To understand how neoliberalism has affected the urban, we draw primarily on political-economic and Foucauldian perspectives, as these, together, go a long way towards explaining how the neoliberal project has been continually reworked and contested in various spheres of life (Mayer and Künkel, 2012; Peck et al., 2013). The conceptualization of ‘neoliberalization’ proposed by Brenner, Peck and Theodore (cf. their chapter in this Handbook) highlights the instability and evolving nature of neoliberal regimes of accumulation and modes of regulation, as well as the relational interconnections between neoliberalizing spaces – from neighbourhoods, cities and regions all the way to nation states and multinational zones – within a transnational governance system, and is therefore particularly helpful for bringing the neoliberalization of the urban into view (Brenner et al., 2010a; Peck et al., 2012). By focusing on the political dimension of ‘regulatory restructuring’ towards the increasing marketization and commodification of all realms of social life,1 this concept of neoliberalization emphasizes its process-based character, the path-dependency of concrete neoliberal projects, and the role of strategies and that of the state. The preference is, therefore, to speak of neoliberalization instead of neoliberalism – signalling that we are not dealing with a fixed state or condition, but rather with a process of market-oriented regulatory restructuring. This process entails no ‘convergence’ of regulatory outcomes. Rather, neoliberalization projects assume myriad contextually specific forms as they collide with diverse regulatory landscapes inherited from earlier rounds (such as Fordism, national developmentalism, or state socialism). Neoliberalization thus works as a contradictory process of state-authorized market transformation (Peck and Theodore, 2012: 178), pushing endlessly for marketization and privatization, but never able to produce an equilibrium (Peck et al., 2012: 277).
Because of its focus on the state, this perspective is productively complemented by Foucauldian approaches focusing on neoliberal governmentalities (some tensions between these approaches and neo-Marxist ones notwithstanding), as they highlight the ways in which state and corporate actors create and promote particular subjectivities (cf. Mayer and Künkel, 2012; Peck, 2013). By focusing on state intervention in subject formation, governmentality approaches sharpen our understanding of neoliberal urbanism and the evolving relations between different kinds of contestations, political institutions and discourses at all scales, especially when they are complemented by neo-Gramscian perspectives (cf. Davies, 2014).
Rather than seeing a rolling back of state power, both of these conceptualizations of the neoliberal project or regime highlight the active mobilization of state institutions to extend commodification and promote market rule, as well as the (self-)technologies of identification and responsibilization through which state programmes and discourses work. Further, these perspectives imply that there is no single ‘pure’ form or ‘ism', because any neoliberal formation hinges upon contextually specific strategies of regulatory reorganization. Therefore, Brenner et al. (2010a) and Peck (2013) speak of ‘variegated neoliberalism’ to suggest that the systemically uneven character of neoliberal hegemony is best understood by analyzing the ways in which such political projects are embedded in different contexts, whereby political and power structures facilitate the spread of market rule to more and more arenas of social life, and concessions to local culture and/or protest movements have been shaping the neoliberal project in various ‘local third ways’ (Mayer and Künkel, 2012: 10–11).
In this perspective, cities and urban regions are seen as key arenas, in and through which processes of regulatory creative destruction occur (Peck et al., 2013): they are sites of regulatory ‘problems’ (such as poverty, crime, joblessness, etc.); sites of putative regulatory ‘solutions’ (where new policy prototypes are developed and experimented with, and which, if effective, will travel around the world); and sites of contradictions, conflicts and opposition to such projects. While many states in the course of globalization have been fostering competition among cities, they have handed more and more tasks pertaining to economic development, as well as social infrastructures, down to municipalities. As a consequence, the urban dimensions of the 2008 crisis have become particularly pronounced – not just because of the role the subprime mortgage meltdown played in triggering it, but especially because cities have become sites of exacerbated fiscal discipline and deepening enclosure and dispossession, as well as renewed cycles of protest.
In spite of the widespread adoption of neoliberal discourses and policy formulations, there is no such thing as the neoliberal city, just as there is no pure ‘neoliberalism'. Instead, diverse place- and territory-specific patterns of neoliberalization have emerged as the search for policy models and forms of governance has intensified on the urban scale. Such contextually specific patterns have emerged wherever (global, national, regional, local) alliances promote market-oriented solutions to regulatory problems – in housing, transportation, economic development, labour, environment, etc. The outcomes are not only contextually specific (as they depend on local institutional and political legacies and struggles), but also always partial and impure forms and messy hybrids. Though varied, messy, and specific, neoliberalization processes have fundamentally transformed what used to be ‘Fordist’ or ‘Keynesian cities', and urban scholars have sought to construct a ‘moving map’ of neoliberalization (Harvey, 2005: 88; cf. Peck et al., 2013).
