Neoliberal City Research Articles

Chinatown, part five? ‘Capitalism with Asian values’ in Vancouver commentary on Elvin Wyly's ‘Regarding the Pain of (Indigenous) Others’

In this commentary on Elvin Wyly’s ‘Regarding the Pain of (Indigenous) Others’, I comment on the absent ontology of Asian subjectivities in urban studies of neoliberal global cities. Wyly’s account of neoliberal Vancouver hellscapes frames racial formations and narratives of dispossession as formed by capital. Asian subjectivities, I argue in this commentary, are also flattened by narratives of capital into purely economic subjects, but what Wyly’s reading of Vancouver opens up, I also hope to show, is the possibility of tracing the complex life stories of Asian capitalist characters in Vancouver’s neoliberal hellscape. In this way, Wyly avoids the trap of the previous urban studies entries in the post-Chinatown ilk, where global cities are depicted as being shaped by capital with the complexity of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, but ironically have neither ‘Asian’ nor ‘Chinese’ characters in them that are subjectively complex. Paying attention to complex Asian subjectivities in neoliberal cities allows for further questioning of the relationship between race and capital in contemporary urban studies.

‘Queering’ Soho: Contesting the borders of normative space in the neoliberal city

In the context of the recent ‘black lives matter’ and ‘me too’movements, the issue of inclusivity and diversity, identity, gender, race,‘otherness’, is brought forth in many disciplines, architecture, academia, teachingand design practices. Although this is, of course, a positive progress, oneneeds to be mindful of the complexities and the potentially conflictual effectsof a normalisation, especially if this dismisses or disallows space for furtherprocesses of disruption, or if this commodifies queer space, objectifies theother, and hence distances it further. In this context, this study reflects onthe relationship between place, bodies, contested norms and social conventions,focusing on Soho, London as a case study, and on the associated evolution ofqueer spaces and narratives.

Beyond the limits of rentability: Revalorizing urban space in late neoliberalism

How has the process of urban spatial valorization evolved since the global financial crisis of 2007–2008? In the late neoliberal city, flows of value are increasingly captured through new forms of privately-controlled rentable property. In order to explore this process, this article develops the notion of rentability. It argues that the post-crisis period of urbanization in the neoliberal core is characterized by an emphasis on the expansion and deepening of rentability throughout urban and suburban space. The article details multiple manifestations of this process. It argues that there this process features distinctive spatial, scalar, and political patterns. And it explores how the expansion of rentability and of landlord-tenant relations are being contested in various ways. As more of urban life becomes subject to rent relations, new opportunities for resistance emerge.

Towards an insurgent urbanism: collaborative counter-hegemonic practices of inhabiting and transforming the cities

This article proposes a debate anchored in a dialogue between concepts of insurgent planning and humane urbanism and the idea of a subaltern urbanism through the lens of a critical reflection on the role of city-building professionals. The paper explores the idea of an insurgent urbanism as a collaborative praxis of city design and development that arises from the protagonism of marginalised communities and the accumulative knowledge of social movements, activists and scholars. It focuses on three different learning dimensions based on the experience of teaching/research actions developed at a self-organised squat in the metropolitan region of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil between 2018 and 2022. Dialoguing with ideas of social learning, it shows that these practices have created a relevant exchange of different types of knowledge and have contributed to the development of other solutions that challenge the hegemonic and neoliberal city production and can therefore be seen as alternatives for the development of more egalitarian and imaginative futures that expand beyond the context of squats in Brazil.

