New Urban Politics Research Articles

New urban politics as post-politics of schooling marketization and distribution in entrepreneurial Chinese cities

ABSTRACT The inadequacy of urban scale in analyzing school system restructuring has generated criticism. Thus, this study interprets school system restructuring as a locally embodied process that produces variegated externalities for local people. This interpretation shifts the position of school system restructuring within the debate on new urban politics (NUP). Following the post-democratic understanding of NUP, we propose three research questions. Firstly, how does school system restructuring produce a new benefit structure that potentially causes dissent from the local society? Secondly, how do different social forces shape the restructuring? Thirdly, how can consensus on the restructuring be reached? We answer by using China as a case study. China has undergone a shift from a public school system to a mixed provision-regulation regime since the 1990s. The comparative analysis of two Chinese cities illustrates the differences in the school system restructuring embedded in local entrepreneurial strategy and the crucial role of the local state in facilitating the restructuring. In Chengdu, school system restructuring has resulted in dissent from middle class households that have the power to reshape the restructuring. In Mianyang, the school system restructuring disadvantaged the working class who was persuaded by the municipality’s discursive strategy to accept the restructuring.

Trans-urban Networks of Learning, Mega Events and Policy Tourism

This paper argues for a rethinking of our understanding of what and where go into the ‘urban’ in the New Urban Politics (NUP). It contends that these issues have always been more complex, complicated and, most importantly, contested than has sometimes appeared to be the case in the literature. Using the example of one trans-urban policy learning network—that around the city of Manchester’s bids for the Olympic and Commonwealth Games—the paper makes the case for taking seriously the politics around comparison and referencing in making possible the NUP. It argues that there is a need to study the circuits, networks and webs in and through which urban knowledge and learning are constituted and moved around, and that often underpin the territorial outcomes that have been the traditional focus of scholars working on the NUP.

Commentary. The New Urban Politics Thesis

Birthed by and in turn giving substantive content to Harvey’s historical materialist manifesto for urban studies, it is possible to think of the New Urban Politics (NUP) thesis as in many ways a talented sibling carrying the hopes and aspirations of an expectant parent. Harvey’s mission of course was to persuade urban scholars that there existed an inescapable embroilment of urban processes in capitalism’s histories and geographies; cities were both constituted by and in turn were constitutive of, capitalism and its trajectories. The contribution of the NUP thesis was to mobilise this analytical framework to make sense of epochal transformations in the governance of the contemporary capitalist city and therein to provide insights into the ways in which, at this historical moment, Western cities might be apprehended as key sites in the struggle over the division of the national product. In part, the popularisation of the NUP thesis can be accounted for by the worldly dramas which unfolded as they did. In the early 1970s, the mileu in which modern Western cities existed was changing rapidly; the Fordist Keynesian compromise which had underpinned 30 years of economic growth and improved standards of living for all had collapsed. Subsequently, the assault on welfare systems wrought by ascendant rightist governments began and local governments came to recognise the full import of their diminished capacity to serve as managers, administers and adjudicators of the distribution of items of collection consumption. Meanwhile, the growing footlooseness and transnational ambitions of capital served to create a new set of expectations of and burdens on cities who—whether they sought it or not—were now charged with the responsibility of spearheading national accumulation strategies. Urban fortunes and futures would increasingly be defined by the capacity of cities to register the new zeitgeist, digest its meaning and implications, and define and enact a new modus operandus.

The New Urban Politics as a Politics of Carbon Control

The new urban politics (NUP) literature has helped to draw attention to a new generation of entrepreneurial urban regimes involved in the competition to attract investment to cities. Interurban competition often had negative environmental consequences for the urban living place. Yet knowledge of the environment was not very central to understanding the NUP. Entrepreneurial urban regimes today are struggling to deal with climate change and reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon reduction strategies could have profound implications for interurban competition and the politics of urban development. This paper explores the rise of a distinctive low-carbon urban polity—carbon control—and examines its potential ramifications for a new environmental politics of urban development (NEPUD). The NEPUD signals the growing centrality of carbon control in discourses, strategies and struggles around urban development. Using examples from cities in the US and Europe, the paper examines how these new environmental policy considerations are being mainstreamed in urban development politics. Alongside competitiveness, the management of carbon emissions represents a new yet at the same time contestable mode of calculation in urban governance.

The politics of urban entrepreneurialism in Glasgow

North American literature on the changing role of the local state these past two decades has been dominated by the view of a transition from urban managerialism to urban entrepreneurialism. Associated with the transition has been the emergence of a New Urban Politics (NUP). Within a political economy framework. the NUP has been rooted in the material redistributive effects of the transition. This paper explores the character of this NUP, as experienced by one British city, and highlights some fundamental differences with the established political economy reading. Our argument, based upon the city of Glasgow, draws attention to two distinctive features. First, the institutional structure of urban governance in Glasgow differs from that of cities in the United States. In Glasgow, it has been the Left controlled local Council which has orchestrated the transition to entrepreneurialism, rather than the North American model of a coalition between local capital and the local state. Secondly, the transition in Glasgow has been marked not by a significant transfer of local state revenue from service provision to local economic development, but by a symbolic reorientation of the local state as marked by the central importance of large place marketing hallmark events. These events represent the city in ways which differ from traditional ‘self’ identities. Consequently, the transition has evoked a political response which has focused upon the symbolic posturing of the local state rather than the material consequences of the shift. In focusing upon local identity, the politics of urban entrepreneurialism in Glasgow points to a dimension of conflict which has received inadequate treatment in accounts of the NUP to date.