ruili and Wanding, two border cities located on the edge of China's southwestern borderland adjacent to Myanmar. While reranking is supposed to balance out the inefficiencies of market principles in interurban competition, multiple rounds of reranking in Ruili and Wanding in the past seven decades indicate that this political orchestration can accelerate interurban competition into a cutthroat game for economic growth and thus create problems for macro economic management. Nevertheless, it can become a political tool to revamp the game by strategically selecting some cities as nodes of development at the sacrifice of urban fortunes of other cities. In this process, market rules operate in parallel with, and sometimes succumb to, the principle of political order from above. This finding expands the geographies of the state: the co-constitution of the local and the national becomes necessary and pragmatic since interurban competition is not a territorially-conditioned endeavor, but remains open to extralocal stakeholders—upper-level governments in this case—who can remake local state space.

(Re-)generating Symbolic Port-City Links: Urban Regeneration and the Cultural Demaritimisation and Remaritimisation of European Port Cities

Urban policies in many European port cities have displayed attempts to diversify the local economy and rebrand the city within interurban competition. Whilst these processes have been commented upon in relation to their socio-economic and spatial outcomes, little research has engaged with their connection with the maritime nature of port cities. With examples from urban development and regeneration strategies in two European port cities, Rotterdam (The Netherlands) and Valencia (Spain), this paper elaborates on the concepts of demaritimisation and remaritimisation of port cities, from a cultural perspective, to support the argument that, in some cases, these strategies have been underpinned by attempts to overlook or depart from the city’s maritime identity, history and heritage. These efforts by policy makers aim to overcome the perceived ‘disadvantage’ of the port image or to create and promote different, not necessarily authentic, relationships with the port and the sea.

Urban Development Through the 2018 FIFA Men’s Football World Cup: Mutated Mobile Policies in the Peripheries


 
 
 
 Planners, politicians, boosters and other elites often use mega-events like the 2018 FIFA Men’s World Cup as a strategy for urban development. This was also the case with the World Cup, hosted in eleven Russian cities and designed to modernize Russia’s peripheral host cities. While the idea of developing cities through mega-events is common, the Russian experience displays much that is new.
 This paper examines urban development in the World Cup as an example of mobile policy, exploring how this mega-event was imported from abroad and how this policy mutated as it was implemented on the ground in Russia. The specificities of the Russian experience were due in large part to the ways in which the World Cup organizing committee was created and operated as an extension of the central government in Moscow. What appeared at first to be a way for Russian peripheral host cities to differentiate themselves through urban development in a form of inter-urban competition, turned out to be a reestablishment of the central state in regional spatial planning. In this way, even as certain material conditions in the host cities were improved, the World Cup represented not an expression of regional democracy, nor even a strategy for inter-urban differentiation, but rather one more instance of development dictated from the center and from afar.
 
 
 

The violence of homelessness: Exile and arbitrary detention in Cambodia's war on the poor

This article examines the plight of homeless peoples in Phnom Penh, Cambodia as a consequence of their enmeshment in a new logic of urban governance being rolled out by city officials and municipal planners. The widespread adoption of neoliberal economics has resulted in a globalised version of urban entrepreneurialism, to which Phnom Penh is a participant. The (re)production of enterprise zones, cultural spectacles, waterfront development, and privatised forms of local governance all reflect the powerful disciplinary effects of interurban competition as cities aggressively engage in mutually destructive place‐marketing policies. Against this neoliberal backdrop, the ongoing pattern of violence utilised by municipal authorities against homeless peoples in Phnom Penh is part of a gentrifying process that the local government has dubbed a ‘beautification’ agenda. Of particular concern is how city officials have begun actively promoting the criminalization of the urban homeless and poor through arbitrary arrests and illegal detention, holding them in so‐called re‐education or ‘rehabilitation’ centres. Yet these centres are not what they seem. Such euphemisms attempt to mask the systemic abuse of marginalised peoples who are deemed to present Phnom Penh in a negative light and are consequently unwanted on the streets of the capital city.