CULTIVATING FOOD JUSTICE: Redefining Harvest Sales for Sustainable Urban Agriculture in Low‐Income Cape Town post Covid‐19

AbstractIt is well established that urban community gardens (UCGs) can either challenge or reinforce neoliberal urbanism. This duality is especially evident among UCGs that sell garden harvests for income generation. In this article I therefore examine UCGs in low‐income areas of Cape Town, South Africa, to understand how they might sell their harvests while countering the neoliberal food system in cities of the global South. I draw on qualitative fieldwork, including observations and semi‐structured interviews with UCG representatives and civil society actors. Most harvests are currently sold to high‐end venues through intermediary actors in civil society organizations (CSOs) and non‐governmental organizations (NGOs). However, this approach disregards the local community's socioeconomic conditions and undermines community gardens’ nutritional objectives. Yet, under specific scenarios, the sale of garden harvests could mitigate the persistent food injustice in Cape Town's low‐income areas. In this article I introduce a model for harvest sales that advances sustainable urban agriculture and fosters food justice in neoliberal cities in the global South.

Context Integration and Inclusivity in Contemporary Public Spaces of Major City From Global South—Case of Karachi, Pakistan

The emerging role of private sector in neoliberal city development is creating disconnect of contemporary public space with physical and social context. The following paper uses four case studies of public spaces within Karachi, mega city of Pakistan, to highlight the developing trends creating lack of context integration to place. The main research question for this study is, how well do the contemporary public spaces cater to inclusivity and integration with social and physical context? The research methodology used is mixed methods and qualitative research. Surveys and interviews conducted evaluate success factors and limitations in design approach to public spaces.

More-than-Human Jerusalem

As a city that is at the same time unified, divided, fragmented, contested, mixed, neoliberal, post- and neo-colonial, Jerusalem / Al-Quds presents a unique combination of urban conditions. It is divided between East (part of the occupied West Bank) and West, and between Palestinian, Jewish-orthodox religious, and Jewish secular neighborhoods. It is a religious meta-city, in which past and future fantasies and obsessions are part of quotidian life, but also a fascinating place of everyday practices, unexpected encounters and productive frictions defying top-down categorizations. At the same time, it is a modern neo-liberal city, in which local and global capital play a major role in new urban developments. It would be a mistake, however, to describe Jerusalem solely from an anthropocentric point of view, while neglecting its more-than-human components. The article will present the fruits of a three-year study, conducted as part of the More-than-Human Jerusalem Lab in Bezalel's Master's in Urban Design: Liquid Jerusalem (2021), Growing Jerusalem (2022) and Terra Jerusalem (2023). Together with the students, we explored possibilities for a renewed interaction between artificial and planned elements and between living organisms in the urban space, focusing on water, vegetation and soil in the city and their interweaving in urban culture and everyday experience. The lab sought to challenge the separations between "nature" and "culture", and to develop nature-based solutions to offer a new perspective on the city, one that can open different futures of inclusion, care and cooperation between the human populations—but also between them and the more-than-human inhabitants of the city. Through a series of projects, the article will describe the research and methodological process of thinking about Jerusalem as a laboratory of the more-than-human suggesting planning tools designed to enhance urban resilience, justice and inclusion.

Militarization, militianization, and crime management in the neoliberal city

Resumo O artigo inicia com uma retomada teórica das teses sobre novos mecanismos de gestão da segurança urdidos nos últimos 40 anos no Norte Global, como as políticas de "tolerância zero" e o "novo urbanismo militar". Explora-se, em seguida, o nexo entre neoliberalismo, megaeventos, desigualdades e punição. Como reflexão empírica, debruçamo-nos no caso da Intervenção Federal na Segurança Pública no Rio de Janeiro em 2018. Assim, pretendemos contribuir para uma agenda de pesquisa que explora os engates entre novos desenhos urbanos, gestão populacional diferencial, punição e capitalismo neoliberal, além de apontar como as manifestações brasileiras destes processos têm contribuído para alterações nos arranjos sociais e políticos do País, sobretudo pelo fortalecimento dos grupos milicianos e da lógica que os sustenta.

