Neoliberal City Research Articles

Should a Human Rights-Based Approach to the Homeless be used in the Neoliberal City? Case Study in Bogotá, Colombia

This article reflects on why cities’ beautification frameworks often replace a human rights-based understanding of homeless people. Using Bogotá as a case study, this paper shows that the local government uses a neoliberal discourse regarding the citizens’ perception of safety. This discourse emphasizes the importance of having clean, orderly, and beautiful public spaces in the city to give a perception of safety. Furthermore, this discourse, based on the perception of safety, justifies the implementation of urban renewal projects in the city centre, aimed at beautifying deteriorated buildings and neighbourhoods for attracting capital and tourism to boost the city’s economy. These factors overshadow the human rights-based national laws for the homeless as well as the decisions of Colombia’s Constitutional Court.

Future scenarios of Digital Social Innovation in urban governance. A collective discussion on the socio-political implications in Ghent

The mushrooming of Digital Social Innovation (DSI) initiatives (i.e. digitally based or digitally enabled solutions to collective social problems) in urban governance is a recent phenomenon that has been only partially investigated in scholarly research, most often in terms of e-government or e-governance. Particularly the socially progressive and regressive aspects of DSI practices in the context of neoliberal cities require special consideration. To enrich the nascent critical debate, the paper suggests that a context-oriented, collective analysis and discussion can help explore the socio-political implications of DSI in citizens' life. To this end, the paper describes the realisation and presents the results of a scenario-building process in Ghent, Belgium, through which key-informants analysed DSI initiatives adopted in local governance, their future perspectives, and the possibilities and threats these bring about. The collective discussion shows that, while these processes can determine people empowering effects, it is fundamental to consider under what conditions and at what costs these are happening and whether their less evident consequences are always desirable for society.

“Place Making” and “Place Attachment” as Key Concepts in Understanding and Confronting Contemporary Urban Evictions: The Case of Givat-Amal, Tel Aviv

This article expands on the usability of the concepts of “place making” and “place attachment” as recently developed in urban studies research in the context of housing insecurity of marginalized communities in today’s neo-liberal city. Particularly, against the growing threat of urban evictions, the article utilizes a transdisciplinary approach, showing the relevance of both concepts for (a) a better understanding of bottom-up processes of spatial production and attempts to create a sense of place on the part of such communities, and (b) offering an innovative legal strategy for doing justice to these communities in terms of their compensation rights, especially where a title to land has not been registered on a private basis. These issues are critically examined on the site-related case of the Givat-Amal quarter in Tel Aviv, Israel. This district is now under actual final threat of forced evictions following seven conflicted decades with the state, municipal authorities and private entrepreneurs. Our transdisciplinary study is based on qualitative methodologies in human geography such as fieldwork, visual evidence, and interviews, with a glimpse into philosophy. It is equally based on revisiting “traditional” legal property rights through the lens of post-liberal human rights analysis. The argument can apply to many situations of forced evictions across Africa, Latin America, and the West itself.

Neoliberal Cities: The Remaking of Postwar Urban America

Neoliberal Cities: The Remaking of Postwar Urban America

Exploring implicit and explicit cultural policy dimensions through major-event and neoliberal rhetoric

This paper is conceptually positions the emergence of the neoliberal city in the context of transitions to late-capitalism. The aim of this study is to understand intersections between explicit and implicit cultural policy dimensions focusing on the Rijeka2020 programme as intended and how it was restructured as a response to COVID-19. Through cultural policy analysis, this ex-ante qualitative case study of the Rijeka2020 programme illuminates overlapping explicit and implicit policy priorities of the ECoC—offering a unique insight into what could potentially be the future of the European cultural policy. Rijeka2020 can be seen as a changing point amidst different rhetoric, analysed around three themes (regeneration, legacy, and participation). Results examine how Rijeka's culture-led urban regeneration agenda was shy on creative industry oriented programming, yet reinforced through capital cultural infrastructural projects. Through attempts to avoid event-led spectacle, officials planned to engage more at the neighbourhood-scale using participatory art practices that concentrated on capacity building. Important take-away points address shifts from culture-oriented regeneration to local participatory art practices is a step towards reconstructing the cultural sector upstream (based on production) and downstream (through reception). • Rijeka2020 rhetoric offers unique insight into what could potentially be future European major-event cultural policy. • Rijeka2020 culture-led urban regeneration was shy on the creative industry, yet reinforced through cultural infrastructural. • Neighbourhood-scale participatory art was impactful, upskilling the workforce and developing audiences. • Through COVID-19, Rijeka focused on the reconstruction of cultural sector activities and active citizen participation.

