Extracting Value from the City: Neoliberalism and Urban Redevelopment

How do states make the built environment more flexible and responsive to the investment criteria of real estate capital? Spatial policies, such as urban renewal funding for slum clearance or contemporary financial incentives, depend on discursive practices that stigmatize properties targeted for demolition and redevelopment. These policies and practices have become increasingly neoliberalized. They have further distanced themselves from those “long turnover” parts of the city where redevelopment needs are great but where the probability of private investment and value extraction is slight. They have become more entwined in global financial markets seeking short–term returns from subsidized property investments. They have shifted their emphasis from compromised use values (embodied in the paternalistic notion of “blight”) to diminished exchange values (embodied in the notion of “obsolescence”). I argue that obsolescence has become a neoliberal alibi for creative destruction and, therefore, an important component in contemporary processes of spatialized capital accumulation.     

Archaeology from below

Abstract

This paper identifies and discusses two contrasting approaches to field archaeology in contemporary Britain. The dominant approach is that of ‘official archaeology’ rooted in professional rescue (or contract) work and represented by bodies such as English Heritage, county archaeology units and the Institute of Field Archaeologists. This ‘archaeology from above’ threatens alternative approaches to fieldwork, since state legislation and other bureaucratic controls are being used to restrict access to archaeology to an elite of self-accredited practitioners, and a persuasive and sophisticated ideology of heritage ‘protection’ and professional ‘standards’ is being deployed to legitimize this policy. This attempt to universalize the practices of professional rescue archaeology is academically incoherent and politically undemocratic. An alternative ‘archaeology from below’ is proposed in which fieldwork is rooted in the community, open to volunteer contributions, organised in a non-exclusive, non-hierarchical way, and dedicated to a research agenda in which material, methods and interpretation are allowed to interact. These points are illustrated with detailed references to the experience of ‘democratic archaeology’ on the author's project at Sedgeford in northwest Norfolk in 1996–98.     

Learning from popular culture: Interpretation,visitors and critique

Abstract

The publication of Frank McCourt's autobiographical novel, Angela's Ashes in 1996 has sharply focused attention upon a sense of place and heritage identity of the Irish town of Limerick. It has both bolstered a local civic self‐conscious identity and spawned ‘McCourt tourism’. On the other hand it has provoked local controversy by revealing the existence of a number of hitherto largely concealed heritage dissonances.

The historical vision of the interwar period that it vividly portrays is a working‐class experience of poverty, poor housing, and absence of facilities compounded by an indifference of the local contemporary political and clerical establishment. There is a geography of McCourt's Limerick, much of which is still extant, composed of row housing, docks, gas works, public houses, Victorian churches and the like that is a different Limerick to the medieval conserved monuments of English Town or the stately residences of the Georgian Newtown (as portrayed in the earlier novels of Kate O'Brien). Such an image contrasts not only with the tourism image projected externally but more significantly with much of the received interpretation of the post‐independence Irish State that was until recently an almost unchallenged dominant ideology.

The catalytic impact of a single novel upon a town's self‐identity raises more general issues about the role of the novel in the shaping, revision and essential instability of heritage messages through time, as well as the management of disagreeable or contradictory elements in a local past through a polysemic and essentially multilayered heritage.     

Secession of municipalities and economies of scale: Evidence from Brazil

In the 1990s, there was a growing process of administrative decentralization that culminated in the creation of 1,016 new municipalities in Brazil. The aim of this paper is to verify the impact of the municipal secessions on the public expenditures and its association with economies of scale. Based on a Differences‐in‐Differences methodology, the obtained set of evidence indicates that those municipalities that underwent a secession process increased their per capita capital expenditures by 14.7 percent. In addition, we show evidence that strongly suggests that this increase in expenses can be explained by a reduction in economies of scale and rent‐seeking behavior.     

