Neoliberal City Research Articles

The interplay between intimacy and commodification: Queer agency and vulnerability amid neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics

This article examines the ways in which lesbians’ economic and intimate lives are closely intertwined amid neoliberal development in the urban landscape. Previous research on queer urban life has primarily drawn attention to commodified gay neighbourhoods and other sites for sexual consumption, which are often marketised as part of a liberal and queer-friendly urban landscape, in Euro-American contexts. Such a focus is not adequate, however, to capture the complex interplay between intimacy and commodification in contemporary societies. Drawing upon interviews with 35 lesbians in Beijing, this study shows how the market is experienced by lesbians as a site of queer agency and vulnerability under neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics. The findings reveal ‘commodified forms of intimacy’, through which lesbians actively engage in the labour market and (queer-targeted) pink market in order to develop their intimate relations. Meanwhile, ‘intimatised forms of commodification’ illustrate how women’s gendered and sexual expressions are closely policed and evaluated in the workplace as a site of both economic production and the reproduction of social norms. Participants were conscious of their vulnerable position as women and lesbians in the marketplace, but they were active in strategising ways to navigate urban landscapes of heteronormativity and gender inequalities. This article helps to develop a deeper understanding of the complicated and contradictory impacts of neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics on queer communities. It contributes to urban sociology and sexuality studies by mapping the multiple connections between commodified relations and intimate relations in the neoliberal city.

Amplifying dignity in the neoliberal city: the Pobladores movement in Chile

ABSTRACT The Chilean pobladores housing movement gained prominence among Chile’s 2019 wave of protests. The contemporary pobladores movement re-emerged in 2000 and since then has mobilized for the right to dignified housing and a dignified life. Values like work, effort, and collective commitment have been fundamental within its historical narratives since the 1960s, but these have significantly evolved over time, reflecting the major changes in the social and political environments in which it operates. Using framing analysis and drawing on an empirical qualitative study which includes interviews with leaders, activists, and participants in housing committees, in this article we explore how the dignity frame, as elaborated by four pobladores organizations, has contributed to the remobilization of the urban poor in Chile, a country which stands out for its neoliberal urban policies in Latin America and the Global South.

Neoliberal city and exclusive communities: the politics of contemporary urbanisation in northern India

ABSTRACT This article focuses on a relatively overlooked dimension of urban development in India: the nature of community-making in new urban spaces. Using concepts from sociological and geographical literature on community formation, it examines the relationship between specific forms of urbanisation in contemporary (neo-liberal) India and community-making processes. The study is situated in the city of Noida within the national capital region in northern India. Examining two habitational forms, that of urban middle-class enclaves and urban villages, we suggest that a model of urbanisation involving eminent domain (the state’s power to acquire private property and convert it into public use) to produce gentrified urban spaces may promote conditions for rival forms of exclusivist community-making, including nativist ‘othering’.

Appropriating the Neoliberal City: Populism, Post-Transcendental Phenomenology, and the Problematic of the “World”

ABSTRACT In the work of Ernesto Laclau, populism is treated as a hegemonic challenge. Hegemony describes the usurpation of the image of society as a totality by a particular and underdetermined social imaginary. Seen through the lens of what Johann P. Arnason terms “post-transcendental phenomenology”, this concerns the way in which a society sees and experiences both itself and the world it inhabits. This article suggests that hegemonic social imaginaries are built into a society’s public spaces, and are in turn experienced by citizens moving through these spaces, meaning that the built environment is central to the development of populist imaginaries. The article discusses how the neoliberal city exemplifies the way social imaginaries are inscribed into the physical landscape by highlighting three moments in the city; the institution of a certain imaginary as dominant; its sedimentation within the urban fabric over time; and finally, the re-activation of the original moment of institution, which opens up the possibility for new beginnings to overwrite the imaginaries encoded in the city. These three moments describe how physical, built spaces make concrete the power relations and horizons of possibility of the hegemonic imaginary—making possible and encouraging certain ways of being while discouraging (and hiding) others. This hegemonic logic of occupying a public space in the name of a particular subset of the population is a not only parallel to the form of populist politics, but populist sentiment is—at least in part—provoked by the experiences of inhabiting these spaces.