Andrew J. Diamond and Thomas J. Sugrue, editors. Neoliberal Cities: The Remaking of Postwar Urban America.

A<scp>ndrew</scp> J. D<scp>iamond</scp> and T<scp>homas</scp> J. S<scp>ugrue</scp>, editors. <i>Neoliberal Cities: The Remaking of Postwar Urban America</i>.

The Digital Dimension of Mobilities: Mapping Spatial Relationships between Corporeal and Digital Displacements in Barcelona

This paper explores the ways in which technologies reshape everyday activities, adopting a mobility perspective of the digital environment, which is reframed in terms of the constitutive/substitutive element of corporeal mobility. We propose the construction of a Digital Mobility Index, quantified by measuring the usage typology in which the technology is employed to enable mobility. Through a digital perspective on mobilities, it is possible to investigate how embodied practices and experiences of different modes of physical or virtual displacements are facilitated and emerge through technologies. The role of technologies in facilitating the anchoring of mobilities, transporting the tangible and intangible flow of goods, and in mediating social relations through space and time is emphasized through analysis of how digital usage can reproduce models typical of the neoliberal city, the effects of which in terms of spatial (in)justice have been widely discussed in the literature. The polarization inherent to the digital divide has been characterized by a separation between what has been called the “space of flows” (well connected, mobile, and offering more opportunities) and the “space of places” (poorly connected, fixed, and isolated). This digital divide indeed takes many forms, including divisions between classes, urban locations, and national spaces. By mapping “hyper- and hypo-mobilized” territories in Barcelona, this paper examines two main dimensions of digital inequality, on the one hand identifying the usage of the technological and digital in terms of the capacity to reach services and places, and on the other, measuring the territorial demographic and economic propensity to access to ICT as a predictive insight into the geographies of the social gap which emerge at municipal level. This approach complements conventional data sources such as municipal statistics and the digital divide enquiry conducted in Barcelona into the underlying digital capacities of the city and the digital skills of the population.

Neoliberal Cities: The Remaking of Postwar Urban America edited by Andrew J. Diamond and Thomas J. Sugrue

<i>Neoliberal Cities: The Remaking of Postwar Urban America</i> edited by Andrew J. Diamond and Thomas J. Sugrue

Global Cities in Analog: Modernism and Intercity Relations, 1900-1940

This article reflects on modernism from 1900 to 1940 on globalist terms. The turn of the twentieth century was a period of rapid urbanization, pronounced intellectual foment, labor politics, and severe colonial relations. Its upheavals formed the context for modernist approaches to city building. It was also a period of unprecedented interconnectedness where modernisms coalesced under a series of transnational movements. The Werkbund, Bauhaus, and Congrés Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) gained international recognition, influencing the creation of whole cities. Global cities studies, the research program most responsible for conceptualizing urban networks, have oddly little to say about the modernist period that prefigured the global city. This article breaks this arbitrary barrier in global cities studies, which equate global cities with the advent of digital linkages. By doing so, it recognizes the international city as its immediate precursor, fostering remarkable political, economic, and social changes under the heading of modernism. The twenty-first century neoliberal city archetype looks politically limited by comparison, its ossified institutions in need of reinvigoration.