Immigrants,Morality and Neoliberalism

This article critiques the liberal and state‐centred view of morality and governance as applied to immigrants. It argues that the alternative perspective provided by some moral philosophers and political theorists can be combined with analysis of the current global economic and political order to outline a framework for protecting the welfare and human rights of the immigrants. It also argues that this framework brings out the commonality of interests of workers in host countries and immigrants in re‐empowering the state to provide for the comprehensive social security that the neoliberal state has trashed.     

Rhetoric and pragmatics in Ulysses: how Joyce invented Twitter

Particularly upon their first appearance, Twitter and James Joyce’s unique style had to face similarly infamous charges in that they were both accused of slowly but inexorably corrupting the English language. In fact, the linguistic practices – stylemes in the case of Ulysses – breeding such corruption are often the same: clippings, abbreviations, the dropping out of inflexional endings, omissions, ellipses, the overabundance of acronyms, creative compound words and blends, symbolisations and onomatopoeias, lexicalisations of (often) vernacular pronunciations. This paper sets out to investigate these features, their rhetorical effect and pragmatic function in order to explore the epistemological, perceptive and social context which made it possible a hundred years ago for an Irish modernist to anticipate how English was to be used on today’s social media and on Twitter in particular.     

Constructing the border from below: Narratives from the Congolese-Rwandan state boundary

This article is about the simultaneous subversion and perpetuation of political borders ‘from below’. Using the state boundary between the cities of Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Gisenyi in Rwanda as a case study, this article shows how people make sense of their border-related social world. By analyzing everyday narratives and practices of people who live on both sides of the border, this article reveals popular geopolitics at work and demonstrates the inchoate character surrounding the idea of ‘the border’. Border talk is examined in key narratives and narrative clusters to emphasize the primacy of certain thematic plots and to reveal which aspects of the border people prioritize and how they attribute meaning to the idea of the border. Views of the border ranging from a desired barrier against the demonized ‘other,’ and as a means of exclusion, to its conception as an institution that may be in need of reform but is essential to economic survival, make clear that approaching the border through narratives means allowing for its historicity and relationality. Border narratives and practices reveal some neglected aspects of violent conflict in the study region and provide insights into state-society relations, an understanding of the state’s legitimacy, and an understanding of the effects of the border as a social construction that influences everyday life.     

The nation as seen from below: Rome in 1870

When Rome joined the Kingdom of Italy in 1870, its symbolic importance played a large part in its role as the new capital of the nation-state. That very symbolic weight, though, left but a small space for the Romans themselves, particularly the lower classes. While recent scholarship on Italian nation-building has explored the cultural project underlying its political developments, it still remains to be understood how the lower classes first experienced and responded to their incorporation into the nation. Courted by the new nation-state, its clerical opposition and its radical opposition alike, their Risorgimento was different from that of the Romantic tropes informing the new national politics.     

Neoliberalism and Suburban Employment: Western Sydney in the 1990s

During the past 15 years metropolitan planning strategies of the NSW state government have done little to address the spatial distribution of either employment or labour market equity within the metropolis. In the fast‐growing outer western suburbs, the government has focused on attracting business investment to increase the stock of local jobs and to improve employment ‘self‐sufficiency’— a dominantly neoliberal policy framework. This paper explores a widening gulf between the reality of outer urban change and this policy framework by considering changes in the location of jobs and in the employment experiences of residents in Greater Western Sydney (GWS). Evidence is drawn from census journey‐to‐work data (1991–2001). While holding a majority of manufacturing jobs in Sydney, GWS also experienced continued growth of jobs in service industries during the 1990s. Yet the relative importance of employment in the city's fast‐growth finance and business services sector still lags well behind that of inner and northern parts of the city. The focus on growing the regional stock of jobs has not addressed problems of labour market access faced by residents of particular localities and the goal of employment self‐sufficiency has not delivered greater equity to outer suburban labour markets. A focus on sufficiency of access to employment for residents of GWS draws attention not only to regional stocks of jobs but also to the provision of social infrastructure and state‐provided services to outer suburban populations as they continue to expand.     

