Neoliberal Urban Policies Research Articles

The refugees’ right to the centre of the city: City branding versus city commoning in Athens

Over the years, cities have figured as exemplary places for neoliberal urban policies which tend to appropriate the right to the city through city-branding policies. However, as this article demonstrates, there are important claims of the right to the city raised by newly arrived refugees in the city of Athens. Although most refugees reside in overcrowded state-run camps on the outskirts of the city, there are many cases in which refugees enact the production of collective common spaces, occupying abandoned buildings in the urban core and claiming the right to the centre of the city. In this context and following the Lefebvrian notion of the right to the city and the spatial analysis on commons and enclosures, we explore the actions of refugees, and the way they engage in commoning practices that not only strive against the official state policies, but also often contest city-branding policies. In particular, we focus on the area of Exarcheia in Athens, which is an emblematic case of the conflicted nexus between investors’ and refugees’ right to the city.

“Qualifying Peripheries” or “Repolarizing the Center”: A Comparison of Gentrification Processes in Europe

Reflecting a broader form of neo-liberal urban policy underlying the progressive return of capital investment, gentrification is a key issue in urban studies. Although earlier definitions of “gentrification” focused mostly on socio-cultural processes, recent works have qualified gentrification as a mixed political–economic issue. Clarifying whether inner city gentrification should be supported, controlled, constricted, or prevented is a key debate in urban sustainability and metabolism, contributing to managing and, possibly, enhancing metropolitan resilience. To define the causes and consequences of gentrification, understanding the intrinsic linkage with different social contexts is crucial. There are no universal and comprehensive gentrification processes, displaying similarities and differences at the same time. A comparative analysis of different forms of gentrification and urban change provides basic knowledge to delineate complex, non-linear paths of socioeconomic development in cities, shedding light on the increased socioeconomic complexity and the most appropriate policies to fuel metropolitan sustainability in a broader context of global change. From this perspective, our commentary focuses on the main issues at the base of gentrification in Europe, starting from basic definitions and providing a regional vision distinguishing three “gentrification ideal-types” (northern, eastern, and Mediterranean). The implications of these different socioeconomic processes for the policy and governance of sustainable and resilient cities were discussed, evidencing new lines of investigation to frame (or re-frame) the increasing complexity of urbanization patterns and processes.

The big bang of neoliberal urbanism: The Gigantomachy of Santiago’s urban development

This study presents a spatial history of the origins of Santiago’s neoliberalisation, unveiling its urban history from the critical point of view of land at the centre of social classes’ dispute over city life. It situates the contestation and struggle over land in a genealogical progression from the origins of the disciplinary field of urbanism (1932) to the transformation of its regulatory framework, making it an exclusively profit-oriented practice complementary to processes of wealth creation through urban transformations (1979). As an allegory, we used the Gigantomachy to interpret these struggles. Special emphasis is given to the land struggles that occurred in Santiago as a part of this migratory process and how the contestation of private land became an alternative to the government’s incapacities to resolve the urban poor condition. This contestation would lead to the dominant class looking for alternative politics that ensure the defence of their property. This study presents neoliberalism as a response to such a call. Neoliberalism in Santiago was the way to transform the problem of housing scarcity in big business for the dominant class. The study historically outlines this process in what may be considered as the first neoliberal urban policy in the world, depicting the big bang of neoliberal urbanism.

Micro-community engagement and area-based regeneration in east London: The case of Chrisp Street Market

Abstract This paper critically engages with how the notion of community is used in local economic development in England. Its primary concern is how current understandings of the concept of ‘community’ in regeneration, as well as how it is instrumentalised through ineffective community engagement, is depicted as a linear and homogeneous construct. This paper addresses how this is a result of a tension between historic neoliberal urban policy and communitarian approaches to local engagement which can often result in tokenistic community engagement practices. This in turn can have serious and adverse effects on localities as local area-based regeneration projects materialise. This paper argues that an approach based on understanding communities as made up of a number of micro-communities might be more useful in a regeneration context. It examines an initiative called the Chrisp Street Exchange led by a local regeneration team called Accents tasked to be at the frontline. The paper outlines Accents' strategies of delivering community engagement as an example of a micro-communities approach. It then suggests that while Accents might not be able to stem the tide of market forces, they can at least deliver engagement approaches that might be able to prepare micro-communities, in this case a local small business micro-community, for the impending change that has landed in this part of east London.