The Scopic Feast of Heritage and the Invention of Unthreatening Diversity in Neoliberal Cities

This article explores the role that heritage might play in the representation of ‘difference’, within the context of neoliberal cities. The case is a large-scale urban change in the former working-class neighborhood of Gamlestaden, Sweden. Interviews and on-site observations revealed how authorized heritage practices can enable the celebration of particular social and cultural values, while naturalizing the erasure of others. People’s cultural diversity, and diverging interpretations of the past, have been guided by the power of heritage into a process of subjectification, according to which only ‘unthreatening’ forms of cultural diversity were celebrated and revealed legitimate. The ‘fetishized’ difference and particular historical records have served to conceal the political interest at stake in its’ production and maintenance, and led to a politicised representation of cultural diversity through what Annie Coombes’ terms ‘scopic feast’. All this was made possible through BID, the first neoliberal business improvement district model in Sweden, and its investment in a deeply rooted process of heritageisation. Uncritical engagement with difference in the context of heritage management and neoliberal urban development, make it appear almost natural to erase the cultural values that fall outside the authorized narrative of value.

Gift giving in the neoliberal city: Polanyi's substantivism and the exchange of density for affordable housing in Vancouver

The policy of density agreements, allowing extra density for condominium developers in exchange for affordable housing units, is seen as an example of the neoliberalization of urban governance in North American and European cities. The consensus of scholarship on urban neoliberalism has suggested this practice is indicative of the rise of the entrepreneurial, market-orientated local state. Through a study of urban development in Vancouver, British Columbia. I illustrate how exchanging density for affordable housing also operates on the basis of gift giving. In doing so I integrate Karl Polanyi's framework of substantivism, which highlights various forms of economic exchange including markets, redistribution, and reciprocity, into research on urban governance. Applying the principles of substantivism to the case of Vancouver, I argue that reciprocity obfuscates the negative effects of the privatization of affordable housing provision by making social welfare contingent on increasing profits for developers, concealing the role of political power in land-use decisions, and gentrifying low-income neighbourhoods. These findings hold implications for the study of urban politics, the neoliberalization of affordable housing, and urban-economic research more generally.

City Production Strategies in the Neoliberalization Context - Salvador as Example

Abstract The aim of the current article is to think over economic development and urban infrastructure propositions by Salvador 360 Strategic Plan from 2017, which was elaborated by the municipal government. The plan allows analyzing the neoliberal city production approach which, despite its modernizing profile, is just an update of old models that have great potential to worsen structural socio-spatial segregation issues. Neoliberalism, urban spoliation, land value and gentrification are key concepts in this article. Neil Brenner, Nick Theodore, Jamie Peck, David Harvey, Lúcio Kowarick, Carlos Vainer and Inaiá de Carvalho are its main theoretical references. The methodology addresses documental analysis, as well as the analysis of secondary data from official sources (DIEESE and IBGE) and digital platforms analysis (AirBnB website). Based on the results, Salvador 360 Strategic Plan deepens eviction processes experienced by the poor population in the city’s central zones and increases the appropriation of private urban added value and service provision concentration, within a political setback context. This process can aggravate urban environment precariousness and quality of life in the city.

City Production Strategies in the Neoliberalization Context - Salvador as Example

Abstract The aim of the current article is to think over economic development and urban infrastructure propositions by Salvador 360 Strategic Plan from 2017, which was elaborated by the municipal government. The plan allows analyzing the neoliberal city production approach which, despite its modernizing profile, is just an update of old models that have great potential to worsen structural socio-spatial segregation issues. Neoliberalism, urban spoliation, land value and gentrification are key concepts in this article. Neil Brenner, Nick Theodore, Jamie Peck, David Harvey, Lúcio Kowarick, Carlos Vainer and Inaiá de Carvalho are its main theoretical references. The methodology addresses documental analysis, as well as the analysis of secondary data from official sources (DIEESE and IBGE) and digital platforms analysis (AirBnB website). Based on the results, Salvador 360 Strategic Plan deepens eviction processes experienced by the poor population in the city’s central zones and increases the appropriation of private urban added value and service provision concentration, within a political setback context. This process can aggravate urban environment precariousness and quality of life in the city.