Resisting and Challenging Neoliberalism: The Development of Italian Social Centers

In the 1970s, Italy experienced a difficult transition from Fordism to a flexible accumulation regime. The resulting changes in production relations led to the disappearance of traditional public spaces and meeting places such as open squares, workplaces, party offices or the premises of groups involved in the antagonistic, ie anti‐capitalist and anti‐fascist, movement. Within this context, in the 1980s and 1990s, these groups managed to create new social and political spaces by setting up Self‐Managed Social Centers (CSAs), ie squatted properties which became the venue of social, political and cultural events. Over 250 Social Centers have been active in Italy over the past 15 years, especially in urban areas. Their organizational modes are examples of successful direct democracy in non‐hierarchical structures and may provide alternative options to the bureaucratic organization of so many aspects of social and political life. Point number one on a Social Center's agenda is a daunting task: it must renovate and refurbish privately or publicly owned empty properties and turn them into public spaces open to the general public. For this task it relies exclusively on collective action, ie cooperative working modes which do not come under the provisions governing regular employment contracts and can thus be used to combat marginalization and exclusion processes which are becoming more and more dramatic in our cities. An analysis of the evolution of this original Italian movement provides the opportunity to address a number of issues associated with alternative practices to neoliberal globalization.     

Electricity Transformed: Neoliberalism and Local Energy in the United States

Abstract: The concept of neoliberalism is explored with respect to the history of the electricity industry and policy in the USA. Rather than view “neoliberalism” as an all‐encompassing form of governmentality or a hegemonic regime, it is instead situated in a political field of competing ideologies, policies, practices, and agents that includes social liberalism, socialism, and cooperativism, with hegemonic and redistributive forms of both social liberalism and neoliberalism distinguished. The field approach enables a dynamic interpretation of the history of the electricity industry in the USA that tracks the relative role of government intervention in the economy, scale shifts in the level of government intervention, and the extent to which the policies favor elite accumulation or redistribution to less favored economic categories. The field approach also enables an analysis of local responses to market restructuring that suggest some examples of redistributive politics, even local socialism, that have emerged as a consequence of marketplace restructuring.     

Locating migrant Latinas in a diverse economies framework: evidence from Chicago

In this article I use an intersectional diverse economies framework and weak theory to build knowledge about migrant Latinas' economic spaces in Chicago. Drawing on qualitative data, I demonstrate how multiple and dynamic identities are linked to economic practices. I show that Latina migrants are not limited to capitalist or noncapitalist forms of economic engagement within neoliberal structures or to single spaces within or outside ethnic economies. Their multiple and dynamic practices shifted, as did their identities and geographies. I captured a snapshot of one migrant Latina economic community and provide insights about the nature and scale of its activities as well as the opportunities, and obstacles it faces. I propose future research and policy resulting from seeing economies differently. What kinds of programs might support collective economies and migrant Latina crafts? How might we re-envision workforce development programs if we see economies differently? What kinds of creative campaigns and advocacy do we need with new kinds of economies? More data and reflection on the nature and scale of intersectional identities within migrant (and other) economic communities and the geoeconomic ramification within those communities is needed. Furthermore, I call for the imagination of new global forms and practices that respond to the crisis that the current economic structures are facing.     

Neoliberalism and gender equality policy in Australia

After a Coalition electoral victory in 2013, the Australian Office for Women was returned from the periphery to the centre of government. This was contrary to the expectation that women’s policy will be given greater salience under governments of the left rather than of the right. To unpack this puzzle, we examine institutional arrangements and policy directions under successive Labor and Coalition governments in Australia, including the abolition of intergovernmental bodies concerned with gender equality. We find that the influence of neoliberalism has resulted in a blurring of patterns of partisan difference over gender equality policy. There are some continuing partisan differences but also a common pattern of increased emphasis on international and regional rather than domestic policy. The notable exception to this pattern is in the area of gender-based violence.