Urban Governance Under Neoliberalism: New Labour and the Restructuring of State‐Space

Abstract: In the UK there has been a proliferation of agencies at differing regulatory scales as part of the rescaling and restructuring of the state by New Labour, following the neoliberal policies of previous Conservative governments. This raises questions concerning the extent to which New Labour's urban state restructuring is embedded within neoliberalism, and the local tensions and contradictions arising from emergent New Labour urban state restructuring. This paper examines these questions through the analysis of key policy features of New Labour, and the in‐depth exploration of two programmes that are reshaping urban governance arrangements, namely Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs) and New Deal for Communities (NDC) programmes. We conclude that New Labour's restructuring is best understood in terms of the extended reproduction (roll‐out) of neoliberalism. While these “new institutional fixes” are only weakly established and exhibit internal contradictions and tensions, these have not led to a broader contestation of neoliberalism.     

The Making of “World‐Class” Delhi: Relations Between Street Hawkers and the New Middle Class

Urban India is undergoing transformation as formal electoral politics increasingly favors the new middle class. Scholarship tends to compartmentalize the politics of the new middle class and the poor, and this article focuses on inter‐class relations. By focusing on relations between street hawkers and the new middle class in Delhi, I show that rather than engaging in zero‐sum conflicts over urban space, conflict is typically over the terms of its use. The analysis shows that these classes are interdependent; the poor depend on the new middle class for their livelihoods, and the lifestyles of new middle class are enabled by services provided by the poor. While the poor enable and participate in Delhi's transformation into a so‐called “world‐class” city, the reconciliation of competing visions of urbanization—one geared toward social reproduction and the other subsistence—is what is at stake in contemporary inter‐class relations.     

The Difference that Class Makes: Neoliberalization and Non‐Capitalism in the Fishing Industry of New England

Abstract: Fishing economies are typically represented as pre‐capitalist and as a barrier to capital accumulation rather than as an alternative economy with its own potentials. Privatization (and capitalism) appears logical and inevitable because “there is no alternative” described or given. The class analysis presented here focuses on questions of property and subjectivity and describes fishing as a non‐capitalist and community‐based economy consonant with both a tradition of common property and an image of “fishermen” as independent and interested in fairness and equity. While the latter is associated with a neoliberal subject aligned with the capitalist economy, a class analysis of fishing repositions “fishermen” as community subjects aligned with a community economy.     

Producing Privatization: Re‐articulating Race,Gender, Class and Space

Abstract: This article combines insights into the mutually constituting nature of gender, race, class and space with Marxist analyses that interrogate how social relations both produce and are constrained by institutions to explore waste management privatization in Johannesburg. It argues that the crystallization of racialized, gendered inequalities within bargaining institutions underpinned financial motivations for privatization. The form of privatization varied across the city due to the ways in which the class of the area serviced articulated with the racialization and gendering of capital and labour in these spaces. An array of material conditions and ideologies informed these processes in which workers were active, although not necessarily progressive agents. Focusing on how privatization is produced through spatialized and institutionalized social relations illuminates avenues for struggle hidden from view in both aspatial, ideal‐type feminist political economy analyses and geographic analyses of privatization inattentive to the mutually constituting nature of gender, race and class.     

“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.     

New Frontiers of Philanthro‐capitalism: Digital Technologies and Humanitarianism

Digital technologies that allow large numbers of laypeople to contribute to humanitarian action facilitate the deepening adoption and adaptation of private‐sector logics and rationalities in humanitarianism. This is increasingly taking place through philanthro‐capitalism, a process in which philanthropy and humanitarianism are made central to business models. Key to this transformation is the way private businesses find supporting “digital humanitarian” organisations such as Standby Task Force to be amenable to their capital accumulation imperatives. Private‐sector institutions channel feelings of closeness to aid recipients that digital humanitarian technologies enable, in order to legitimise their claims to “help” the recipients. This has ultimately led to humanitarian and state institutions re‐articulating capitalist logics in ways that reflect the new digital humanitarian avenues of entry. In this article, I characterise this process by drawing out three capitalist logics that humanitarian and state institutions re‐articulate in the context of digital humanitarianism, in an emergent form of philanthro‐capitalism. Specifically, I argue that branding, efficiency, and bottom lines take altered forms in this context, in part being de‐politicised as a necessary condition for their adoption. This de‐politicisation involves normalising these logics by framing social and political problems as technical in nature and thus both beyond critique and amenable to digital humanitarian “solutions”. I take this line of argumentation to then re‐politicise each of these logics and the capitalist relations that they entail.     