Social effects of neoliberal policy in post-Soviet Saint Petersburg: Urban space contestation revisited

Neoliberal city policy has become central for urban planning and (re)development in postsoviet St. Petersburg. Competing views on how urban space should be organized make citizens consolidate and buck the decisions of strong advocacy groups. This paper considers the contestation of urban space by urban dwellers and city elites in the early times of establishment and spread of neoliberal rhetoric and policy. It focuses on four cases of local communities struggling against spot construction, demolition, and renovation of historical areas (2005–2012). Empirically, the paper relies on a series of semi-structured interviews with local residents and activists as well as materials of semi-formalized observations at local gatherings and rallies. We use theories of urban political regimes to analyze the decisions on urban futures made by administrations and developers, and the theories of Lefebvre, Scott, and de Certeau providing insights into everyday grassroots resistance of citizens to structural pressures, domination and exploitation — to describe the responses of urbanites. Our data shows that these theories need to be adapted to the local context, where struggles over urban space unfolded under the conditions of total uncertainty including multiple property regimes, unstable legal frameworks, non-transparent decision-making by city authorities and investors, and rising tradition of civic participation. As a result, we question the scholarly convention about the paternalistic relations between urbanites and powerholders, and problematize the boundaries between the core concepts of urban theory: in particular, we demonstrate the relative nonbinary character of the opposition of spatial strategies vs. spatial tactics.

Governing through design: the politics of participation in neoliberal cities

ABSTRACT This article critically analyses an empirical case of how design mediates governing power in situated contexts. Using the Foucauldian concept of governmentality, the article examines the specific role of co-design to enable governance through the strategic use of design techniques and artefacts. Drawing on ethnographic research undertaken during the participatory urban redevelopment of Waterloo, Sydney, the article unpacks four concrete mechanism of governance through design: (1) the building of a seemingly coherent, stable and shared visions of Waterloo’s future; (2) the regulation of local knowledge production and political imagination; (3) the rendering of community technical through calculation techniques, standardisation, and the objectification of subjects; (4) the performance of diversity of choice while smoothing out differences. In conclusion, the article argues that, in Waterloo, the shift from top-down modes of urban governance to decentralised multi-stakeholders did not imply the reduction of state power but only supposed the rearrangement of governing power in the face of neoliberal urbanism.

Understanding Weak Local Governance in the Neoliberal City through the Case of Skopje 2014

While Skopje 2014 intended to rebrand the city for international companies and tourists, the lack of local accountability over the project raises questions about what happened to the powerful local governance under Yugoslavia. Bringing local governance into analysis of the city’s physical changes helps show how its capacity weakened under neoliberalism and how municipalities shifted toward nationalist placemaking because of their inability to address other problems. These factors set the stage for Skopje 2014. In pushing Skopje 2014, the Gruevski government also exhibited patterns of authoritarian neoliberalism found in urban redevelopment in other post-communist states. Project opponents gaining control of the Centar Municipality was important in unraveling the project and regime, but building local citizenship remained a challenge as municipalities still lack the conditions to create and sustain their own agendas and legitimacy. By taking a longer historical view, the case helps distinguish mechanisms of local government capture in authoritarian neoliberal urban redevelopment from broader problems of urban governance and local citizen disempowerment under neoliberalism.

Mobilizing ‘impermaculture’: Temporary urban agriculture and the sustainability fix

This paper addresses the alliance between some urban agriculturalists, developers, and the local state in promoting a certain type of ‘green urbanism’ through what we call ‘impermaculture’. Impermaculture is a model of urban agriculture whereby some urban farmers approach their impermanence – the possibility of their operations being replaced by higher value developments – less as a threat to be avoided, as traditionally understood in the literature, and more as an intended modus operandi to which they are committed. We discuss how they use lightweight and portable growing containers, planter beds, greenhouses, and livestock pens to operate within and enhance contemporary regimes of development in global North cities. We identify a spatio-temporal impermanence that stands in contrast to classic understandings of sustainability fixes as either a form of greenwashing or as spatial fixes involving the sinking of capital into construction of a ‘greener’ built environment. In what follows, we develop a conceptual framework that will facilitate these contributions and provide a language for discussing cases of impermaculture in Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, British Columbia. We discuss how urban agriculture is mobilized as part of the sustainability fix in the two cities. We first demonstrate how impermaculture emerges as a means of stabilizing the fix which is always prone to coming apart, or fracturing. We then draw on two examples – goat husbandry in Portland and temporary gardens in Vancouver – to demonstrate how urban agriculturalists are embracing and leveraging impermanence. This ‘impermaculture by design’ not only marks a new form of urban agriculture in the neoliberal city but shores up and temporally rescales the sustainability fix while providing urban agriculture initiatives stability.

