Neoliberal privatisation? Remapping the public and the private in Sydney's masterplanned residential estates

The analysis of neoliberalism has become a key point of departure in critical urban studies and political geography. Its application in theorising new forms of residential environments is no exception. Common interest developments, gated communities and, in the Australian case, masterplanned residential estates (MPREs) are cast as vehicles of neoliberalist privatisation, extending private property rights and embedding market logics and neoliberal modes of privatised governance. This paper is a critical theoretical and empirical engagement with the interpretation of these residential developments as iconic expressions of urban neoliberalisation. We bring poststructuralist thinking on neoliberalism as an assemblage of diverse practices and projects together with poststructuralist conceptions of the public and private as contextual and enacted political constructions, to provide an alternative analytic—an analytic of assemblage—for investigating putative pathways of neoliberal privatisation. We suggest the purchase of this extended framework through an exploration of MPRE development by Sydney's largest MPRE developer. In this framework, MPREs become contingent productions in which multiple and overdetermined projects, practices and paradigms of governance are at work including, amongst others, social sustainability and interventionism. Rather than producing neoliberal privatisation, we explore how MPRE developments involve the complex constitution of new forms of public and private that exceed coding as neoliberal. We conclude that the framework engaged with here can enable productive advances for urban theorising. Its emphasis on practice, enactment, multiplicity and assemblage can resist a tendency to reify urban neoliberalism and nurture the development of new conceptions and discourses of urban governance less bound to the neoliberal imaginary.     

The Malleability of Participation: The Politics of Agricultural Research under Neoliberalism in Bolivia

This article analyses how neoliberal restructuring encouraged the use of participatory methods in agricultural research in Bolivia and how, at a later stage, participatory development initiatives had to be adapted to prevent conflicts with the post‐neoliberal views of farmer organizations. The article contributes to the debate on the normalization of participatory methods in agrarian development. Engaging with Foucault's work on governmentality and neoliberalism, our analysis goes beyond interpretations of participation which conceptualize it exclusively as a technology of power to discipline subjects. Drawing on a distinction between a liberal and a neoliberal moment in the restructuring of agricultural research, we study the case of PROINPA (Foundation for the Promotion and Research of Andean Products), a national NGO that was once part of the state system for agricultural research but was then privatized. Although PROINPA employed participation mainly to enhance managerial effectiveness, it also facilitated moments of participation from below. We argue that participation designed by this type of NGO is not just ‘technical’ as PROINPA professionals would like to perceive it, nor is it simply ‘political’ as critical views on participation hold. Instead it is malleable in the sense that each actor is involved in finding a new balance between technical, economic and political considerations.     

Communal Performativity—A Seed for Change? The Solidarity of Thessaloniki's Social Movements in the Diverse Fights Against Neoliberalism

The debate on the financial crisis is at an impasse. Neoliberal austerity discourse is often positioned as an almost insurmountable barrier, its disciplinary power affecting even the most change‐oriented citizen‐initiatives existing today. Countering this, this paper highlights the transformative capacity of social movements in Thessaloniki. Drawing from Butler, Laclau and Mouffe, and Gibson‐Graham we develop the notion of “communal performativity” both as an academic and as a practical concept to understand and build trajectories of socio‐economic change. “Communal” denotes the drive of the movements’ participants to interconnect and (re)negotiate with a multiplicity of Others, curbing identity politics to articulate internal differences and Otherness. We see some hopeful signs of bridges being built towards shared trajectories of change that can be understood as different but concrete variations on the abstract counter‐narrative of “breaking with neoliberalism”. Some of these variations challenge, others diversify neoliberal discourses and practices.     