Class Conflict and Spatial Domination in the Neoliberal City

Abstract This article analyzes spatial domination in middle-classed spaces—the spaces that cater to the dispositions, status, and lifestyle ideals of middle-class groups—of the neoliberal city. Grounded in interdisciplinary scholarship on the neoliberal city, the article introduces a typology of middle-classed spaces, which maps out different combinations of cross-class hostility and cordiality in dynamics of spatial domination. Through an extended case study of a new upscale neighborhood bordering a slum area in a southern Brazilian city, the article unveils the socio-historic conditions that inform the localized cross-class relations and situate it in the spatial typology. With the support of a semiotic square, the article then identifies, relates, and analyzes the hostile (“takeover” and “repression”) and cordial (“makeover” and “concession”) spatial practices by which dominant agents produce one specific type of middle-classed space. Through these practices, dominant agents improve the status, experience, and market value of the neighborhood for target upper-middle-class consumers, while further disenfranchising the poor from its spaces—effectively reproducing deep-rooted historical patterns of social exclusion. This study extends research on status consumption and spatiality while also adding insights into the role of the state in consumption and market dynamics.

Neo-liberalizing social service provision: Reactions and responses to the limits and constraints of housing and settlement services for refugees in Toronto, Canada

ABSTRACT This article engages with the impacts of neoliberalism on the experiences of social service providers working with refugees searching for shelter and affordable housing in Toronto, Canada. The 1990s in Toronto consisted of intergovernmental restructuring, which downloaded federal housing responsibilities onto provincial and municipal governments. Additionally, changes made to settlement funding had direct impacts on non-profit organizations serving immigrants and refugees. This devolution and decentralization of Canada's housing and settlement services have led to a complex hybrid of informal and formal social networks. Based on semi-structured interviews with service providers, this study reveals institutional gaps in Toronto's housing and settlement support models. This paper enriches scholarly debates on (1) neoliberal cities, (2) social service provision for immigrants and refugees, and (3) informal social networks, by engaging with critical feminist frameworks that highlight the importance of a profound understanding of the types of informal networks developed by social service providers.

Making Vulnerability Invisible: The Impact of COVID-19 on the Use of Public Space in Hong Kong

Despite the growing body of work on how COVID-19 impacts the use of public space, few studies focused on vulnerable social groups. This article outlines a systematic analysis of the use of public space by migrant domestic workers before and after the pandemic outbreak in Hong Kong. The analysis reveals changes in behavioral patterns, and we discuss them as part of an ongoing conflictual renegotiation of rights and space alongside the dual nature of invisibility. The growing invisibility of migrant workers prompts unresolved questions of rights, spatial and recognitional justice, and acceptance of diversity in the global neoliberal city.

Construction and Destruction—Making Delhi World-Class: A Critical Study of Trickster City and A Free Man

In post-independence India, the city has served as a critical site for the negotiation of postcolonial citizenship. As Gyan Prakash has noted, literary and cinematic representations of urban spaces have captured both the promise and the failures of this process (199). In this study, I seek to examine the extent to which the postcolonial neoliberal city in India has delivered on its promise of citizenship for the urban poor, and how literature from the region responds to this issue. To explore these questions, I turn to Aman Sethi’s A Free Man: A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi and Trickster City: Writings from the Belly of the Metropolis which features the works of multiple authors. Both texts offer first-hand accounts of individuals in Delhi who have experienced the effects of neoliberal transformation. These works depict a paradoxical situation: as the city strives to become a world-class metropolis, it simultaneously dispossesses its most vulnerable citizens, who are often the ones contributing their labour to its construction and maintenance. To make sense of this dialectic of construction and destruction, I argue that we must examine the complex interplay between the market, the state, and spatial restructuring. Drawing on the concept of ‘precarity’, as developed by Irene Pang, David Harvey, Kalyan Sanyal, Giorgio Agamben, Amita Baviskar, D. Asher Ghertner, Henri Lefebvre, and Edward Soja, I analyse the mechanisms that contribute to the precariousness experienced by the urban poor in India.
 Keywords: Postcolonial city, precarity, neoliberalism, metropolis, dispossession