Anchoring Urban Development: Globalisation, Attractiveness and Complexity

Since the work of Hoyt in the 1930s, economic theories of urban development have stressed the primacy of manufacturing because of the existence of a regional multiplier effect. This model was extended to traded services and, in the last 10 years, to the residential and presential economy, taking into account the fact that mobile consumers and residents also bring monetary flows into regions. The city today is both a productive agglomeration and a place of living, for both local and extra-local consumers, heralding the end of the primacy of manufacturing. In this article, we go a step further and consider the primacy of other kinds of export, either based on selling competitive goods or on attracting consumers. Due to changes in globalisation and to the rise of interurban competition for spending, incomes earned on exports are less and less likely to be spent locally, and instead flow out, progressively invalidating the multiplier effect. Consequently, the hypothesis of this article is that the main issue for urban development theories and practices is combining competitiveness in terms of exports with attractiveness to local as well as to external consumers. In this article, we call complexity the idea of pushing aside the focus on exports in order to understand the tensions and synergies between all activities and populations present within the urban space. In order to formulate new research questions, we build a typology of urban income flows and activities.

Taming the genius loci? Contesting post-socialist creative industries in the case of Brno's former prison

In the increasingly tight race of inter-urban competition, the idea that cities have to be made creative has gripped the imagination of urban planners and scholars alike. This process is imagined as straightforward, readily exportable and devoid of conflict. The paper uses the perspective of relational place-making to reveal the creative city imperative as a political process. This is carried out through the medium of conflict, which brings about two contrasting place frames, which progressively reveal each other's political connections. We use the case of a former central-European prison, located in Brno, the Czech Republic, to show how making a city creative is just one possible framing of a place, how making cities attractive to creative individuals engenders resistance and how historical memory summons the powerful genius loci, that is nevertheless relational and contingent. The results illustrate in detail how the conflict between development and preservation unfolds around six axes of opposition that define the two frames (e.g. future vs. past, part vs. whole etc.) and how these axes are themselves linked to various concepts of place and time.

“Fanatic Energy in the Wrong Places” : Potemkin Neoliberalism and Domestic Soft Power in the 2018 Men’s Football World Cup in Russia

This thesis uses the 2018 World Cup in Russia to engage with the processes of neoliberal restructuring and the conception of soft power. Based on a comparison of the host cities of Ekaterinburg and Volgograd, it unpacks the World Cup at multiple scales of analysis and offers a light and revisable framework for understanding mega-events. Grounded in primary qualitative and secondary documentary data, the thesis demonstrates multiple dimensions of Potemkinism in the articulation of this World Cup. Inspired by but moving beyond traditional post-colonial thought, it attempts to make good on the premise of theorizing from anywhere, making a case for the relatively invisible cities of the Global East in a landscape of urban theory dominated by the hegemonic North or the subaltern South. This ambition represents the overall frame for the thesis, while the work itself focuses more specifically on the planning and impacts of hosting the World Cup. This work is composed of two central thrusts. Within an understanding of mega-events as fundamentally urban events, the first thrust explores hosting as the vanguard of neoliberal restructuring, one of the traditional means of making sense of mega-events. In this view, bidding and hosting are seen as a strategy for inter-urban competition and a ploy to attract increased flows of tourists and capital. This is understood as one of the markers of a shift to a more entrepreneurial mode of urban governance and is part of wider global political economic restructuring that de-emphasizes the national in favor of regional or municipal scales. Using Neil Brenner’s conceptualization of rescaled competition state regimes, this part of the thesis explores how rescaling worked on the ground in Russia and demonstrates that these processes of neoliberalization are not as easily understood as they might first appear. Instead, what is revealed in the articulation of the Russian World Cup is a seemingly paradoxical combination of national state-led projects to develop the peripheries in regionally and municipally specific ways, for the purposes of interurban differentiation and competition. The thesis proposes the notion of Potemkin neoliberalism to make sense of these seeming paradoxes and, further, traces some of the uneven developments within the host cities. This is framed within an emphasis on the superficial rather than the substantive, meaning an attention towards aesthetics and appearance rather than on structural reforms and durable infrastructural improvements. The second thrust investigates Joseph Nye’s notion of soft power, which is another traditional way of understanding the rationales for hosting mega-events. Soft power analyses typically frame hosting through the lens of foreign policy, a view that tends to ignore the domestic component entirely. Separate from this, some mega-event studies focus on hosting as a strategy for nation- or identity building, but typically these do not situate this domestic concern within the conceptual apparatus of soft power. Combining these two approaches, this thesis takes the Russian World Cup as a primarily domestic affair, both to develop the urban peripheries (as demonstrated in the first thrust), and to inculcate certain soft power narratives within the domestic population. Conceptualizing the narrative project as soft power allows a tracing of each element in the soft power equation: narrative generation, the mechanisms of distribution, and the reception (or lack thereof) among host city residents. This is presented as discursive Potemkinism, whereby a certain set narratives were promoted as the official way to understand the mega-event, though with little attention to the realities underneath. Finally, the thesis explores the final element in the soft power equation – the impacts on host city residents – through an attention to the micro level of everyday life. In this, it engages with de Certeau and Lefebvre to create a spectrum of tactics employed by residents to disalienate themselves by various degrees from World Cup developments. The thesis emphasizes the individual and the quotidian to offer a more nuanced, human level approach to understanding mega-event-led urban development. Situated in a relational comparative urbanism that valorizes the Global East, these two thrusts represent the core contributions of this monograph. Overall, the thesis presents an investigation of the 2018 men’s Football World Cup that takes stock of global political economic processes, Russian national state spatial strategies, uneven municipal developments, the creation and distribution of soft power narratives to the domestic audience, and the adoption, reworking, or outright refusal of those narratives among host city residents.