From Community to Public Familiarity: Neighborhood, Sociability, and Belonging in the Neoliberal City

Current urban neoliberalism processes have shaped and changed contemporary cities, including the local scale’s built environment and social relations. This article aims to study how such transformations affect local sociability by analyzing the effects of neighborhoods’ morphology and socio-demographic characteristics on different forms of interactions and how they affect the sense of belonging. Taking the Metropolitan Area of Santiago, Chile, as a case study, we gathered secondary data on urban morphology and surveyed ten neighborhoods to measure sociability patterns. The results obtained from multilevel logistic regression models show that time living in the neighborhood and public pedestrian space is the most critical factor affecting neighborhood sociability. Moreover, instead of local ties, public familiarity is the form of sociability with the most substantial effects on a sense of belonging. We conclude that recent neighborhoods, formed by neoliberal urbanization, tend to discourage neighborhood sociability and a sense of belonging.

Smart cities and behavioural change: (Un)sustainable mobilities in the neo-liberal city

The smart cities agenda has garnered considerable interest recently as the spread of mobile technologies and notions of ‘big data’ have opened possibilities for promoting greater efficiencies in urban metabolisms. This has been particularly prominent in the realm of environmental sustainability, where smart technologies have been viewed as a way of reducing traffic congestion and delivering energy efficiencies. Key to these aspirations is the way in which technologies are seen to interact with human behaviour and how digital technologies can promote behavioural change through the provision of ‘better’ information. However, smart city programmes adopt a particular intellectual and pragmatic framing of behavioural change that we argue is fundamentally narrow and unambitious, raising concerns about how behavioural science is mobilised, by whom and its potential to promote sustainable urban futures. First, we propose that the focus in smart city narratives on quantitative data and insights from ‘big data’ is methodologically narrow and is representative of a highly individualised, libertarian paternalist perspective that privileges rationalistic and atomised understandings of behaviour. Second, we argue that the logic of smart cities leads city governments towards a focus on superficial change and the language of ‘encouraging’ shifts in individual behaviour that presents a distraction from the urgent need to reconfigure city infrastructures for low carbon forms of living. Third, we explore how such behavioural change approaches are fundamentally didactic and often lapse into assuming that publics are the passive receivers of ‘smarter’ information rather than active citizens who can question, campaign and present alternative visions to those of corporate-government interests. In this way, we argue that the suffusing of the smart cities and behavioural change agendas act as a neo-liberal distraction to the ways in which cities can develop to support the priorities of human and ecological wellbeing.

Punishment, support, or discipline? Taking stock of recent debates about homeless governance in neoliberal cities

AbstractAn interdisciplinary debate emerged in the 1990s about the nature of homeless governance in neoliberal cities. Contributions to this discussion have interrogated the form, function, and legitimacy of contemporary homeless management. Urban scholars have differentiated three techniques of homeless governance: punishment, support, and discipline. A subset of scholarship has defined punitive governance as an illegitimate act of repression that promotes urban revitalization by excluding the homeless from urban political economies, supportive governance as a legitimate act of voluntary or coercive care that helps the homeless survive a traumatic life experience, and disciplinary governance as an illegitimate act of production that fortifies urban political economies by including rather than excluding homeless individuals into bourgeois institutions. An emerging body of research demonstrates frontline workers coordinate these techniques of governance to pursue the aims of institutional elites. This article outlines the main points of contention in this debate, examines significant empirical findings that scholars have reported, and identifies salient knowledge gaps to be addressed in future research.

The Noise of Silent Machines: A Case Study of LinkNYC

In early 2016, the city of New York and the Google-backed consortium CityBridge launched LinkNYC, a communication network that enables residents and visitors to access Wi-Fi, charge their phones, and make domestic calls—all for free. The ten-feet tall kiosks scattered around the city are also equipped with screens, cameras, a tablet, speakers, and a microphone. Almost immediately after its launch, many raised concerns about LinkNYC: noise complaints concerning users listening to loud music, homeless people gathering around the kiosks, outrage regarding users watching pornography, as well as the potential threat to privacy the kiosks present. In this paper, I argue that LinkNYC functions as a neoliberal apparatus of listening and silencing in the public sphere through data collection and restrictions of usage of the kiosk in the name of accessibility. As Google’s first attempt at occupying the public space, LinkNYC reveals the aspirations for the neoliberal city. Through an ethnographic socio-technological study of LinkNYC, I engage sound studies in current discussions about surveillance. I theorize the modalities of listening in the neoliberal city and discuss competing notions of the public space in smart/responsive cities. I investigate the ideological difference between the smart city and the responsive city and trace the movement from a listening entity to a responsive one, analyzing the implications for privacy. I theorize unsilencing and its politics, discussing examples of re-appropriation of the kiosks. I conducted fieldwork by observing interactions with the kiosks and by doing interviews with citizens, homeless advocacy groups, CityBridge employees, and experts. In addition, I analyze the discourses of CityBridge, local politicians, activists, journalists, and citizens surrounding LinkNYC. This paper is at the theoretical intersection of sound studies, urban studies, science and technology studies, and surveillance studies. Through this case study, I open a theorization of the listening practices of surveillance to look at how power circulates through sound.