The cultural politics of civic pride through Hull UK City of Culture 2017

PurposeThis article explores the cultural politics of civic pride through Hull's year as UK City of Culture (UKCoC) in 2017. It unpicks some of the socio-political meanings and values of civic pride in Hull and critiques the ways in which pride, as an indicator of identity and belonging, was mobilised by UKCoC organisers, funders and city leaders. It argues for more nuanced and critical approaches to the consideration and evaluation of pride through cultural mega events (CMEs) that can take account of pride's multiple forms, meanings and temporalities.Design/methodology/approachA multidimensional, mixed methods approach is taken, incorporating the critical analysis of Hull2017 promotional materials and events and original interviews with a range of stakeholders.FindingsThe desire for socio-economic change and renewed identity has dominated Hull's post-industrial sense of self and is often expressed through the language of pride. This article argues that UKCoC organisers, cognisant of this, crafted and tightly controlled a singular pride narrative to create the feeling of change and legitimise the entrepreneurial re-branding of the city. At the same time, UKCoC organisers overlooked the opportunity to engage with and potentially reactivate the political culture of Hull, which like other “left behind” or “structurally disadvantaged” places, is becoming increasingly anti-political.Originality/valueThrough the case study of a relatively unresearched and under-represented city, this paper contributes to cultural policy literatures concerned with critically assessing the benefits and shortcomings of Cultural Mega Events and to a more specific field concerning Cities of Culture and the political cultures of their host cities. This paper also contributes to an emerging literature on the centrality of pride through the UK's post-Brexit Levelling Up agenda, suggesting that pride in place is becoming figured as a “universal theme” of the neoliberal city script.

Busking in the neo-liberal city: A critical inventory of a selection of street art ordinances in Austria

The conditions under which buskers pursue their art have never been easy, but their situation has become even more complicated recently, as public spaces worldwide have been transformed under rampant neo-liberal conditions. Street music today often takes place against the backdrop of globally oriented urban planning, which is frequently shaped by neo-liberal considerations that ascribe specific qualities and functions to public outdoor places and spaces. By subjecting these spaces, which remain central for street music activities even in the digital age, to increasing official control and regulation, street musicians are often exposed to a regulatory frenzy – enacted by local politics and executed by local authorities – that makes it difficult or even impossible for many of them to perform in public in a manner of their choosing. Moreover, under such conditions the creative potential of street music is not allowed to unfold in its breadth and heterogeneity, but only in a limited manner. An analysis of the street art ordinances of the cities of Vienna, Salzburg and Innsbruck exemplifies the status quo in Austria in this regard and demonstrates how different the political strategies for dealing with street music are in this self-proclaimed country of music. Rather than being seen as a nuisance to be controlled, it is argued that a rich and diverse street music landscape has a significant democratic potential, which would flourish under a more sensitive approach to public spaces on the part of politics and city planning.

Land market concentration, developers’ pricing decisions, and class monopoly rent in urban China

Drawing on Harvey’s assertion on class monopoly rent, this paper investigates developers’ monopolist pricing decisions in urban China, with an additional focus on the heterogeneity between state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and private developers. By contextualizing Harvey to China’s urban political economy, we find that when developers maximize profits and local governments maximize land revenues, their individual activities forge a collective to create “island-like” markets that lead to class monopoly rents, and that local governments seek to realize social goals primarily through the operation of SOEs, making SOE developers act differently. We specify a set of hypotheses on the relationship between private developers’ monopolist pricing and their power in local secondary land markets and SOEs’ imparity. We organize a city-level, national-scale dataset and use a fixed effects model and the instrumental variable approach to test our hypotheses. This research has implications for China’s land and housing policies, and suggests that a deeper examination of the concept of class monopoly rent would facilitate a better understanding of contemporary neoliberal cities.