The ‘Populist’ Right Challenge to Neoliberalism: Social Policy between a Rock and a Hard Place

This article looks at the rise of right populist politics in both developed and developing countries, and its implications for social policy. The author locates the cause for the right populist surge in the legacies of neoliberalism, paying particular attention to the way neoliberal reforms have affected popular attitudes towards politics. The commodification of politics and social services has stoked mass cynicism towards reigning neoliberal elites, creating receptive audiences for populist slogans to ‘drain the swamp’ at the heart of governments. More controversially, the author argues that popular resentments toward neoliberal social policies based on the recognition of the rights of women, minorities, migrants and the poor have made communities susceptible to the racist and misogynist messages of the right populists. Through case studies looking at the United States, Brazil and the Philippines the author argues that the biggest impact of right populists on social policies can be found in their discourses and authoritarian practices of social exclusion.     

4. NEOLIBERALISM THROUGH FOUCAULT'S EYES

Michael Foucault's 1979 lectures at the Collège de France on the birth of biopolitics are increasingly read as the most lucid introduction to neoliberal policies. This article invites us to be cautious about such claims by exploring one rather obvious point: these lectures also—and perhaps most important—reflect Foucault's very distinctive and contemporary preoccupations. In 1978, Foucault wrote and thought about three topics that were, in his view, crucial: the idea of “critique” and the influence of Kant; Foucault's project for an “analytical philosophy of politics”; and the crisis of disciplinary society, notably as it related to sexuality. This paper shows that these preoccupations had a profound impact on Foucault's interest in neoliberalism. As a result, the interpretation of the neoliberal revolution proposed in these brilliant lectures is, if not idiosyncratic, at the very least highly partial.     

新自由主义的危机与都市治理——从全球到地方

自2008年的经济危机之后,新自由主义作为西方国家和城市治理的主要手段也受到根本性的挑战,这些政治经济的失败,最终表现在都市空间的治理当中。本文将以新自由主义的扩张案例入手,通过国内外都市空间治理的实践经验,剖析新自由主义所带来的短期和长期的政治经济危机后果,并讨论全球不同空间尺度当中撤退空间的治理与挑战。新自由主义的问题不仅存在于西方国家,在网络时代和全球化的趋势下,资本的累积是在全球范围内产生危机,亚洲国家以及中国也必须思考如何应对危机,以及探索后新自由主义的发展道路。最后,文章从全球到地方的撤退空间讨论当中,反思新自由主义作为一种全球性的都市治理政策在全球的流动,认为就后政治的城市来说,要超越新自由主义的局限还有待观察,中国城市走向后新自由主义的治理转型就必须勇于摆脱英美社会脉络所产生的都市治理论述,建构符合地方社会脉络的理论和实践。     

The Adaptative Nature of Neoliberalism at the Local Scale: Fifteen Years of City Improvement Districts in Cape Town and Johannesburg

Abstract: By unravelling the adoption and adaptation of the North American Business Improvement District (BID) model in South African cities, this paper considers the way neoliberal principles are making their way in the post‐apartheid context. Drawing on a comparative approach of BIDs in Johannesburg and Cape Town, we analyse the tensions and conflicts surrounding their implementation and unpack the resilience of this model. As unexpected as this resilience might be in such a context, that is, far away from the heartland of neoliberalism, we argue that this resilience is linked to the permeability of the local contexts and to the plasticity of the model itself at the city and neighbourhood levels, reflecting a capacity to adapt to inherited regulatory frameworks, patterns of territorial development and embedded socio‐political alliances of the local terrains, as well as an ability to accommodate post‐apartheid issues through the crafting of what we refer to as “local Third Ways”.     