While cities under socialism, developmentalism, or Keynesianism were shaped by the respective logics and rationalities of the context they were embedded in, processes of neoliberalization have meanwhile actively been constituted (and contested) across the system of urban(ized) regions. For example, cities were defined under Keynesianism by the ways in which central governments took over – in more or less bureaucratic, patriarchal, or authoritarian fashion – large parts of social reproduction, generating expanded infrastructures of collective consumption. The norms and standardization of the Fordist-Keynesian city, its functional zoning, suburbanization, specific types of urban renewal, and state-underwritten collective consumption marked the urban form and reproduction. With the crisis and dismantling of the Fordist regime, the logics and dynamics characterizing the Fordist-Keynesian city also gradually became eroded and were displaced by the (il)logics of successive phases of neoliberalization, eventually replacing it by a rather different formation.2 First, a roll-back of Fordist institutions and redistributive policies (in most regions of the capitalist West during the 1980s) aimed to address the limits of the Keynesian city. In the following roll-out phase, policy makers sought to ameliorate some of the destructive effects of the dismantling of the Fordist compromise (during the 1990s). Next, urbanization became a global phenomenon in a third round, beginning with the dot.com crash of 2001, as financial markets became globally integrated to debt-finance urban development around the world. The 2008 crash has catapulted us into a ‘post-crisis’ round of austerity urbanism, where policy innovation seems to have slowed and the hegemonic hold of the neoliberal project seems to have weakened. While familiar strategies, such as fast-policy adjustments and experimental reforms, are ‘eclectically stitched together across scales of governance’ (Peck et al., 2013: 1096), the landscapes of urban development and urban governance have been mutated once again through the creatively destructive process of neoliberalization.3
Of foremost importance to urban scholars with a political science focus is the observation that urban policy-making hinges no longer primarily on the institutions of the local elected state and its bureaucrats; instead, it relies ever more on business, real estate, developer and investor interests (all of them increasingly global). Concomitantly, the point of urban policy has become to facilitate the unfettered operation of ‘the market'. Urban services (what is left of them) have become increasingly privatized, and city governments have become the purchasers rather than providers of services, the goal of which has become to activate and entrepreneurialize ‘clients’ (Hackworth, 2007; Geddes, 2011; Theodore and Peck, 2011). The latest round of neoliberalization (where the neoliberal project has been discredited by the 2008 crash and stagnant growth rates that followed, as well as delegitimized by social movements, but still not weakened) is characterized by a devolved form of extreme fiscal constraint, which in the northern countries is projected largely onto sub-national state scales. Here, the municipalities are adversely affected, many of which have developed an advanced form of austerity politics, which not only dismantles Fordist social welfare infrastructures (as during the first roll-back phase), but grinds away at what has survived the repeated rounds of cut-backs and neoliberal restructuring.
Neoliberal urbanism thus denotes a complex configuration involving the local adaptation of neoliberal regulations, such as the enforcing of low wages and insecure working conditions, restrictions of tenants’ as well as workers’ rights, debt as both enabler of continuing habitual levels of consumption and as disciplinary technique. Simultaneously, it also entails specifically spatial adaptations of neoliberal tenets, such as increasingly uneven spatial developments: while attractive areas are ever more spiffed up with expensive, glitzy and securitized developments, poor neighbourhoods are suffering even more cut-backs, surveillance and coercive technologies. The politics of neoliberal urbanism have been characterized by the deliberate valorization of real estate and public space, creative city policies, and punitive (austerity) policies. Both the spatial polarization and social precarization aspects of neoliberal urbanism were only intensified through the measures with which policy managers sought to cope with the fall-out of the 2008 crisis. Drawing on a broad spectrum of empirical work on recent urban restructuring and transformations of urban governance,4 and interpreting these observations through the lenses of the analytical approaches sketched, four dimensions in particular can be distilled as characteristic features in the neoliberalization of cities. In presenting these characteristic policies, strategies and forms of governance, I highlight how each of them has contributed to exacerbating social imbalances and conflicts which, in turn, has transformed the urban polity, as well as available space and resources for urban residents. From the start, the neoliberalization of the urban has been met with resistance and challenging movements; they, too, have continually adjusted and transformed as neoliberal urbanism evolved and morphed, in many regions, into austerity urbanism.
The overarching political strategy continues to be what it has been since the beginning of the neoliberal turn: the pursuit of growth first. That is, urban managers do whatever they can to accelerate investment flows into the city and improve their position in the inter-urban rivalry. Cities that come out on top of this global competition include those whose real estate markets appear as safe-havens to footloose global capital, such as London, New York, Vancouver or Shanghai, or cities whose credit-fuelled construction boom (e.g., Istanbul) or tourism industry (e.g., Barcelona) have driven real estate surges. ‘Aspiring’ cities of the Global South, in their efforts to reach world-class status, have joined this competition with enormous speed and, since growth is not as sluggish in some of these regions, often with significant success (Roy and Ong, 2011).