Erratum to Neoliberal Cities: The Remaking of Postwar Urban America

Erratum to Neoliberal Cities: The Remaking of Postwar Urban America

Transport Inequality in Today’s Cities at the Intersection of Mobility and Inequality

One aspect of social inequality in today’s cities concerns transport inequality. This simply refers to the transport advantages of the rich compared to the poor (Gebresselassie & Sanchez, 2019). The transport inequality intersects with other forms of marginalization as well, based on gender, age, disability, and ethnicity. Yet for the mobile or kinetic elite (Andreotti, Le Gallès, & Moreno-Fuentes, 2013), all places and transport means are readily available. Furthermore, transport-related mega-projects accentuate the existing social inequalities of the neoliberal city. However, urban policy makers have begun to realize the importance of transport inequality and develop inclusive policies, such as “accessibility planning” in the UK (Lucas, 2012). Urban citizens are also forming mobility justice movements to protest against the increasing transport costs, as in Latin America (Díaz Pabón & Palacio Ludeña, 2021) and France. The encompassing mobility research is largely connected to social and environmental sustainability ideals. Hence, this paper will study the relationship between mobility and inequality through a thematic analysis of approximately 100 publications that were selected with certain keywords from the results of Web of Science searches, a few books, institutional reports and other sources. This literature review shows that transport inequalities are a reflection of the capitalist system and one of the main sources of social conflict in contemporary societies. Against the solution suggestions that range from rehabilitating the system to revolution as a process in the related literature, formation of place-based solutions that take into consideration both universal and local conditions is suggested in this study.

Unlocking Emotional Aspects of Kindergarten Teachers’ Professional Identity through Photovoice

The previous literature has strongly emphasized the professional aspects of teacher identity in terms of knowledge and pedagogical matters. However, teachers’ emotions have also been academically discussed in recent decades. The voices of kindergarten teachers are critical for reflecting on professional identities within the community of kindergarten teachers. Regrettably, in Hong Kong, kindergarten teachers have become an oppressed professional community due to the marketization of kindergartens in this neoliberal city. Therefore, this arts-based participatory study aimed to investigate teachers’ identities by discovering kindergarten teachers’ emotional characteristics in Hong Kong. Teachers’ voice has been collected through photo narratives. Twelve in-service kindergarten teachers participated in this study; all of them worked in local kindergartens in Hong Kong. The teachers were invited individually to take a photo of an object in their daily lives and share their own stories. Altogether 1080 min of interview data were recorded. Through a series of oral narratives by members of this marginalized professional community, this study unlocked the emotions and voices of kindergarten teachers in Hong Kong. Through a photovoice approach, the findings revealed how the teachers’ personal aspects were a neglected but important part of their teacher identity.

In, Of, and For the City: Acknowledging the 2022 Anthony Leeds Prize in Urban Anthropology

In, Of, and For the City: Acknowledging the 2022 Anthony Leeds Prize in Urban Anthropology

Marking humans for consumption, whilst erasing others: Affective becomings and the workings of (dis)comfort

In the becoming of neoliberal cities, consumption can play an important role in the process of marking who is human, that is, fit for consumption, and who is not. This paper explores such processes as affective becomings and focuses on the workings of comfort and discomfort to highlight how some bodies are delegitimized in order for others to become legitimatized. Using an ethnographic approach with affective methodologies, I trace the process of erasing activism collectives that were resisting gentrification in São Paulo and advocating the ‘right to the city’. The contribution of this paper is threefold. Firstly, it highlights how the becoming of the neoliberal city follows a neoliberal normativity in tandem with a colonial one. By exploring how spaces, bodies, and norms are always related to one another in this process, I highlight how ‘the consumer’ has become the body who counts (i.e. the human). Secondly, this paper shows how activism work refracts the dynamics of the neoliberal-colonial normativity, as it (re)acts to its mechanisms for sorting out bodies. Thirdly, this paper highlights the political dimensions of (dis)comfort that mark the splitting of legitimate and illegitimatebodies in a social reproduction for consumption. Consequently, it explores how discomfort has been used as a political-affective tool of delegitimization, subjugation, and oppression.