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.     

The Uses of Neoliberalism

Abstract: The term “neoliberalism” has come to be used in a wide variety of partly overlapping and partly contradictory ways. This essay seeks to clarify some of the analytical and political work that the term does in its different usages. It then goes on to suggest that making an analytical distinction between neoliberal “arts of government” and the class‐based ideological “project” of neoliberalism can allow us to identify some surprising (and perhaps hopeful) new forms of politics that illustrate how fundamentally polyvalent neoliberal mechanisms of government can be. A range of empirical examples are discussed, mostly coming from my recent work on social policy and anti‐poverty politics in southern Africa.     

Neoliberalism and the Aestheticization of New Middle‐Class Landscapes

Abstract: If according to Terry Eagleton (The Ideology of the Aesthetic 1990:28), the aesthetic is from the start “a contradictory, double‐edged concept”, how are seemingly innocent acts of viewing and consuming aesthetically pleasing landscapes implicated in the neoliberal politics of urban restructuring? Using contemporary Shanghai as a case study, this paper critically examines the role of the aesthetic in the politics of exclusion and urban segregation in post‐Socialist Shanghai where the restructuring and commodification of erstwhile public welfare housing have led to the rapid development of private “middle‐class” gated enclaves. A central objective of this paper is to excavate the underlying cultural politics of neoliberalism and demonstrate how the aestheticization of urban spaces in Shanghai has become increasingly intertwined with and accentuated by neoliberal ideologies and exclusionary practices in the city. Imbricated in the pristine neighborhoods of Shanghai's gated communities are the fault lines of social division and class distinction that are rapidly transforming urban China.     

The Shock of the Real: The Neoliberal Neurosis in the Life and Times of Jeffrey Sachs

This paper draws on Slavoj ?i?ek's critique of ideology in seeking to account for the persistence and transformability of the neoliberal project. Against understandings of neoliberalism as a utopian representation projected onto an external reality, I argue that neoliberal ideology operates as a social fantasy, which structures reality itself against the traumatic Real of Capital. The evolution of the neoliberal project should be understood, not as the meticulous manipulation of social reality, but as a series of increasingly desperate attempts to hold the very fabric of reality together. Reconceptualizing neoliberalization as a form of obsessional neurosis can help to explain the relentless persistence of “zombie neoliberalism” and its paradoxical trajectory towards increasingly intensive forms of social engineering. This argument is developed through a critical engagement with the work of the economist Jeffrey Sachs. From shock therapy to the Millennium Villages Project, Sachs's trajectory embodies the characteristics of the neoliberal neurosis. The paper aims to undermine the apparently monolithic power of neoliberalism, by challenging dominant critical representations of the neoliberal project in terms of a hyper‐rational governmentality. It also aims to subvert the attempts by Jeffrey Sachs and other neoliberals to reposition themselves as opponents of the Washington Consensus, and as spokesmen of the Occupy movement. The chosen method of attack is more satirical than polemical. Neurotic neoliberals such as Sachs have successfully appropriated ethical objections to neoliberalism in the name of “globalization with a human face”. In the present conjuncture, an immanent critique that reveals the internal incoherence of neoliberal ideology, and the hapless floundering of its proponents, is perhaps more effective than a repetition of familiar forms of moral condemnation. An alternative subtitle for this paper might therefore be “Towards a satirical materialism”.     

"Common–Sense" Neoliberalism: Progressive Conservative Urbanism in Toronto, Canada

This paper argues that urban neoliberalism can best be understood as a contradictory re–regulation of urban everyday life. Based on an analysis of neoliberalism as a new political economy and as a new set of technologies of power, the paper argues that the urban everyday is the site and product of the neoliberal transformation. Governments and corporations play a key role in redefining the conditions of everyday life through neoliberal policies and business practices. Part of this reorientation of everydayness, however, involves new forms of resistance and opposition, which include the kernel of a possible alternative urbanism. The epochal shift from a Keynesian–Fordist–welfarist to a post–Fordist–workfarist society is reflected in a marked restructuring of everyday life. The shift changes the socioeconomic conditions in cities. It also includes a reorientation of identities, social conflicts, and ideologies towards a more explicitly culturalist differentiation. Social difference does not disappear, but actually becomes more pronounced; however, it gets articulated in or obscured by cultural terms of reference. The paper looks specifically at Toronto, Ontario, as a case study. An analysis of the explicitly neoliberal politics of the province’s Progressive Conservative (Tory) government under Mike Harris, first elected in 1995, demonstrates the pervasive re–regulation of everyday life affecting a wide variety of people in Toronto and elsewhere. Much of this process is directly attributable to provincial policies, a consequence of Canada’s constitutional system, which does not give municipalities autonomy but makes them “creatures of provinces.” However, the paper also argues that Toronto’s elites have aided and abetted the provincial “Common–Sense” Revolution through neoliberal policies and actions on their own. The paper concludes by outlining the emergence of new instances of resistance to the politics of hegemony and catastrophe of urban neoliberalism.     