While not all cities can come out on top, this inter-urban competition has led urban policy makers and planners everywhere to prioritize – unless challenged by mass movements – ‘highest and best use’ as criteria for land use decisions, to roll forward gentrification and create urban enclaves, privatized spaces of elite consumption, and sanitized spaces of social reproduction, thereby transforming the built environment. The pursuit of such growth-chasing projects, heated by international property speculation, has led to exploding property prices. These, in turn, have led to surges in evictions, social displacement, and a new homeless crisis borne out of an affordable housing crisis (in addition to that borne out of the subprime mortgage crisis, as was the case in Spain). In contrast to the global city hotspots which attract international investments and, thereby, contribute to economic growth (if not for all, see e.g., Watt, 2013), most ‘ordinary’ cities now face tightening budgets which prevent urban managers from implementing the types of big project and urban spectacle they used to employ in their efforts to radiate the message of success to investors and tourists alike. Cash-strapped cities – and not merely in the more heavily indebted European South – have turned increasingly to forms of locational politics that rely more on low-cost, symbolic ways to play up the local flavour and attract ‘creative classes’ that help culturally upgrade their brand. That is to say, the search is on for innovative low-budget, especially culture-led efforts to mobilize city space for growth.
There exist, of course, a great variety of cultural branding strategies, as they have become a popular instrument for diverse cities to build structural competitiveness within the global urban network. Different forms of instrumentalization of artistic and creative production occur in small and big, poor and flourishing, northern and southern cities, as everywhere urban managers have become enamoured with image construction, place branding, and city marketing. In the process, artists and other creative workers have been assigned particular roles in urban development strategies to enhance the unique brand of each city, with their presence being understood as particularly conducive to creating ‘indigenous authenticity'. Many cities have put in place specific programmes and subsidies for these groups in order to foster the emergence of spaces for their cultural and sub-cultural activities and productions. In this new appreciation for soft locational assets, the cultural milieus of artists and creatives, as well as oppositional movements and radical squats, have received attention as they mark urban space as attractive, especially where they can be tied into the marketing strategies applied to attract tourists and investors. Radical squats or self-managed social centres are, thus, frequently seen as charging their environment with cultural capital which, in the scheme of ‘creative city’ policy, then becomes transformed by investors into economic capital. Formerly squatted buildings, open spaces and other ‘biotopes', which anarchists spiffed up or precarious artists made interesting, have become harnessed by clever city officials and (real estate) capital as branding assets that contribute to the image of ‘cool cities’ or ‘happening places’ (cf. Mayer, 2013, 2016a). Yet, as such strategies tend to upgrade and valorize the spaces made attractive by artists, squatters, or alternative or (sub-)cultural interim users, they tend to lead to the further displacing or marginalizing of groups that lack symbolic cultural resources, thus triggering their protest.
The neoliberalization of cities has also been defined by their adoption of entrepreneurial forms of governance in ever more policy areas, where they make more and more use of presumably more efficient business models and privatized forms of governance. This trend has presciently been described by Harvey (1989) for the early stage of neoliberalization as privatized governance and public-private partnerships, outsourcing and localization of risk, and an orientation to speculative investment, along with the commodification of place and place assets. Since then, municipalities have thoroughly internalized such entrepreneurial logics, aided along the way by disseminators of policy intelligence, such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization, or Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (cf. Theodore and Peck, 2011). Strategies such as contracting-out and task- and project-driven initiatives (such as developing a particular part of town, upscale uses for waterfronts, ‘science cities', and other projects suggested by the growth first imperative, such as competing for mega-events such as the Olympics, World Cups, International Building Exhibits, etc.), have become routinized manoeuvres in governance. Under conditions of slow growth, of course, these strategies can provide sustained competitive advantage only for a few cities; hence we see municipal treasurers, becoming progressively wary of failed projects and speculation ruins, to instead increasingly favour more small-scale regeneration efforts. Where funding streams from superior levels of government have dried, and local governments need to do more with less, cities have increasingly turned to ‘the markets’ – and not just for funding speculative projects, but to fund basic infrastructure as well. In this process, urban governance structures have become more and more financialized.
According to Peck (2014b: 400), these processes of entrepreneurialization and financialization signal not merely a transition from one mode of urban governance to another, but also a transformation in inter-urban relations, as new forms of regulation have become institutionalized. Already in the early stages of neoliberalization, mayors and their partners from the business sector (often bypassing council chambers) began to set up special agencies to deliver target-driven initiatives that focus on specific concrete objectives. In contrast to the previous Keynesian mode of governance – which generally used to secure the consent of the governed through tripartistic, corporate and long-term designs – these novel modes of regulation, while less transparent and often not democratically legitimated, produce hegemony (if at all) by making flexible, small, and constantly changing concessions to particular groups, primarily to middle-class-based and upwardly mobile groups. This trend towards projects has transformed municipal planning, where informal and cooperative procedures have gained new significance. Such cooperative planning procedures now involve both participatory citizens and (global) developers, along with the municipality's political and administrative representatives, but do not always succeed in resolving conflicts over planned development or those about in/exclusion and representation (cf. Swyngedouw et al., 2002; Miller, 2007; Purcell, 2009). In fact, in this increasingly ad hoc and informalized political process, out-of-town investors, global developers and corporate flippers have come to play ever-stronger roles in these procedures, although it has been local politics that, by adopting entrepreneurial strategies, has allowed them this role. At the same time, the changed urban planning processes also provide new openings for small and big political resistances ‘by enacting countless dividing lines in the city’ (Nicholls and Uitermark, 2016: 1; Rinn, 2016).