Transforming paradise: Neoliberal regeneration and more-than-human urbanism in Birmingham

In Birmingham, a badger visits me each evening outside my front door. Five years later, a fox meets me on a city street at 5 am. Two years after that, walking along the city’s canals, my eyes lock with a heron’s. A year later, a eucalyptus tree becomes my shade and respite in a disturbed city. Months later, as I get ready to leave the city, I encounter a group of parakeets. In this paper, I ask how these seemingly disparate encounters and relationships are intimately connected as part of Birmingham’s urban ecologies and larger stories of urban regeneration – and its consequences for thriving and precarious life in the city. I argue that the tension between thriving and precarity in Birmingham (and cities like it) results from new exertions of control whilst urban dwellers establish new forms of more-than-human urban cohabitation. The stories in this paper, relating to different non-human lives caught up in Birmingham’s transformation into a neoliberal city, demonstrate that serious consideration of more-than-human theory and experience is essential to the future of urban studies scholarship.

Black insurgent aesthetics and the public imaginary

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the spontaneous production of graffiti art and murals covering the entrances of businesses in the central business district of Oakland, CA, in the wake of the global protest movements, in 2020, against state violence and systemic racism. I argue that the art made legible what gets hidden through the violent processes of gentrification, neoliberal urbanism, and displacement/dispossession. The paper rethinks what borders, policing, and reclamation mean in a time of economic instability and a global health crisis, through the placement of these vernacular expressions in Downtown Oakland. What is revealed through the art is the convergence of two co-constitutive publics – a segregated, decaying city mostly inhabited by poor and working-class Black and Latinx residents and laborers, and a modern, prosperous, neoliberal city that caters to a privileged class of white residents and tourists – especially as the city grappled with the management and regulation of public space in the midst of a global pandemic. The article thus theorizes public space as layered and always contested, and not simply a space of conflict but also collective engagement.

Simulating the “city of joy”: state choreography and the re-appropriation of public spaces in Kolkata

ABSTRACT Videos of what seems like enforced and orchestrated solidarity, performed by celebrities from the film industry in Kolkata, each scene blending into another, each upper-class urban home-space resembling the other, each envisioning a brighter future, rendering the same song in multiple voices, with metaphors of cities smiling again, circulated through social media are problematic in the erasures of particularities, “of the presence of the poor, of crime, of dirt, of work”. While the nature of public spaces and performances of the public gathering is evolving amidst a pandemic, this paper, probing primarily into the state-sponsored strategic public performances in COVID-affected Kolkata, argues that the simulation and performance of state-envisioned “joy” by a postcolonial neoliberal city to mimic the imagined global city, to embody “the ageographia, the surveillance and control, the simulation without end” has frightfully familiar echoes of coloniality and hegemonic control.

Contesting the Neoliberal City: Place-Based Activism in the Documentary Films of Barrio Anti-Gentrification Movements in Bogotá and Mexico City

This study explores how barrio social movements in Bogotá and Mexico City fight gentrification by making everyday life visible in films. An analysis of two communally produced documentary videos examines how the portrayal of stories that detail people’s affective ties to places targets the pillars of neoliberalism – that is, the reduction of human relations to market exchanges and the prevalence of private property over collective rights. After some background on the urban areas at stake, I study how the films foreground processes of place-making by portraying everyday family and communal work routines and explain how these depictions not only humanise space, in opposition to the abstract understanding of space to which urban plans aspire, but also allow residents to claim the neighbourhoods as collective property. The analysis demonstrates that by making everydayness visible, grassroots organisations position themselves as place-makers, creating a local culture capable of countering the discourses through which neoliberalism justifies the necessity of urban renewal.