Fotografias de Cesar Barreto no contexto do “Rio Olímpico”: transformações espaciais e arquitetônicas na região portuária

Cesar Barreto foi o fotógrafo contratado pela Prefeitura do Rio para registrar o processo de revitalização da zona portuária do Rio de Janeiro para os Jogos Olímpicos de 2016. Suas fotos eram publicadas no portal institucional Cidade Olímpica, que continha informações sobre as obras e projetos em andamento. Este artigo discute o papel das fotografias produzidas por Barreto para a memória urbanística da cidade, bem como as principais ideias por trás do projeto Porto Maravilha no contexto das cidades globais. As reformas urbanas executadas no Rio tiveram inspiração na política urbana neoliberal, implicando, sobretudo, a valorização da marca-cidade, buscando torná-la competitiva no mercado internacional.

The Battle of Žižkov: Urban Planners’ Transition from Heritage Protection to Neoliberal Discursive Planning

On the example of working-class Prague quarter of Žižkov, the article studies the interrelation between heritage protection of late nineteenth-century tenement housing and neoliberal city policies after 1989. It locates the common root of both phenomena in the strong sense of crisis of socialist modernist urbanism among urban planners and architects since the early 1970s. The criticism of socialist urbanism culminated shortly before the Velvet Revolution of 1989 in a public struggle against demolition and redevelopment of the entire Žižkov quarter, led by a group of young architects. The article concludes by describing a bitter victory as the quarter’s architecture was eventually saved, while neoliberal urban policies and gentrification eroded its working-class nature. This process illustrates a major shift in urban expertise from social planning under socialism to neoliberal discursive planning in which a “story” of a city is constructed through preservation of belle-époque tenement housing.

Profiteering from Urban Safety, Fear of Crime and Earthquakes in Istanbul

There is a direct relationship between urban safety in Istanbul and neoliberal urban planning policies that has led to the creation of a new wealthy class. Such a class has risen from profiteering from land deals and the construction of housing and offices, both of which were politically facilitated. The classification of areas of the city as being at risk from crime and earthquake, together with the legalisation of urban change projects, have resulted in whole sections of the community being declared at risk and moved to other areas with an attendant rise in social exclusion.

Urban Projects and Residential Segregation: A Case Study of the Cabanyal Neighborhood in Valencia (Spain)

In this paper, we study the consequences of neoliberal urban policy, in terms of the segregation and social changes experienced in the Cabanyal neighborhood located in Valencia, Spain. In doing so, we analyze the process of residential mobility that has affected the neighborhood during the last decade, resulting in a segregation of space. This neighborhood had been affected, since 1988, by an urban project that was to bring about its partial destruction. Despite having been stopped, the project has caused a dynamic of physical and social degradation of the neighborhood against which the local government has only very recently started to intervene. Using microdata from the Residential Variation Statistics provided by the Statistical Office of the City of Valencia, we analyze the demographic profile of the mobility inside the Cabanyal neighborhood and also the origin of the arrivals and the destination of the departures from 2004–2016. The aim is to identify the territorial pattern of the socio-demographic changes that have affected the neighborhood. The results indicate that during the period under analysis, in which the area was affected by the urban project, a progressive loss in the Spanish population was occurring, as well as a substitution of non-EU immigrants, who were predominant at the beginning of the period, with EU immigrants. This process has produced a high level of residential segregation, since immigrants from the European Union are viewed more negatively than immigrants from outside of the European Union, which, along with their lower level of education and employment in low-skilled and poorly paid jobs, makes their social integration and interaction more difficult.

Elite discourse coalitions and the governance of ‘smart spaces’: Politics, power and privilege in India's Smart Cities Mission

This article reveals the elite discourse coalition which frames the priorities and institutional arrangements of the Smart Cities Mission in India. After locating the SCM within India's neoliberal urban policy trajectory and the new elite coalition it encompasses I describe three separate elite discourses: Modi's technocratic nationalism IT and consulting firms' technological utopia and middle class urban citizenship. Together the discourses have: shifted the moral sphere of urban policy from inclusive rights to exclusive privilege, privatised governance instead of local democracy and turned digital technocracy into a simplified solution for structural problems of urban inequality. While the elite discourses contest each other on certain areas which could lead to delays and stops in Smart City projects, together they have left the imprint of an elite led governance arrangement for urban planning and development in India.