These entrepreneurial governance strategies, their lack of public transparency, and their strengthening of the hand of outside investors, have given rise to all kinds of struggles over the (erosion of) representative democracy and exclusion of ‘expendable’ groups from the city. From the ‘real democracy’ demands of Madrid's Indignados, to resistance against the plans for Istanbul's Gezi Park, to countless urban campaigns against the undemocratic ways in which large urban infrastructure projects would get pushed through, all these struggles contested the underlying shift towards entrepreneurial urban governance. Besides such citizens’ protests against opaque decision-making, expediting projects favoured by global developers or corporations, there have also been growing mobilizations of those who are deemed superfluous or do not conform to the standards of international investors now shaping the urban environment: they challenge how these strategies exclude them from the ‘right to the city’ (cf. Brenner et al., 2012; Smith and McQuarrie, 2012; Samara et al., 2013).
Intensified privatization of state assets and public infrastructures, as well as of services (through outsourcing), is another key feature of neoliberal urbanism, which keeps being pushed to new levels. Privatization of the local public sector involves both destructive and creative moments – with the elimination of public monopolies for municipal services, such as utilities, sanitation or mass transit an example of the former, and the creation of new markets for service delivery and infrastructure maintenance a case of the latter. These processes of privatization have not only transformed the traditional relation and boundary between the public and private spheres, as they have implied not just the rolling-back and reorganization of the socially-oriented institutions of the public sector; rather, as collective infrastructures – from public transport and utilities to social housing – are now exposed to the market, privatization has actually turned into financialization (cf. Hodkinson, 2012; Rolnik, 2013). In this raiding of public coffers, often by government-sponsored private companies, urban resources, public infrastructures and services have been turned into options for expanded capital accumulation by dispossession (cf. Merrifield, 2013). For US cities, Peck and Whiteside (2016: 9) conclude that ‘[i]nfrastructure provision, which was integrated and socialized under Keynesian regulation, has since been extensively “unbundled”, rated for “return”, and financialized, in a manner that shifts the locus of power toward bond market networks and away from growth-machine coalitions per se'.
The privatization of one particular state asset has had particularly palpable effects for urban land: as the extortion of maximal land rent works best through dedicating more and more private spaces to elite consumption, cities have intensified the privatization of public land and public areas. Privatizing train stations or (quasi-public) shopping malls has meant limiting access to and/or making the use of collective infrastructures more expensive. Whole urban centres – from Paris, Manhattan and London to Singapore and Hong Kong – have become, in the words of the Financial Times, ‘exclusive citadels of the elites'. ‘[T]he middle classes and small companies are falling victim to class-cleansing. Global cities are becoming patrician ghettos’ (Kuper, 2013).
These enclosure strategies have triggered various contestations, from protests against rent increases, to occupations of social centres. Occasionally, situationist-inspired guerrilla and other actions in the semi-public privatized spaces of surveillance and consumption have responded to privatization processes impinging on public spaces (cf. Eick and Briken, 2014). And, in some instances, movements have forced municipalities to re-communalize water and/or energy utilities with popular referenda, but this has occurred only sporadically (cf. Becker et al., 2015).
Where the public sector has not yet been (fully) privatized – when, for example, health care, child care, schools or universities are still in the public sector – tight city budgets have been used as justification for keeping public employees’ wages stagnant. Where municipalities and provincial governments have frozen or cut back expenditures and wages, this has triggered waves of protest from state employees from Wisconsin to Madrid and Germany (Buhle and Buhle, 2012; Streeck, 2015; Martinez, 2016), as well as protests against cut-backs of public infrastructures, services, schools and universities. But where credit-rated cities have to find funding for public education, health care systems, or municipally managed utilities on the financial markets, their employees face growing risks of losing their jobs altogether, and residents stand to lose what used to be basic services (cf. Peck, 2012, 2014b).
Particularly combustible situations have been generated where deprivation and exclusion, deepened through these enclosure strategies, have been accompanied with punitive state measures and police brutality, manifest as part of a further (fourth) characteristic feature of neoliberal urbanism.