Melbourne’s vertical expansion and the political economies of high-rise residential development

This article advances understandings of Melbourne’s dramatic vertical expansion over the last decade by attending to the political economies of its high-rise housing development. Melbourne’s major high-rise development in the wake of the financial crisis represents a radical yet poorly understood departure from the city’s traditional patterns of suburban development. This article applies an existing conceptual framework for residential vertical urbanisation informed by heterodox political economy and critical geography. Drawing on secondary sources supplemented by supply-side stakeholder perspectives, the analysis shows how Melbourne’s high-rise development assisted in syphoning significant investor capital into the city. This not only expanded the local housing stock but, in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis and later, amid ongoing economic uncertainty, Melbourne’s high-rise construction served both economic and geopolitical/symbolic functions in the city’s ongoing inter-urban competition for hyper mobile flows of capital and highly-skilled workers. Large apartment projects fuelled the Victorian economy and filled state coffers through property-related revenue. Meanwhile, the city’s dramatic vertical expansion helped project a powerful image of Melbourne around the world. Its crane-filled skyline heralded a thriving economy, and its new thicket of towers rendered a striking impression of urbane high-density living. Together these representations helped promote Melbourne as a vibrant, desirable place to live, work, and invest. Looking beyond the planning failures and planning politics identified in planners’ critiques of Melbourne’s vertical expansion, this article showcases the state’s considerable stakes in this development, and its role in smoothing the way for this expansion to occur.

Safe, sustainable… but depoliticized and uneven – A critical view of urban transport policies in France

This article offers a critical view of the contemporary urban policies undertaken in France in the name of safe, sustainable urban transport strategies. It seeks to show how a spatially and socially selective ordering is under way in French transport planning and policies by presenting an overview of research and empirical results dealing with the narratives and the implementation of these policies.Firstly, urban transport policies were analysed as narratives. Stressing users’ individual responsibility and their capacity to adopt economically rational behaviours, and conveying moral injunctions for them to adopt the ‘right’, safe, healthy, sustainable mobility behaviours, a depoliticized framing of issues characterizes these public policies. Referring to theoretical frameworks related to neoliberalisation as a rationality, our hypothesis is that a neoliberal rationality feeds these policies by ignoring a certain number of macrosocial determinants. Moreover, the use of morality works as a powerful democratic anaesthetic that dissolves any objection.Secondly, we studied how these policies, legitimated by ‘noble causes’ and depoliticized, influence the organization of traffic in the city, and to what extent they lead to a selective and uneven treatment of urban spaces. While sustainable mobility is frequently presented as a major objective in the field of urban planning for transport and travel, contemporary policies do not seek to reduce polluting modes of travel overall. They rather seek to direct them onto bypass road infrastructures to reduce their negative impacts on the city’s main sites. ‘Sustainable’ policies oppose the car only in certain spaces and for certain uses. With reference to theoretical frameworks related to the entrepreneurial mutation of urban policies, our interpretation is that these policies are part of urban marketing strategies of cities engaged in inter-urban competition processes. These policies lead to an increase in the value and attractiveness of strategic areas of the city, and tend to displace problems (cars, noise, pollution…, and deprived populations) to other parts of the urban territory.