Experiencing regularisation in Accra, Cape Town and Rio de Janeiro

In the prolific contemporary discussions on the right to the city, little attention has been paid to the multifaceted political meaning of the reshaping of city dwellers’ rights, duties and responsibilities through regularisation processes inspired by neoliberal logics. This paper fills in this gap by engaging in an analysis of the dialectical relation between the political dimension of everyday life, urban rights, neoliberal urban policies and political emancipation. We thereby break from a radical reading of Lefebvre’s notion and from a focus on political mobilisation in order to cast a new light on the debate on the right to the city. Three regularisation policies, all linked to the affirmation of a commercial or fiscal relationship to the state are considered through a cross-case analysis: the regularisation that followed the forced displacement of street traders in central Accra; an in situ process of regularisation of street trading in a Cape Town central market; the regularisation of electricity services in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, a policy that seeks to re-establish a commercial relationship with favela residents by redefining their rights and responsibilities as registered customers of a private electricity provider. We resort to an exploratory notion, the actual right to the city, to examine how these forms of administrative regularisation have reshaped urban life. We argue that these processes of regularisation convey de-politicisation dynamics, such as the fragmentation and individualisation of political identities, along with the possible re-politicisation of certain stakes, such as the strengthening of individual and collective political expectations toward the State. This tension is due to the ambiguous nature of the new social and spatial contract between State and citizens emerging from regularisation. Beyond the necessary analysis of political struggles against neoliberal policies, and the essential assessment of their impact on urban inequalities, we therefore call for a better consideration of the ambiguous and less visible political impact of processes of selective inclusion and recognition by the State on the way city dwellers envision their rights and duties.

Searching for “Solutions” to Crisis: A Critique of Urban Austerity and Keynesianism

Based on reflections on how economic crises under capitalism have been typically “solved”, particularly by examining processes of creative destruction and spatial fixes, this paper argues for the need to rethink the duality between austerity, and Keynesian crisis management, given the nature of the current economic crisis. Austerity is a key policy instrument of neoliberalism. Keynesianism is regarded as neoliberalism's antithesis. Conventionally understood, continued austerity would mean more post-Fordist and neoliberal geographies, while a Keynesian approach would mean more demand management. This paper argues that such a conclusion is over-simplistic, indeed incorrect. Crisis management inspired by Keynes is less concerned with the destructive parts of crises and seldom challenges the power of capital. Therefore, Keynesian crisis management risks reproducing neoliberal spaces and neoliberal urban and regional policies. This paper questions whether Keynesian crisis management — i.e. boosting aggregate demand during slumps — is a “solution” to the current crisis. The paper questions Keynesianism in its belief, for example, that climate change can be stopped within a framework that still perpetuates, and advocates for, compound economic growth. The paper concludes by arguing for the need to see beyond Keynesianism, and explores what a Marxist approach to spatial fix and creative destruction might mean.

The Portable Flush Toilet: From Camping Accessory to Protest Totem

In Cape Town, the sanitation shortage has become politicized through the ongoing protests and legal advocacy known as the toilet wars. Portable flush toilets (PFT), originally designed for the leisure market in the 1960s but now touted as an urban infrastructure solution by the Cape Town municipality, are central to the rallying cry for safe, dignified, and adequate sanitation. By comparing the origins of the full flush toilet (FFT) and how it has designed people’s behavior and beliefs since colonialism, the paper argues that a toilet has come to represent the humanizing rights to privacy, dignity, safety, legitimation, inclusion, and health, which a PFT cannot offer. Tracing the urban design of Cape Town back to nineteenth-century sanitation policy, this paper shows how violation of these rights is built into the city’s urban planning and infrastructure. This urban system, which relies on certain humans being classified as expedient, continues to be replicated to this day through neoliberal urban policy. The PFT has become a powerful totem of power relations, and is used by protestors, students, artists, and satirists to bring the unseen outskirts of Cape Town to the center of public discourse.