Finally, the tool-kit for dealing with the intensifying social polarization has been renewed. Social and socio-spatial polarization have been intensifying ever since the onset of neoliberal urbanism. Concomitantly, the numbers of vulnerable groups and their grievances have been exploding due to the deregulation and flexibilization of labour markets, welfare retrenchment, and the increase of low-wage and informal sectors that employ growing sections of the (racialized) ‘precariat’ and growing numbers of migrants, i.e., growing and differentiating sets of precarious, often paperless workers (cf. McNevin, 2006; Wacquant, 2009; Beckett and Herbert, 2011). In order to address the territorial concentration of what became termed ‘social exclusion’ (Mayer, 2003: 114), a tool-kit was invented during the roll-out phase of neoliberalization that consisted primarily of area-based programmes, i.e., a mix of neighbourhood, revitalization and activation programmes that were to stop the presumed downward spirals in ‘blighted’ or so-called ‘problem neighbourhoods'. These programmes have, meanwhile, been severely curtailed and superseded by a two-pronged policy. Its prongs are, on the one hand, attrition and displacement policies and, on the other, more benign programmes designed to incorporate select impoverished groups and areas into upgrading efforts. We find this policy differentiation in cities of the Global North and South, although the focus here is on how the processes work in Northern cities (cf. Roy, 2013; and various chapters in Samara et al., 2013; and Wang et al., 2016, for analogous processes of differentiated inclusion, simultaneous eviction and resettlement, dispossession and patronage). Both in terms of geographies and social groups, the effects of these policies contribute towards sharpening polarization: policies addressing upgradable areas end up generating more uneven socio-spatial development, while policies differentially targeting groups and individuals divide the citizenry according to ascribed risk and credit worthiness.
The ‘benign’ prong frequently gets applied to decaying social housing districts or (ex-)industrial areas which are, due to changing circumstances, deemed to have some development potential. Such previously stigmatized ‘problematic’ districts have, in the recent past, become locations for urban spectacles and (development) projects, with city managers claiming that such upgrading strategies will benefit the residents of these areas. While not directly displacing poor or unemployed residents with immediate force, such programmes still result in not only ‘revitalizing’ and upgrading such blighted neighbourhoods, but also inducing a gradual residential shift. For example, in the de-industrialized, but CBD-near district of Hamburg-Wilhelmsburg in Germany, the city charged urban development corporations to implement an International Building Exhibit and a Garden Show, thus achieving an upscale transformation by means of exhibitions and festivals (cf. Birke et al., 2015); while in the run-down district of the Bronx in New York, the local state encouraged the building of new luxury hotels when the booming real estate market of Manhattan made adjacent blighted boroughs attractive for upscale residents and tourists. Social mix policies constitute further means that are widely (re-)adopted by city governments across Europe and North America to tackle urban deprivation. While widely praised for ‘breaking up concentrations of poverty and providing neighbourhoods with a middle-class voice’ (Bridge et al., 2014: 1133), empirical research has shown varied results. As with US efforts to reform public housing (cf. Chaskin, 2013), such measures of benign incorporation are today strategically employed in order to undergird efforts to attract growth, investors, creative professionals and tourists. They ‘work’ only where valorization processes, i.e., a rise in property values and investments, are promising. And once they ‘succeed’ – frequently by even marketing the ‘wild urbanism’ and exploiting the rough working-class milieu or chic ‘indigenous authenticity’ – in attracting the desired clientele, the indigenous poor and vulnerable populations are eventually forced out (Mayer, 2008: 324–325; Vitale, 2010).
However, the prong that is used far more widely under conditions of austerity urbanism consists exclusively of repressive and criminalizing measures and instruments. It entails punitive strategies that tend to criminalize unwanted behaviours and groups, as well as attrition and displacement policies that evict and banish the poor, pushing them to further outskirts or into invisible interstices of blight within the urban perimeter.5 The intricate causal relationship between the gentrification-led restructuring of city centres and inner-city housing markets through new and often gated development projects, the clearance of public housing (e.g., Elmer and Dening, 2016), elimination of protections of tenants, and expulsion of disadvantaged places, milieus and social groups, is everywhere obfuscated in new discourses of (in)securitization and self-responsibilization (cf. Smith, 2002).
Many communities of colour, informal workers, homeless people, the undocumented, and increasingly new austerity victims, as well as protest movements and urban ‘rioters', are primarily exposed to this repressive side of neoliberal politics: stricter laws, tougher policing and more disenfranchisement. As precious central urban space plays such a key role in inter-urban competition, urban policy makers seek to cleanse it of whatever might diminish its exchange value or might disrupt the exclusive commerce and consumption, or the tourism that is supposed to take place here (cf. Vitale, 2010; Beckett and Herbert, 2011; Eick and Briken, 2014, esp. Section III: Policing the Urban Battleground).