FOUCAULT'S ‘HALL OF MIRRORS’: AN INVESTIGATION INTO GEO‐EPISTEMOLOGY

In this article we aim to single out a part of Foucault's trihedrals of spatialization – discourses and practices, that is, technologies of power that have their spatialized frames. In order to analyse them we use the concept of a trihedral, not a triangle, because we noticed that several lines can be drawn from any angle and can form new spaces. In such a manner we are able to see their multiplication, separation and parallelisms. Using the trihedrals of spatialization we detect in Foucault's work, besides the demands for a certain (spatialized) ontology, the existence of no less significant geo‐epistemology as knowledge and discourses that are formed in spaces and as the space formed through knowledge/power/discourses. We face a polyvalent character of the angles of the trihedrals and try to avoid the labyrinth into which their multiplication pulls us. The article pays special attention to Foucault's elementary trihedral, life–work–language, in which man came to life as a being who works, speaks and reproduces in a new shape – as population. In this trihedral the angles/concepts are only seemingly separated: they overlap, mix, collide and intertwine in a game that cannot end. That is why this is only a snapshot of the many trihedrals; a possible aggregate of combinations, yet in no case coherent and homogenous. In that sense this article is not an attempt to systematize Foucault's thought but to identify one of the many possible models/matrices for understanding the meaning of his spatial turn and his analysis of power.     

Market civilisation meets economic nationalism: the discourse of nation in Russia's modernisation

This article examines how the discourse of nation functions as a mechanism furthering the expansion of a neoliberal market civilisation in Russia. It contributes to discussions that have challenged the assumed mutual exclusivity of economic nationalism and neoliberalism. The article develops its argument in the context of the idea of contemporary international society as a market civilisation characterised by an adaptation to and adoption of neoliberal standards by states. The ongoing modernisation project in Russia illustrates the workings of such standards, as exemplified by the project for an innovation city in Skolkovo, in the Moscow metropolitan area. Building on an analysis of the Skolkovo debate, the article agues that there is no inherent contradiction between economic nationalism and neoliberalism. Rather, the nation is an important symbolic system that produces a cultural susceptibility to, and a discursive field for, the introduction of neoliberal standards of market civilisation in Russia.     

“This neighbourhood deserves an espresso bar too”: Neoliberalism,Racialization, and Urban Policy

In the Dutch and more broadly European context, urban policymaking has generally been studied through the conceptual lens of neoliberalism. While important, I argue that this neoliberal lens does not fully account for the design and impact of urban policies currently transforming cities like Amsterdam. Following Mustafa Dikeç's (2007, Badlands of the Republic: Space, Politics, and Urban Policy) understanding of urban policy as place‐making practices that normalize particular distributions of people, authorities and spaces, I propose to focus on underlying visions of the normal and the good city that shape urban policymaking. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic research on Amsterdam's “notorious” Diamantbuurt, I argue that this vision is informed by neoliberalism and by racialized concerns with migrants and ethnic minorities. It entails particular classed and racialized preferences that normalize and underwrite the partial displacement that is underway in the neighbourhood.     

A neoliberal nexus: Economy,security and the biopolitics of citizenship on the border

In this paper I explore what the development of an expedited border-crossing program called NEXUS reveals about the changing political geography of citizenship in contemporary North America. Developed after 9/11 as a high-tech solution to competing demands for both heightened border security and ongoing cross-border business movement, NEXUS and other so-called Smart Border programs exemplify how a business class civil citizenship has been extended across transnational space at the very same time as economic liberalization and national securitization have curtailed citizenship for others. The biopolitical production of this privileged business class citizenship is explored vis-à-vis the macroscale entrenchment of neoliberal policy through NAFTA and the microscale production of entrepreneurial selfhood. By examining how this transnational privileging of business class rights has happened in an American context of exclusionary nationalism, the paper also explores the relationship between neoliberalism and the development of new spaces of exception defined by exclusion from civil rights. Examples of such exclusion include ‘expedited removal’ and ‘extraordinary rendition’, two forms of American anti-immigrant control that have been developed in concert with expedited border-crossing programs. Examining these forms of expedited exclusion and comparing the carceral cosmopolitanism they produce with the soft cosmopolitanism of the NEXUS lane, the paper ends by offering an argument about the relationship between the neoliberal privileging of transnational mobility rights and its exclusionary counterparts.     