Birdwatching on Brownfields: Contradictory Contexts and Ambivalence in the Neoliberal City

Background: In the least densely populated residential neighborhood of Chicago, deindustrial brownfields are being repurposed into sites of outdoor recreation and green spaces. This article explores the subjective experience of park development on one of these sites, focusing on how the socioeconomic contexts of the neoliberal city creates complex and ambivalent experiences of green space development. Methods: Data regarding residents' and community leaders' perceptions of park development emerge from digital and in-person participant observation, analysis of Chicago-area newspapers, and two rounds of interviews conducted in 2015–2017 and 2020–2021. Results and Discussion: Due to the continued presence of private-public partnerships and industrial activities on the Southeast Side, I find that park development on the Southeast Side of Chicago produces feelings of ambivalence rather than uninhibited enthusiasm for new parks. I suggest that this ambivalence about deindustrial land uses is characteristic of the neoliberalization of American communities. Given patterns of disinvestment and privatization in deindustrialized cities, certain land use debates summon neither passionate commitment nor vehement resistance simply because they cannot address the accrual of structural problems. Conclusion: Leveraging public–private partnerships to renovate deindustrial landscapes into sites for outdoor recreation nonetheless allows locals to emphasize why certain places near their homes are worth rendering visible once again.

Business improvement districts, class turf war and the strategic weaponisation of class monopoly rent

Business improvement districts (BIDs) are understood as a proactive response by locally dependent property owners and businesses aimed at attracting capital investment and consumers back to the central city at a time of increasingly gutted public sector resources. BIDs have yet to be explicitly examined as a form of rent-seeking, even though the primary motivation for property owners to self-impose additional taxes for implementing ‘clean and safe’ programmes is rent. In this context, the self-imposed tax is treated as a speculative investment that will hopefully yield a return in the form of enhanced profit for businesses and rents for landowners. As such, we conceptualise BIDs as not only a form of rent-seeking, but an alliance of private-sector actors engaged in the collaborative and strategic mobilisation of class monopoly rent as a weapon against all perceived barriers to profitability. Based on evidence from Seattle, Washington, the paper deepens our understanding of BIDs by linking this phenomenon to the spatial dynamics of rent within the contemporary neoliberal city and concludes by discussing the implications for what BIDs reveal about class monopoly rent in particular, the kind of class conflict this form of rent configures and its role within wider processes of neoliberal urbanisation.

Employment and sustainability: The relation between precarious work and spatial inequality in the neoliberal city

• Precarious employment reinforces inequity and fragmentation of urban spaces in a neoliberal, commodity based economy. • Individual expectations of future wellbeing and stability are affected by conditions of precarious employment and by neighbourhood. • Urban sustainable development efforts need to address precarious labour as it affects future options and reproduces fragmentation. The creation of employment opportunities is a key factor to economic growth, but when pursuing sustainable development, work arrangements must also be fair and stable. In contrast, precarious employment is a common and serious limitation to prospects for development and personal well being in Latin American cities. Discussing this phenomenon in the developing world requires considering the ongoing transformation of the neoliberal urban labour market, the commodity-driven economic structure, and questioning how such features relate to the likelihood of urban sustainable development. The present study addresses precarity in urban labour markets and subjective perceptions of stability and prospects and asks how marginalisation and fragmented urban spaces in a neoliberal context relate to the structural characteristics of precarious labour. This relationship between labour and space is analysed based on survey data from different types of neighbourhoods in Chile’s two largest metropolitan areas – Santiago and Concepción – using multilevel regression and ANOVA. Our study finds that precarious employment and poor prospects replicate and reinforce typical territorial inequalities and thus constitute a serious limitation for sustainable development. We conclude that the current labour market, the features of neoliberal extractivism, and weak formal social protection are obstructing urban development that is sustainable in terms of employment. Thus, the conceptual debate on sustainability and urban policy should focus more on the negative effects of precarious employment and its particular relation to spatial fragmentation in growing urban areas.