Thus, traditionally vulnerable groups – the ones Wacquant (2008) labelled as ‘urban outcasts’ and groups unwanted in the core retail districts, such as street youth or panhandlers – are surveyed, controlled, or banished. Moreover, the new austerity victims, who are increasingly losing out in both labour and housing markets, confront this part of the tool-kit as well: more extensive surveillance, more aggressive policing, and generally more stigmatizing, repressive and expelling treatment. Feher (2015) describes increasingly brutal ways of ‘disposing of the discredited’ that have become characteristic of neoliberal governance. These measures to ‘disappear’ people without assets, which are of no use to austere neoliberalism, range from making them statistically invisible, via harassing them ‘to death', all the way to pushing them out of or not letting them into gated Europe, North America, or Australia.
In some ways, ailing municipalities and cities teetering on the brink of bankruptcy are at the forefront of systemic austerity, as they engage in the most drastic cutbacks in public infrastructure. Not just in the US, where cities can actually file for bankruptcy,6 or in debt-ridden Southern Europe, but also in still-stable Germany, the number of heavily indebted cities has exploded, and some municipalities have gone broke (Holtkamp and Kuhlmann, 2012). Often, municipal fiscal crises are used to install so-called (unelected) ‘emergency managers’ who can rule with unrestricted authority over the urban region for which fiscal emergency has been declared. Aside from cutting basic services, these (state-imposed) managers also pass laws and decrees that suspend essential political and social rights (Peck, 2014a; Peck and Whiteside, 2015; Schipper and Schönig, 2016). Rather than receiving support from supra-local levels of government, distressed cities are requested to shoulder even more burdens, responsibilities and deficits, as higher state levels are shifting these downward. Given their shrinking room to manoeuvre in a state of continuous market surveillance, most of these cities attempt to tackle the offloaded social and ecological ‘externalities’ with the very same methods of outsourcing, deregulation and privatization of public services and social supports which have already proven to incapacitate the state, thereby burdening those at the bottom and compounding their economic marginalization with state abandonment (Peck, 2012: 650–651).
All of these currently popular instruments and policies have implications for the ways in which urban resistance has formed, and they structure oppositional groups’ room to manoeuvre. While creative city policies and some of the ‘benign’ integrative measures may open up new space and resources for action and sustenance for some grassroots initiatives, the expanded austerity and criminalization policies not only exacerbate social polarization, but also work to restrict and suffocate protest movements of more vulnerable urban residents. The expansion of stop and frisk measures, identity controls, and surveillance technologies has particularly affected people of colour and migrant groups, especially their youth. But this disciplinary, repressive side of neoliberal urbanism is also looming larger in the authorities’ response to political, militant, and riotous behaviour.
In sum, neoliberal urbanism denotes a complex configuration, where the widespread adoption of neoliberal discourses and policy formulations is mutating the landscapes of urban development and urban governance (Peck et al., 2013: 1092). While it manifests in different nationally and locally specific forms, and also takes on different socio-spatial contours, this ‘moving map of neoliberalization’ (Harvey, 2005: 88) contrasts markedly with previous urban constellations and exerts rather different influences and constraints on contemporary contestations. In a concluding section, the dynamics and mutual influences of neoliberal urbanism and its resistance are briefly delineated.
A broad spectrum of urban collective actions – from well-organized campaigns and social movement actions to violent uprisings – has co-evolved with and against the neoliberalization of cities. The delineated manifestations of neoliberal urbanism have sometimes triggered protest directly, but they also affect resistance through the way they (re)shape political opportunity structures. In particular, the latest round of neoliberalization of the urban, which has imposed austerity on already lean urban governments, has sparked heretofore unseen levels of protest – both from the left and the right, as well as new middle-class-based activism that emerged to defend against new risks (Giugni and Grasso, 2015; Peterson et al., 2015; Ancelovici et al., 2016). Research exploring the complex and contradictory forms of urban resistance that have arisen in response to this latest round of neoliberalization, which needs to take account of both its progressive, emancipatory and regressive, right-wing variants, is still only beginning to emerge.
This brief concluding section can merely summarize some findings from the research to date on relations between the dynamics of urban neoliberalization and urban protests of recent decades that have been motivated by social justice (rather than those motivated by, for example, religious fundamentalism or ideals of purity of blood or nation). It highlights how the dynamics and tensions inherent to neoliberal urbanism have generated more conflict and contestation involving a more heterogeneous group of affected subjects.
Leitner et al. (2007: 320f) distinguished between different trajectories that the articulation of contestations and neoliberalisms can follow. First, in the engagement trajectory, non-neoliberal interests opt for or see no alternative to cooperation with neoliberal corporate and institutional power. Second, in the opposition trajectory, movements challenge the neoliberal agenda in myriad different ways, illustrated by the case studies collected in their book. A third trajectory operates through alternative knowledge production, whereas a fourth trajectory – disengagement – develops spaces within which alternative practices can be pursued, such as nonmarket forms of economic organization and everyday livelihoods. Given ‘the multitude of contestations … and of trajectories through which contestations rub up against neoliberalism, it is little wonder that the effectiveness of contestation has become such an intensely debated issue’ (Leitner et al., 2007: 322). Since this diagnosis, the multitude of trajectories, as well as that of theorizations about them, has only grown.