Vreemde bedgenoten: publiek-private samenwerking in de Nederlandse ruimtelijke ordening 1950-1980

This contribution investigates the public-private partnerships between local officials and property developers in the Dutch field of urban planning during the post-war period, with a focus on the redevelopment agendas for the central areas of larger cities such as Utrecht and Amsterdam. I argue that we should see the ties between the public and private sector in this field as the outcome of a structural dependency of the state on private investments. Indeed, even at the zenith of the social-democratic welfare state, local governments very much leaned on the market to get urban redevelopment off the ground. Thus, we should be careful to draw a clean line between the golden age of state involvement in urban planning from the end of the Second World War to the economic crises of the 1970s and the neoliberal policies of the 1980s. While the case studies in this article display some features of urban neoliberalism, such as a belief in market efficiency and the advancement of interurban competition, these were never the means nor the ends of urban policies. By working with a wide array of primary sources and employing the theories of urban scholars such David Harvey and Hank Savitch and Paul Kantor, I argue for a more comprehensive and multifaceted narrative of the involvement of property developers in local affairs and the partnerships and growth coalitions they built with government bodies.

Capital Cities in Interurban Competition: Local Autonomy, Urban Governance, and Locational Policy Making

Capital cities are government cities that tend to lack a competitive political economy. Especially secondary capital cities—defined as capitals that are not the primary economic centers of their nation-states—are pressured to increase their economic competitiveness in today’s globalized interurban competition by formulating locational policies. This article compares the locational policies agendas of Bern, Ottawa, The Hague, and Washington, D.C. The comparison reveals that (1) secondary capital cities tend to formulate development-oriented locational policies agendas, (2) local tax autonomy best explains the variance in locational policies agendas, and (3) secondary capital cities possess urban governance arrangements where public actors dominate and where developers are the only relevant private actors. The challenge for secondary capital cities is to formulate locational policies that enable them to position themselves as government cities, as well as business cities, while not solely relying on the development of their physical infrastructure.

Die städtische Produktion von „Armutsmigration“

In 2013 the spectre of „benefit tourism” entered the German urban agenda as a “poverty migration” discourse. The paper shows how the local state itself creates the scandalized precarious living conditions of EU migrants. Drawing on an interview-based case study of the homelessness politics in Frankfurt am Main it points to a logic of reverse inter-urban competition that aims at deterring „costly“ subjects: By limiting migrants’ access to social benefits and infrastructures such as homeless shelters, cities try to present themselves as bad benefit tourism destinations. Social movements contest the exclusionary politics that produce homelessness and cramped housing. Yet, while successfully putting the topic on the agenda, in Frankfurt, the rights-based approach, demanding shelter for everybody, failed to challenge the city’s legal discourse dividing migrants into il /legal and benefit un /entitled subjects.

Privatisation of the production of public space

From the 1960s to the 1970s, a large number of Western inner cities went through a phase of severe deprivation due to both a relocation of manufacturing jobs that in turn led to a depopulation, a lack of investment and high unemployment and to suburbanisation made possible by the car. From the 1990’s, urban regeneration strategies were introduced to tackle this inner city deprivation. In the United Kingdom, this ‘urban renaissance’ took place within the new economic and political paradigm of neoliberalism which placed a strong emphasis on market forces as the driver of urban regeneration (see national policy document Urban Task Force 1999). The shift to this economic system led to changes in both the process of urban development and its product, the space itself. Local governments endorsed the new economic reality- which included a greater role for private and corporate actors in the development and management of cities - in order to be able to participate in the global inter-urban competition. As a result of declining public budgets and encouraged by national guidance, public authorities began to outsource tasks and responsibilities that had previously been regarded as a governmental concern to private actors and newly developed private public partnerships (urban regeneration vehicles in planning policy terminology). Public authorities themselves also adopted business-like styles of organisation in which productivity, effectivity and efficiency were regarded as the main conditions for serving the public’s financial interest, though other public values such as cultural heritage, equality and democracy were often regarded as of secondary concern. This privatisation of development in urban areas did not just affect the process but also the outcome; the appearance and use of public spaces. Within the urban renaissance agenda, a strong emphasis was put on the aesthetisation of space in order to attract the desired businesses, investors and people with a high disposable income. The objective in private management regimes appears to be on reducing risk by putting a strong focus on surveillance, safety, tidiness and the exclusion of undesirable behaviour, all of which reduces the diversity, vitality and vibrancy of spaces in order to welcome tourists and middle-class visitors, in other words consumers (Low 2006). This privatisation of public space raises valid questions with regard to the publicness of urban open space and a number of authors recognise a ‘decline’ of public space or have even declared ‘the end of public space’ as we have known it (Sorkin 1992; Mitchell 1995; Low and Smith 2006; Madanipour 2003; Iveson 2007 etc.). Other authors argue that we do not experience the death of public space but a change in its form, function and appearance that reflects contemporary economic, societal and cultural narratives (see eg Madden 2010; Carmona et al. 2008, Carmona 2015; De Magalhaes and Freire Tigo 2017). To be able to incorporate these societal shifts, a revised (and wider) definition is needed to describe and analyse publicness in the production of space (Kohn 2004; De Magalhaes 2010; Varna and Tiesdell 2010; Nemeth and Smith 2011; Langstraat and Van Melik 2013; Varna 2016). The premises for this research are based on the above discussion on the different roles that privatisation plays in the production of space, within this shift towards greater involvement of a variety of private partners in the development process and the possible decline in the degree of publicness in both process and space. The apparent need for a wider definition of public space to include current political, economic and societal changes, the relation between the public sphere and public space, the degree of publicness in both the process and space itself, the perception of the user and the role of the urban designer are hereby taken as starting points and lead to the following research question: Does privatisation lead to a decline of publicness in the production of space and space itself, and how does urban design play a role in this?