Exploring practitioners’ perception of ethical issues in planning: The Peruvian case

Despite the ethics of planning in the Global South is an issue of crucial importance due to the challenging circumstances in which the discipline is practiced in the region, this discussion is still at this initial stage. This article contributes to expanding on the matter through an approach to identify the influence on practitioners’ perception of ethical issues of the planning purposes and values embedded within five frames of reference of practice (i.e. professional training, professionalization bodies, institutional settings, planning systems and policy frameworks). Using the case of professional architects working as planners for municipalities in Arequipa (Peru), the article starts with an exploratory comparison between the purposes and values put forward by professional training in planning and architecture and then contrast these with the planning purposes and values purveyed by professionalization bodies, institutional settings, planning systems, and policy frameworks. These results support the analysis of practitioners’ perception of ethical issues. This shows that the understanding of planning purposes and values of Peruvian architects acting as planners and the views of the country’s architecture professionalization body contributes to strengthening the regulatory, technical, and apolitical orientation of the Peruvian planning system. With the adoption of neoliberal urban policies and within the ethically inconsistent municipal institutional setting, architects’ operationalization of their understanding of planning purposes and values leads to a procedural perception of ethical issues, which is based on the belief that these center on conflicts of personal principles. Their belated realization that ethical issues also concern conflict of interests adds to their questioning of the idea of planning, making the discipline’s practice in the country even more challenging.

They never said ‘Come here and let's talk about it’: Exclusion and non-decision-making in the rebuild of Christchurch, New Zealand

Decision-making in urban contexts is increasingly characterized by a depoliticized environment that has normalized neoliberal urban policies. These are further pursued in post-disaster contexts across the globe with narratives that overshadow the views and demands of the affected communities. Spatial contestation, exclusion of certain groups from key decisions and episodes of non-decision-making thus shape urban redevelopment through top-down governance. This paper provides a Lukesian narrative on post-earthquake Christchurch, where the redevelopment of the city has been characterized by a strong command-and-control rebuild agenda emanating from the national government, regardless of the feedback and criticisms from the affected community.

From New York to Ecuador and Back Again: Transnational Journeys of Policies and People

In this article, I explore the surprising and unexpected turns that have developed since zero tolerance policing was exported from New York to Ecuador at the turn of the new millennium. Drawing from fifteen years of ethnographic research with young indigenous Ecuadorians, I demonstrate how the impacts of displacement can extend far beyond the local scale. Street work has long been a key survival strategy for the indigenous Kisapincha. Yet, as growing poverty forced rising numbers onto the streets, cities in Ecuador responded by importing punitive neoliberal urban policies to cleanse and sanitize the streets. Deprived of critical income, many Kisapincha turned to transnational migration to seek better opportunities in the United States. Since then, young Kisapincha men and women have endured brutal 9,000-km journeys through South America, Central America, and Mexico to work in garment sweatshops and as day laborers in the United States. This research reveals how existing inequalities are reproduced and exacerbated in the drive to gentrify and modernize cities. I argue that zero tolerance policing in Ecuador pushed many former street vendors to migrate to New York City. These transnational displacements and scalar disruptions have led to profound injustices and intergenerational trauma for the Kisapincha. To untangle the hidden geographies of urban change, I suggest that scholars adopt ethnographic and longitudinal approaches to expose the long-term and unforeseen ramifications of policy mobilities over time and space. Key Words: Ecuador, indigenous, migration, policy mobilities, zero tolerance.

Heritage and resistance: irregularities, temporalities and cumulative impact

Urban social change and large-scale demolitions in the name of urban renewal often give rise to social conflicts. In this study, we investigate how resistances to this change emerge, coalesce and revolve, and how they use heritage to generate cumulative impact. The analyses of urban change and resistance in Gårda, a working-class neighbourhood of Gothenburg, Sweden, showed social conflicts to be instigated by their stigmatisation. Since the 1970s, Gårda has been called ‘out of place’ and marked for demolition. These demolitions were given legitimacy by the ‘housing quality standards’ that emerged in the 1930s as a means to reduce social inequalities. Over time these standards became an ‘intangible heritage’ employed in neoliberal urban policies. In response, five ‘Re-Gårda’ resistance strategies emerged to contest Gårda’s future. Resistance groups uncovered new values for Gårda, curating the vision with the slogan ‘have a coffee in Gårda’, and structuring the narrative ‘upgrade Gårda’. This challenged the dominant discourse ‘demolish’ or ‘conserve’ Gårda, and resulted in a government decision to protect Gårda as a ‘heritage site’. Investigating heritage and resistance in Gårda helped us reveal the potential of resistance in challenging the limits of authorised urban and heritage discourses, and in realising socially equal and just cities.