A modicum of consensus among the theorizations may be claimed, though, about the broad ways in which neoliberal urbanism has redefined the ground for urban movements. For one, today's urban movements confront additional targets and adversaries beyond city politicians, such as unelected technocrats (especially financial technocrats), as well as global investors and developers, who are behind the financialization of property and housing markets and pushing for big development projects. Some of these actors, who are responsible for what locals perceive as problematic development, are very difficult to target. Unlike the local growth machines and business-dominated regimes attacked in the past, the banking institutions responsible today are increasingly headquartered in other countries (Fainstein, 2016: 1505). For another, movements now mobilize around a panoply of new issues, such as privatizations and cuts (to education, child care, social services and pensions), evictions, rising poverty and homelessness, as well as racist anti-refugee populism and media campaigns against ‘others', who are painted as having been ‘living beyond their means'. In addition, many movements witness de-democratization processes in various spheres, as well as suspension of civil rights, which increasingly affect their own practice, while they face more and new forms of repression.7 Also, growing numbers of movement organizations lose state funding or legal status as recognized associations, or lose public support, as they are criminalized – and thereby suffer from shrinking resources, opportunities and open spaces for their activities. On the other hand, the movement terrain has been altered as it has expanded with new actors who mobilize around these restrictive measures and scandalize the deprivation of rights and resources imposed on unwanted or ‘disposable’ groups. Human rights groups, solidarity initiatives, refugee support groups and scores of more or less spontaneous actions have drawn on populations that used to be distant from urban activism.
As the recent austerity cuts have been hitting not only the traditionally disadvantaged, but increasingly youth, students, creatives, and more segments of the middle class, the punitive side of neoliberal urbanism has come to be experienced by growing numbers of different, formerly not precarious groups in so-called first-world cities. Newly asset-less victims of austerity – such as the newly-evicted due to foreclosures, people with college degrees but without (commensurate) employment and the newly-indebted – have swelled the ranks of the urban disenfranchised, and many have joined mobilizations against neoliberal urbanism (Mayer, 2016b, cf. della Porta, 2015; Mayer et al., 2016).
What appears, on the one hand, to be a huge achievement when compared to earlier waves of urban movements – that a larger number of different groups from across the social spectrum are involved in anti-austerity struggles and movements for a more just city – presents, on the other hand, unfamiliar and tough challenges, because the heterogeneity of backgrounds, socializations, and interests creates tensions and frictions in collaborating. While neoliberal urbanism has produced a growing and differentiated spectrum of ‘discredited’ groups, these do not, in spite of their shared expulsion or disenfranchisement, automatically share positionalities and interests. The stratification within the protest camp has become complex and capillary, going far beyond the cleavage between the ‘truly disadvantaged’ and comparatively privileged movement groups (‘privileged’ because they may hold some leverage within neoliberal urbanism as part of sub-cultural scenes or creative milieus possessing assets that are potentially marketable in the context of inter-urban rivalry over cultural branding). While the latter may sometimes still receive concessions or offers for incorporation, the ‘urban outcasts’ face – if not deaf ears – more restrictions, surveillance, and aggressive policing than their potential allies. Such stigmatizing and repressive treatment exacerbates their disenfranchisement and also deepens the divides and oppositions among the different groups locked out of or exploited by the neoliberal city and dispossessed in its crisis management. Even before state agencies’ differentiating repressive treatment of the ‘disposable', there is no natural unity among this growing vulnerable population. Different homeless groups and groups of undocumented, the welfare dependent, de-industrialized, informal and low-wage workers, various racialized groups, or migrant youth have extremely divergent experiences and each face widely different and specific challenges. These different positions and concomitant needs pose real hurdles for a coming together in joint struggles.
But all of these traditionally and newly asset-less groups are present in the heterogeneous new movements, their different socializations, cultural backgrounds, and political ideas frequently clashing, especially when the assemblies of the squares reached out into neighbourhoods, schools, hospitals, and to direct actions at banks and protests around political institutions. This clashing and rubbing up against each other, however, is the first step in overcoming the hurdles and distances that exist between the different groups neoliberal urbanism has harmed and, increasingly, also mobilized – each with their own organizing potential and specific challenges. This first step provides the opportunity for the different constituencies to get to know and respect each other, overcome reservations about each other's lifestyles and motivations, and for seasoned political activists to reconfigure their assumptions about how to build and grow movements adequate to the historical situation.