THE 2013 ANTIPODE RGS‐IBG LECTURE New Materialisms and Neoliberal Natures

The rise of non‐deterministic understandings of nature, with their emphasis on intensive difference and non‐linear processes, has occurred in conjunction with the neoliberalization of environmental governance, which at once emphasizes and financializes the inherent productivity of nature. This paper accepts the position that there is a link between the two, but argues that if we are to maintain a crucial ontological distinction between capital and non‐capital, this link must be understood as contingent rather than necessary. Drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari's concept of “universal history”, I argue that the neoliberalization of nature must be understood, in part, as the strategic containment of the critical energies of new materialist thought, and that the role of critical historiography is to recognize within processes of containment the contents and qualities of more radical possibilities. If such critical efforts are to succeed they must continually distinguish between nature's innovative force and the mechanisms that seek to capture this force in the service of capital and state. In turn, if we are to remember the radical potential of these ideas, the neoliberalization of nature must be understood as a response to these critical energies, and not their origin.     

Labour Migration, Neoliberalism and Ethno-politics in the New Europe: The Latvian Case

Abstract:  The accession of the new European Union (EU) member states of Eastern Europe has highlighted ambivalence towards migration within the older member states. That same ambivalence has been less frequently discussed in the new. The former Soviet republic of Latvia serves as a case study of a new member state facing intensified pressure to accept inward migration to meet labour shortages, in part, a consequence of EU accession. Confounding appropriate political and policy responses is the sensitive issue of "ethnic balance", a troubled "legacy" of Latvian history. This has been characterised as comprising a "regime of discrimination" against the Russian-speaking minority. In the context of changes in the global migratory landscape, the potential for a renewed of regime of discrimination is emerging, based on an ethno-politics that has wider European resonance.     

Diasporic Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transnational Production of Black Middle‐Class Masculinity

This essay examines the relationship between two black Freemasons in the Gold Coast and New York in the 1930s. Drawing on the correspondence of D. K. Abadu Bentsi and Harry A. Williamson, this essay argues that fraternal voluntary associations operated as sites for the formation of a gendered diasporic identity. In doing so, it suggests that we need to complicate our understanding of diaspora by considering the ways in which the development of diasporic subjectivity and consciousness, as a dynamic process, is inextricably bound up in the formation of class and gender identities and the maintenance of class and gender boundaries.     

Race and the Making of Southeast San Francisco: Towards a Theory of Race‐Class

San Francisco is engaged in a redevelopment project that could bring millions in investment and community benefits to a starved neighborhood—and yet the project is embedded in an urban development process that is displacing residents. In trying to unsettle these contradictions, this paper achieves two aims. First, I unearth a little known history of redevelopment activism that frames debate around the current project. Second, I use this history to argue for a reframing of the language of race. To wit: although the social construction of race and racism is well established, race is still deeply understood in everyday life as natural. This paper offers a theoretical fusing of race and class, “race‐class”, to help us think race through a vital constructionist lens. Race‐class makes present the economic dynamics of racial formation, and foregrounds that race is a core process of urban political economy. Race‐class works both “top‐down” and “ground‐up.” While it is a vehicle for capital's exploitation of people and place, race‐class also emerges as a mode of power for racialized working‐class residents.     

The Political Aesthetics of Middle Class Housing in (not so) Neoliberal Mozambique

This article explores the social and material repercussions of middle class aspirations in a system that is still infused by socialist aesthetics in Maputo, Mozambique. We argue the activation of “middle classness” reproduces ingrained inequalities and boundaries. This is demonstrated through two ethnographic case studies of urban housing, long central to imaginaries of prosperity. First, fearing downward mobility, members of the upper middle class seek to embody a liberal ideology of “autonomy”, while simultaneously being dependent on state structures. Second, members of the lower middle class attempt to create enclaves to experiment with forms of privatisation normally only accessible to a privileged elite. Through this examination of the ways in which a spectrum of privileged urbanites attempts to secure their position in the face of a precarious future, the article outlines middle classness under contemporary capitalist conditions and how this is shaped by the legacies of the past.     

The Production of Commons and the “Explosion” of the Middle Class

Abstract: This paper builds on the author's previous theoretical work on the role of processes such as enclosures, market discipline and governance. It discusses the middle class in terms of a stratified field of subjectivity within the planetary wage hierarchy produced by these processes. It discusses the thesis that the middle class, qua middle class, will never be able to contribute to bring about a fundamental change in the capitalist system of livelihood reproduction. The production in common centered on middle class values—however historically and culturally specific they are—is always production in common within the system. Our common action as middle class action, whether as consumers, workers, or citizens, reproduces the system of value and value hierarchy that is the benchmark, the referent point for our cooperation. The paper then discusses some of the implications of the conundrum faced by those who seek alternatives: there will be no “beginning of history” without the middle class, nor there will be one with the middle class.     