“Vote with your feet”: Neoliberalism,the democratic nation-state,and utopian enclave libertarianism

This paper examines a series of emerging utopian discourses that call for the creation of autonomous libertarian enclaves on land ceded by or claimed against existing states. These discourses have emerged in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and can be seen as a response to the crisis on the part of free-market advocates who critique previous waves of neoliberal reform for failing to radically transform the existing structures of the state. Enclave libertarianism seeks to overcome neoliberal capitalism's contradictory relationship to the liberal democratic state by rethinking the state as a “private government service provider” and rethinking citizens as mobile consumers of government services. Citizens are thus called to “vote with their feet” by opting-in to the jurisdiction that best fits their needs and beliefs. The paper argues that these utopian imaginaries are key to understanding specific new manifestations of post-crisis neoliberalism, and calls for more research into the diversity of discourses and imaginaries that circulate through networks of neoliberal actors beyond specific policy initiatives.     

Recently Observed Polarising Tendencies and Australian Cities

Recent research and writing about social and spatial polarisation in Australian cities is reviewed in a five-part study. The first part outlines the international context in which Australian urban restructuring and polarisation is occurring. The second considers the consequences of structural adjustment in Australia in terms of changes to the distribution of national income and social costs. There is an apparent incongruity of sharper spatial disparities developing during a decade (1982—94) when the living standards of the poor were maintained at 1982 levels by the social security system under federal Labor governments.Part three surveys several recent that explicitly set out to measure shifts in urban spatial inequality, and thereby help to clarify aspects of the debate about social and spatial polarisation under Australian conditions. Part four sets out to show how both the construction of this debate, and the response of governments to urban restructuring in Australia, are implicitly grounded in three competing theoretical frameworks: ‘post-marxist’ political economy; neoliberalism; discourses of identity and difference. Finally, practical and ethical issues are raised that stem from the triumph of neoliberal ideology over alternative visions of the ‘companionable state’.     

The Dark Sides of Social Policy: From Neoliberalism to Resurgent Right-wing Populism

This Forum Debate explores the confluence of neoliberal, populist, conservative and reactionary influences on contemporary ideologies and practices of social policy, with a focus on the poorer peripheries of global capitalism. Several fundamental tensions are highlighted, which are largely overlooked by the social policy and development literatures. First, many recent social policy innovations have been discredited by their association with neoliberalism. The rising political Right has been much more successful than the Left at exploiting this discontent, despite simultaneously deepening many aspects of neoliberalism once in power. At the same time, right-wing movements have proactively used social policy as a political tool to fashion the social order along lines deemed amenable for their interests and ideologies, expressed along nationalist, racialized, ethnicized, nativist, religious, patriarchal or other lines, and to innovate practices of segregation, exclusion and subordination. While these synergies of neoliberal and right-wing populism are observed globally, they need to be carefully and differentially interpreted from the perspective of late industrializing (or late welfare state) peripheral countries. Nonetheless, common themes occurring across both centres and peripheries, as identified by the invited contributions to this Debate section, include exclusionary identity politics, hierarchical and subordinating inclusions, and patriarchal familialism. In this context, segregationism is an ominous possibility of post-neoliberal social policy.     

Adjusting to Equity: The Contradictions of Neoliberalism and the Search for Racial Equality in Peru

This article traces the development of race equity initiatives in Peru in the context of economic "liberalisation" and Western cultural hegemony. Drawing on interviews with Peruvian antiracist educators, we argue that the development of race equity programmes is being shaped by contradictory sociopolitical pressures. On the one hand, these initiatives reflect the forces of neoliberal intervention and reorganisation. On the other, they are the products of the challenges presented to conservative and antiegalitarian traditions by those committed to social justice. The paper also examines how the "new" equity paradigms associated with neoliberalism are acting to obscure the existence of other antidiscrimination traditions within Peru.     