On the basis of this first, ‘on the ground’ step, varied localized joint struggles will, however, need to become more than the sum of their parts. This, in any case, is the implication of the conceptualization which Brenner et al. (2010b) have developed about the rise – as well as the overcoming – of neoliberalization. The authors distinguished three dimensions of neoliberalization processes corresponding roughly to the decades in which neoliberalization shifted from ‘disarticulated’ to ‘deep(ening)': regulatory experiments (1970s), interjurisdictional policy transfers (1980s) and, finally, transnational rule regimes (1990s), emphasizing that the trajectories of neoliberalization unfold not only within distinct (post-Keynesian, post-developmentalist or post-socialist) local fields, but also within extra-local, inter-urban and transnational fields of power.
Counter-neoliberal pathways and scenarios are correspondingly conceived as also following these three dimensions of regulatory restructuring, but progressively pushing back and replacing the neoliberal rule regimes. This has entailed actions ranging from experiments across dispersed, disarticulated contexts at local, regional and national scales, via a thickening of networks of policy transfer based upon alternatives to market rule, all the way to ‘deep socialization’ dismantling and replacing neoliberal rule regimes by constructing alternative, market-restraining, socializing frameworks for macro-spatial regulatory organization, and characterized by radical democratization of decision-making and allocation capacities at all spatial scales (Brenner et al., 2010b: 333–342).
Building on this analysis, Peck et al. (2012: 285) argue that ‘the construction of counterneoliberalizing systems of policy transfer, whether among social movements, cities, regions or states, represents a major step forward for progressive activists and policy makers. But in the absence of a plausible vision for an alternative global rule regime, such networks are likely to remain interstitial, mere irritants to the global machinery of neoliberalization, rather than transformative threats to its hegemonic influence.’ This implies that only when we build new forms of inter-urban politics, when we join forces across the uneven map of neoliberalization, will there be a chance to break with the pattern of neoliberal urbanism. As yet, most of the urban mobilizations are still (dis)articulated ‘in fragments', while the combined forces of economic austerity and state repression circumscribe their terrain, hampering and limiting any scale-jumping efforts by the movements (Peck et al., 2013: 1095). But the movements’ success will be measured not only by their local victories, because local successes risk falling into the ‘local trap’ if they do not manage to link up through horizontal networks and scale up to higher state levels. Their success is, thus, crucially measured by their contributions towards building the new rules of the supra-local game. This will require that the dispersed sites of protest forge a broader and inter-urban anti-neoliberal front, and that their networking across local alternatives become more effectively articulated with a strategic fight for those new rules of the extra-local game (Peck, 2013: 24).
In this multi-scalar struggle, movements will need to simultaneously sort out how to turn local solidarity practices into counter-neoliberal struggles while building movement-to-movement solidarity across the uneven urban landscapes, politicizing anti-eviction and other emergency support while pushing the state – on all scales – to protect rather than punish society with austerity policies.
1. They conceive neoliberalization as one among several tendencies of regulatory change that have been unleashed across the global capitalist system since the 1970s, and describe as its three major features: (1) prioritizing market-based or market-oriented responses to regulatory problems; (2) striving to intensify commodification in all realms of social life; and (3) increasingly mobilizing financial instruments to open up new arenas for capitalist profit-making.
2. In their search to identify the logic of a growth model and regulatory regime that might succeed the Keynesian-Fordist one that had reached its limits, scholars were initially uncertain how to label the emerging formation and assess its capacity to provide societal coherence and (however temporary) stability. They spoke of ‘post-Fordism’ (Jessop, 2001), the ‘post-Fordist-workfarist society’ (Keil, 2002) and the post-Fordist city (Mayer, 1994), before making out the successor regime as driven by the (il)logic of the neoliberal project, continuing to debate its sustainability to this day.
3. These phases – which roughly, but not universally, correspond to the decades indicated – are well described in Brenner et al. (2010b). The correspondences between these phases and respective urban movements are presented in Mayer (2012: 65–69, 2013: 6–10).
4. See, for example, Aalbers (2013); Brenner and Theodore (2002); Cartier (2012); Clement and Kanai (2015); Derossett (2014); Geddes (2011); Hackworth (2007); He and Wu (2009); Hourani and Kanna (2014); Osterlynck and Gonzáles (2013); Park et al. (2011); Peck (2012); Schipper (2014); Theodore and Peck (2011); Tulumello (2016); Wang et al. (2016); Weber (2002).
5. Beier (2015: 6) provides examples from around the world of a continuous push of resource-poor people from the centre to peripheries: Neo-Haussmannian projects such as the construction of the Royal Avenue in the medina of Casablanca, the resettlement of informal settlements in South Africa and Brazil in the context of mega-events such as the FIFA World Cup, and the demolition of run-down council estates in the southern city centre of London.
7. For example, the Spanish safety law ‘La Ley Mordaza’ was passed in July 2015 to clamp down on the assambleas, eviction blockades, and protests near government institutions, i.e., the forms of activism that had been characteristic of the anti-austerity and real democracy movements sweeping across Spanish cities. Demonstrators participating in unauthorized protests near ‘sensitive’ locations can now be fined with sums as high as 600,000 Euros (Minder, 2015).
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