Privatisation of the Production of Public Space

Privatisation of the Production of Public Space

Growth coalitions in declining cities: casinos, redevelopment, and inter-urban competition

ABSTRACTCasino development is a popular strategy for urban redevelopment in declining cities. I examine the process of casino acquisition in the former Canadian automotive capital, Windsor, Ontario – one of the first cities in North America, outside of Atlantic City and Las Vegas, to host a resort casino. Drawing on 20 interviews with urban elites and the local news media, I explore the interplay between a local growth coalition and State interests in the development of Casino Windsor. To capture maximum revenue for provincial coffers, provincial interests used competition between economically depressed cities to co-opt the Windsor casino alliance’s project . Windsor’s urban elites, however, continue to “talk” urban entrepreneurialism, perpetuating the myth that municipal entrepreneurialism was an effective strategy for this struggling city. These findings suggest that the importance placed on the entrepreneurial capacity of local growth coalitions in urban redevelopment studies may be misplaced, especially in peripheral and declining cities.

Strategies of cities in globalised interurban competition: The locational policies framework

Globalised interurban competition affects cities of various sizes and cities in various locations. Cities have to find ways to position themselves in global markets by formulating locational policies. To capture this wide range of policies, this paper develops an analytical framework of locational policies that is interdisciplinary informed by theories of economic geography and political science. We compare the cities of Lucerne and Ulm to illustrate the added value of the locational policies framework. We found that these two cities feature very different locational policies agendas. By employing a neo-institutional lens, we suggest that place-specific factors enable and constrain the formulation of locational policies. We outline three possible venues to tentatively explain these different locational policies, namely the economic sector mix, the national tax system, and politics. Beyond these empirical findings, this paper shows that the locational policies framework is able to capture a wide range of policies that aim to enhance the competitiveness of a city. Thus, the locational policies framework is a tool that can be used to reveal how cities face the globalised, and increasingly knowledge-intensive, interurban competition.

Start-ups and the entrepreneurial city

Start-up technology and digital platform firms have become a much-talked about plank of urban economic development policy worldwide. The paper considers the various modes and practices of urban capitalism which sit behind these ‘disruptive’ business models, and connects it to the recent revisiting of the landmark essay by David Harvey (1989. ‘From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation of Urban Governance in Late Capitalism.’ Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 71 (1): 3–17) on urban entrepreneurialism. Attempts to rank and measure the relative strengths of start-up ‘ecosystems’ have put a new spin on inter-urban competition. Some of the best-known start-ups such as Uber and Airbnb have made direct incursions into the redrawing of markets of the collective consumption of urban services. Others may fly under the radar as they facilitate the rostering of casual labour, provide predatory payday loans, and push new on-demand consumption choices. And at the same time, digital platforms allow unprecedented opportunities for social enterprise and ‘defensive’ localist capitalism. The paper argues that urbanists must understand the diversity of start-ups and their different ways of framing the urban, and sets out a number of areas for further debate.