Class,Caste, Gender,and the Materiality of Cement Houses in India

Recently, large parts of India and the global South have experienced a rapid transformation from mud to cement houses, which has been promoted by governments and cement companies for its positive impacts on household socioeconomic status and gender inequalities. But we know little else about how different communities are participating in house transformation. In this paper, I study the embodied and affective dimensions of house transformation in Himachal Pradesh, India. I argue that house transformation is also the transformation of traditional gender and caste identities into new middle-class identities which benefits some social groups, like upper-caste women and Dalit men, but not others like Dalit women along intersectional lines. My work extends literature in infrastructure studies and urban political ecology by highlighting how the materiality of infrastructures interacts with everyday dimensions of difference to reproduce the marginalisation of historically oppressed groups along intersectional lines of class, caste, and gender.     

Class in a Glass: Capital,Neoliberalism and Social Space in the Global Wine Industry

Abstract: This paper explores the evolving relationship between class and capital in the neoliberalised global wine industry. Wine is a unique sector that is possessed of intricate and underexplored aspects of class formation. Having investigated the recent restructuring of the industry under neoliberalism the paper goes on to analyse class formations in the production and consumption spheres. In this discussion we note not only the concrete economic and social dynamics of change, in terms of the differing fortunes of consumers, investors, landowners and workers, but also the physical and symbolic expressions of class in and through the countryside, as manifested in changing landscapes, discourses and idylls. In conclusion we analyse relationship between capital, class formation and accumulation across and within different scales in the context of a rapidly globalising sector that is so rooted in place.     

中产阶级在特立尼达和多巴哥政治现代化中的作用

在特立尼达和多巴哥政治现代化过程中,作为特立尼达和多巴哥多等级、多种族社会中的一个阶层,中产阶级既是联系社会上层又是沟通工人阶级下层的黏合剂。正是由于中产阶级的努力,特立尼达和多巴哥才建立起西方化的政治民主制度。特立尼达和多巴哥的政治现代化实践,为第三世界国家的政治现代化提供了新的启示。     

新社会阶层党员队伍建设与保持党的先进性

加强新社会阶层党员队伍建设直接关系到党的先进性的具体保持与体现。发展新社会阶层党员队伍是保持党的先进性的必然要求;加强新社会阶层党员队伍建设有利于保持党的先进性;保持党的先进性必须加强新社会阶层党员队伍建设;必须按照“三个代表”重要思想和中共中央关于在全党开展保持共产党员先进性教育活动《意见》的要求,与时俱进地加强新社会阶层党员队伍建设,保持和发展党的先进性。     

The Provocations of Neoliberalism: Contesting the Nation and Liberation after Apartheid

Abstract: This paper is part of an ongoing effort to make sense of the turbulent forces at play in South Africa in relation to other parts of the world. Engaging debates over neoliberalism from a South African vantage point, I show how currently influential theories cast in terms of class project, governmentality, and hegemony are at best partial. A more adequate understanding is not just a matter of combining these different dimensions into a more encompassing model of “neoliberalism in general”. The challenge, rather, is coming to grips with how identifiably neoliberal projects and practices operate on terrains that always exceed them. A crucially important dimension of what is going on in South Africa is that escalating struggles over the material conditions of life and livelihood are simultaneously struggles over the meaning of the nation and liberation, as well as expressions of profound betrayal. These processes underscore the analytical and political stakes in attending to interconnected historical geographies of specifically racialized forms of dispossession, and how they feature in the present. The paper concludes with a call for a properly post‐colonial frame of understanding that builds on the synergies and complementarities between a Gramscian reading of Fanon and relational conceptions of the production of space set forth by Lefebvre.     

Neoliberalism and the Economic Utility of Immigration: Media Perspectives of Germany's Immigration Law

Abstract: Germany's new immigration law, which took effect in 2005, was hotly debated over a period of four years. This paper follows the debate on the law through the newsprint media, examines the representation of immigration as an economic utility, and investigates the contents of this economic‐utility perspective of immigration in light of neoliberal restructuring in Germany. The analysis focuses on 609 articles sampled from five major German daily newspapers published between July 2001 and August 2005. A discourse analysis suggests that the newsprint media represented immigration on the one hand as an economic necessity to replenish the labor market and ensure the international competitiveness of key industrial sectors. On the other hand, immigration was depicted as an economic liability that raises unemployment rates and burdens the public welfare system. Although the media emphasized the economic necessity of immigration, the final law does not permit any significant immigration of labor. The paper resolves this contradiction by situating media discourse in a wider context of neoliberal reforms and European Union expansion.