Neoliberal Reason and Its Forms: De‐Politicisation Through Economisation

This paper offers a historically contextualised intellectual history of the entangled development of three competing post‐war economic approaches, viz the Austrian, Chicago and post‐Walrasian schools, as three forms of neoliberalism. Taking our cue from Foucault's reading of neoliberalism as a mode of governmentality under which the social is organised through “economic incentives”, we engage with the recent discussions of neoliberal theory on three accounts: neoliberalism is read as an epistemic horizon including not only “pro‐” but also “post‐market” positions articulated by post‐Walrasian economists who claim that market failures necessitate the design of “incentive‐compatible” remedial mechanisms; the Austrian tradition is distinguished from the Chicago‐style pro‐marketism; and the implications of the differences among the three approaches on economic as well as socio‐political life are discussed. The paper maintains that all three approaches promote the de‐politicisation of the social through its economisation albeit by way of different theories and policies. © 2013 The Author. Antipode © 2013 Antipode Foundation Ltd.     

China's Emerging Neoliberal Urbanism: Perspectives from Urban Redevelopment

Abstract: China's urbanization is undergoing profound neoliberal shifts, within which urban redevelopment has emerged in the forefront of neoliberalization. This study aims to understand China's emerging neoliberal urbanism by examining the association between urban redevelopment and neoliberalism. Rather than a deliberate design, neoliberalization in China is a response to multiple difficulties/crises and the desire for rapid development. The neoliberalization process is full of controversies and inconsistencies, which involve conflicts between neoliberal practices and social resistance, and tensions between central and local states. Nevertheless, China's neoliberal urbanism has a responsive and resilient system to cope with the contradictions and imbalances inherent in neoliberalism. Meanwhile, neoliberal urbanism is more tangible at the sub‐national scale, since the local state can most effectively assist neoliberal experiments and manage crises. This study not only contributes to the understanding of China's neoliberal urbanism, but also has multiple implications for neoliberalism studies in general. First, in examining the interrelationship between the state and market, it is the actual effect of legitimizing and facilitating market operation rather than the presence (or absence) of the state that matters. Second, a new nexus of governance has formed in the neoliberalization process. Not only the nation state but also the local state is of great significance in assisting and managing neoliberal projects. Third, this study further validates the importance and necessity of scrutinizing neoliberal practices, in particular the controversies and inconsistencies within the neoliberalization process.     

“You Cannot Measure a Tzuultaq'a”: Cultural Politics at the Limits of Liberal Legibility

Abstract: In the past two decades, many Latin American nations emerged from twin crises of debt and dictatorship towards an uncertain marriage of fragile democracies and neoliberal policies. The focus of this article is on recognition for a limited set of rights for indigenous peoples known as neoliberal multiculturalism. Through a case study of a sacred place declaration by Q’eqchi’ Maya activists in rural Guatemala, I show the limits of liberal legibility. If an organized group in struggle engaged with the neoliberal state on its terms, their goals and actions would necessarily be circumscribed to its limited scope for recognition. In this case, however, multicultural neoliberalism did not encompass the full spectrum of Q’eqchi’ political activism. I argue that Q’eqchi’ cultural politics goes beyond neoliberal limits, using spirituality and territoriality to signal a broader politics of transfiguration.     

Ethnodevelopment: Social Movements, Creating Experts and Professionalising Indigenous Knowledge in Ecuador

Indigenous social movements have become important development actors in recent years. As the targets of "socially inclusive" neoliberal policies and protagonists in global anti‐capitalist movements, the position of these social movements in mainstream development is often ambivalent. This ambivalence reflects contradictions between economic neoliberalism and goals of social development as well as different understandings and practices in development‐with‐identity. We explore the relationship between the institutionalisation of ethnodevelopment and the creation of indigenous experts through indigenous social movements' engagement in popular training that emphasises indigenous knowledge. Drawing on Michael Watt's notion of governable spaces of indigeneity, we examine how institutionalisation is occurring in a range of ways that establish new alliances and cut across scales. Analysing the politics occurring at the development policy interface, we focus on the processes of representation, negotiation and embodiment involved in indigenous professionalisation, as activism shapes "scaled up" policy making.