The creative spatio-temporal fix: Creative and cultural industries development in Shanghai, China

As the idea of creative city becoming a universal panacea for economic stagnancy and urban boosterism, the heavy dependency on creative fixes has widely spread to cities around the globe through urban networks and neoliberal urban policies. Since the late 1990s, Shanghai has expeditiously embraced the idea of making creative city and enthusiastically promoted the development of creative and cultural industries (CCIs). This research proposes the idea of ‘the creative spatio-temporal fix’ to interpret Shanghai’s CCIs development over the last decade: under an overarching framework of creative entrepreneurial governance, the creative reconfiguration of the built environment (spatial fix) and temporal deferral of crisis and long term speculation on land (re)development (temporal fix) are in place to cope with the crisis of capital accumulation. Two rounds of creative spatio-temporal fix are discerned and epitomised in the case of Red Town, an iconic CCIs zone in Shanghai. Drawing on policy analysis and in-depth fieldworks, this study scrutinises into the creativity of the spatio-temporal fix and the spatiality and temporality of the creative fix in Shanghai. The findings are threefold. First, CCIs development is underwritten by a multi-scalar entrepreneurial network and its alliance with SOEs landlords and private developers. Second, the creativity of the spatio-temporal fix can be seen in the creative institutional design enabling CCIs development and forming an alliance with the SOE landlords, as well as the strategic speculation on the theme of creative city. Third, the spatiality and temporality of the creative fix are manifested in the temporal deferral of the crisis of deindustrialisation and limited spatial reconfiguration at the first stage, and a radical spatial restructuring with a temporal fix introducing financial capital at the second stage.

The landscape of education “reform” in Chicago: Neoliberalism meets a grassroots movement

This article examines the dialectics of Chicago’s neoliberal education policies and the grassroots resistance that parents, teachers, and students have mounted against them. Grounding the analysis in racial capitalism and neoliberal urban restructuring, I discuss interconnections between neoliberal urban policy, racism, and education to clarify what is at stake for communities resisting Chicago’s policies. The paper describes deep and pervasive racial inequities, school closings, privatization, and disenfranchisement driving organized opposition and the labor-community alliance at the center of organized resistance. I argue that neoliberal education policy is racialized state violence, and education is a battleground for racial justice and Black self-determination. I conclude with observations on Chicago’s experience so far that might be useful in other contexts.

A Walled Academic Urban Fortress: Using Neoliberal Urban Policies to Redesign and Maintain Chicago’s Hyde Park Neighborhood

A Walled Academic Urban Fortress: Using Neoliberal Urban Policies to Redesign and Maintain Chicago’s Hyde Park Neighborhood

On the edge of new public spaces - city-centre renewal and exclusion in Kaposvár, Hungary

In this paper we intend to analyse the effects of European and Hungarian urban policies with special attention to the consequences of neoliberalisation on marginalised groups. In the first part we demonstrate how neoliberalisation evolved in Hungarian policies. Next we analyse the revanchist turn of urban rehabilitation programmes, then we demonstrate the strengthening exclusion mechanisms of the rehabilitation projects through a case study in Kaposvar (Hungary) where anti-homeless regulations changed the survival strategies of marginalised people. With this research we intended to answer two questions. Firstly, how the class relation reproduction projects and processes of the neoliberal urban policies appeared in the Hungarian policies? And, secondly, how the processes that can be linked with inner-city regeneration can be interpreted in the light of the use of public spaces and the survival strategies of homeless? We illustrate the above mentioned local changes and the discourse of exclusion (as Hungarian manifestation of revanchist urbanism) through a case study. The research is based on narrative and life-path interviews with homeless of Kaposvar, and with experts, as well as members of the local political and cultural elite. Furthermore, we made participant observations to observe the consequences of the aspirations of local political elite.