Knowledge Practices Within and Beyond Sharing and Commoning Urban Initiatives

In the context of neoliberal cities, with growing levels of housing commodification and space competition, sharing and commoning urban initiatives within the larger framework of urban social movements are shaping tactics of contestation. To what extent they represent sustainable efforts to urban commons governance remains largely unexplored. This article aims therefore to contribute to better understand how practices of solidarity can be maintained beyond their first productive phase and to explore the engagement of social movement and initiatives actors in the production and maintenance of shared spatial resources. To do that, we focus on knowledge practices as a key factor to ensure sustainability of actions within and beyond urban initiatives that engage with and practice sharing and space-commoning. Drawing on figurational sociology, we consider individuals involved in these urban initiatives as embedded in multiple social settings and networks of collaboration and interdependence, in which transactions such as resources, ideas and information take place giving way to collective action, new modes of participation and urban transformation. Within this conceptual framework, we explore how urban initiatives networks produce and transfer their knowledge (1) within their own internal set-up, (2) to private and public institutions (e.g., administration and political actors) and (3) to other civil society organizations. To do so, we draw on qualitative research conducted in three German cities, Kassel, Stuttgart, and Berlin on the topics of sharing and commoning practices in the field of housing and public space. By looking at the practices by which knowledge—required for action and networking—is co-/re-produced and exchanged, we identify those that constrain or enable sharing and commoning strategies on the long-term and have therefore a larger potential for sustaining efforts of urban commons governance.

Urban sustainability and perceived satisfaction in neoliberal cities

In light of growing levels of urbanisation globally, the concept of urban sustainability has become an increasingly important element of the general discussion on sustainable development. However, few studies have addressed the various dimensions of sustainability and the different territorial scales on which day-to-day urban life takes place. Instances of discontent and social crisis have become commonplace in many of the world's major cities. Around the globe, inequality is seen as associated with a neoliberal urbanisation process that offers few solutions to issues of social exclusion and the climate crisis. The present work proposes the use of households' perceived satisfaction when analysing urban sustainability in neoliberal cities. Data is taken from the Sustainable Urban Development Perception Survey, conducted in the two main metropolitan areas of Chile, a country that since the 1970s has been widely considered to be a prime example of orthodox neoliberalism. We propose and test new dimensions with which to address urban sustainability, through the lens of perceived satisfaction, a key element in the analysis of the discontent that is sweeping across major cities globally.

Philanthropic Investment in Equity: Cultivating Grass Roots Leaders for the Equitable Revitalization of Marginalized Communities

Community development must include deeper investment to foster a pipeline of community leaders to support equitable redevelopment practice in marginalized communities under threat of gentrification in the city. We argue that philanthropy is critical to develop this pipeline, particularly in the era of the neoliberal city. The following case study analyzes efforts to develop place-based grass roots leadership in marginalized neighborhoods of Columbus, Ohio. The United Way of Central Ohio, through their Neighborhood Leadership Academy (NLA) program, has partnered with community organizations to develop multiple cohorts of grass roots neighborhood leaders over several years within three specific neighborhoods. Our case identifies how philanthropic investment into a grass roots leadership development model centered on equity has impacted policy outcomes, built bridging social capital and spurred successful activism. Our case illustrates a potential model for building social infrastructure through philanthropic investment to buttress potentially disruptive neighborhood change. In the era of the neoliberal city, neighborhoods can no longer rely upon federal funding, leaving redeveloping neighborhoods particularly vulnerable to market driven gentrification and displacement. In this void of resources, philanthropic efforts to support robust grass roots leadership is the last remaining defense against widespread displacement and the primary asset to support equitable development practices.

Rent gap governance

While gentrification in some contexts has been analysed as a profit-driven process best explained by the rent gap, state governance, e.g. through social mixing, has elsewhere been seen as the main driver of this urban process. With the concept of rent gap governance, the aim of this article is to show that profit and governance can be mutually constitutive parts of gentrification in the neoliberal city. Even when gentrification is a political premise, the rent gap can remain important, but its formation and closure might be unconventional. Empirically, the article centres on Denmark’s 2018 ‘Ghetto Law’, a social-mix policy aiming to govern a racialized surplus population by reducing non-profit housing in stigmatized areas through privatization of housing and land and new-build. Building on recent elaborations of rent gap theory, I suggest three mechanisms for rent gap governance in the Danish case: increased potential rent, depressed ground rent, and subsidized and envisioned rent gaps. I ground this model with a case study of the sale of the non-profit housing complex Schackenborgvænge. I analyse rarely-available qualitative and quantitative data and consider the immediate social consequences of the sale. The result is a murky picture of localized rent gap governance.

Book Review: Neoliberal Cities: The Remaking of Postwar Urban America

Book Review: Neoliberal Cities: The Remaking of Postwar Urban America