Disrupting normalcy. Artistic interventions and political mobilisation against the neoliberal city (Santiago, Chile, 2019)

ABSTRACT This article explores the role of art interventions in mobilisations unleashed in Chile in October 2019, situating them in the urban fabric of one of the most segregated cities in the world: Santiago. Understood as an uprising against the precarity of life imposed by the neoliberal state, this social explosion devised creative and expressive strategies to disrupt the daily flow of ingrained normative structures, and questioned its longstanding legitimacy in shaping the city’s neoliberal layout. In this text, we first focus on the ways this spring of protest overflowed the genealogies that cross art, politics and public space on the local scene, opening up vanishing points between a certain tradition of politicisation of public art with solid roots in Latin American territory, on the one hand, and a more recent history of aestheticisation of urban protest that finds a crucial milestone in the playful resources of the student protests of 2011, on the other. From an interdisciplinary approach, we examine diverse art interventions that vindicated the urban space as a territory of public expression and political imagination to conceive a new constituent process. In this work, we sustain that these exercises reclaiming citizenship operated as ‘strategies of estrangement’, shedding light on how the neoliberal infrastructure of the city has naturalised inequality, social insecurity and segregation. By way of conclusion, we cross-examine the possibilities that aesthetic experience can offer for social and political resistance against neoliberal normalcy, and a common ground to explore alternative visions of futurity.

Urban paradox and the rise of the neoliberal city: Case study of Lagos, Nigeria

In a bid to actualise the vision of transforming Lagos into Africa’s model megacity and global economic and financial hub, the state government has embarked on and/or supported various urban development projects. Drawing on the theoretical underpinnings of neoliberalism, we argue that governance practices in Lagos are transforming the city in a manner that is paradoxical to the intents of the city’s development plan. This paper, therefore, explores how government practices have shaped the city, and the socio-spatial consequences of the recent Lagos state government-supported developments. Of interest are projects from the Lagos State Development plan (2012–2025) which have resulted in significant spatial displacements – hence the selected case studies of Lekki Free Trade Zone and Badia-East Housing Estate. The study reveals that the Lagos state development policy results in creative destruction largely due to the uncritical embrace of market logic over social logic, thereby entrenching urban discontent and socio-spatial fragmentation across the city.

Neoliberalising the divided city

This paper examines the relation between ethno-nationalism and neoliberalism in urban space. Contrary to common views in urban studies, it argues that the ‘ethno-nationally divided city’ and the ‘neoliberal city’ are not antithetical, but that neoliberal nationalism is a new modality of urban conflict in a globalised world, which reshapes the relation between the local and the global and draws new urban geopolitics. By investigating practices of nation-branding in a divided city, this paper bridges different theoretical fields to shed light on an aspect of urban conflict that has largely been ignored by the literature on nationalism and urban divisions. It also complements existing research on neoliberal nationalism by emphasising the spatial and material aspects of nation-branding, and by showing how it can be used by competing ethno-national leaders to mobilise their communities and extend their control at the national and urban levels. By highlighting processes common to neoliberal and divided cities, this paper draws on recent calls within urban geopolitics to rethink current theoretical categories and labels attributed to cities. It develops this analysis by examining contemporary neoliberal urban policies in Skopje, Macedonia, which have become a new battlefield where interethnic conflicts unfold.