Community Volunteering as Neoliberal Strategy? Green Space Production in Berlin

Abstract: The task for critical urban research is to analyze processes of neoliberalization “on the ground”. This paper examines—based on original empirical research—in how far the outsourcing of former local state responsibilities for public services and urban infrastructure is expressed in the promotion of community gardening in Berlin (Germany). It shows the contradictory outcomes: on the one hand, a failing strategy of outsourcing towards residents and the opening up of opportunity structures for other interests. On the other hand it shows how far the emergence of open green spaces maintained by volunteers can only be understood against the background of “roll‐back” neoliberal urban politics and that their rationality cannot be separated from “roll‐out neoliberalism”.     

Lisbon's Red Belt: A Cautionary Tale on Politicisation and Depoliticisation of the Urban Realm

Within the making of Portuguese liberal‐representative democracy, the Portuguese Communist Party became a major actor in local government in urban deprived peripheries, shaping Lisbon's Red Belt. In this article, we analyse the communist discourse on the Portuguese urban question, showing how it politicised the urban as a site of unevenness and deprivation, but simultaneously depoliticised it by refusing to acknowledge it as a proper space for conflict. This historical account leads us to a critical debate with proposals that discuss urban politicisation by ontologising “the urban” or “the political”—we argue that these approaches tend to be less helpful in understanding processes of contingent, partial and inter‐related forms of politicisation/depoliticisation of the urban in itself. In contrast, we argue for a more attentive theorisation on politicisation–depoliticisation of the urban condition as a most valuable path to grasp situated formulations of citizenship and, hence, configurations of political regimes.     

Neoliberal Urbanization in Europe: Large–Scale Urban Development Projects and the New Urban Policy

This paper summarizes the theoretical insights drawn from a study of thirteen large–scale urban development projects (UDPs) in twelve European Union countries. The project focused on the way in which globalization and liberalization articulate with the emergence of new forms of governance, on the formation of a new scalar gestalt of governing and on the relationship between large–scale urban development and political, social and economic power relations in the city. Among the most important conclusions, we found that: ?Large–scale UDPs have increasingly been used as a vehicle to establish exceptionality measures in planning and policy procedures. This is part of a neoliberal “New Urban Policy” approach and its selective “middle — and upper–class” democracy. It is associated with new forms of “governing” urban interventions, characterized by less democratic and more elite–driven priorities. ?Local democratic participation mechanisms are not respected or are applied in a very “formalist” way, resulting in a new choreography of elite power. However, grassroots movements occasionally manage to turn the course of events in favor of local participation and of modest social returns for deprived social groups. ?The UDPs are poorly integrated at best into the wider urban process and planning system. As a consequence, their impact on a city as a whole and on the areas where the projects are located remains ambiguous. ?Most UDPs accentuate socioeconomic polarization through the working of real–estate markets (price rises and displacement of social or low–income housing), changes in the priorities of public budgets that are increasingly redirected from social objectives to investments in the built environment and the restructuring of the labor market. ?The UDPs reflect and embody a series of processes that are associated with changing spatial scales of governance; these changes, in turn, reflect a shifting geometry of power in the governing of urbanization.     

Cities and the Geographies of "Actually Existing Neoliberalism"

This essay elaborates a critical geographical perspective on neoliberalism that emphasizes (a) the path–dependent character of neoliberal reform projects and (b) the strategic role of cities in the contemporary remaking of political–economic space. We begin by presenting the methodological foundations for an approach to the geographies of what we term “actually existing neoliberalism.” In contrast to neoliberal ideology, in which market forces are assumed to operate according to immutable laws no matter where they are “unleashed,” we emphasize the contextual embeddedness of neoliberal restructuring projects insofar as they have been produced within national, regional, and local contexts defined by the legacies of inherited institutional frameworks, policy regimes, regulatory practices, and political struggles. An adequate understanding of actually existing neoliberalism must therefore explore the path–dependent, contextually specific interactions between inherited regulatory landscapes and emergent neoliberal, market–oriented restructuring projects at a broad range of geographical scales. These considerations lead to a conceptualization of contemporary neoliberalization processes as catalysts and expressions of an ongoing creative destruction of political–economic space at multiple geographical scales. While the neoliberal restructuring projects of the last two decades have not established a coherent basis for sustainable capitalist growth, it can be argued that they have nonetheless profoundly reworked the institutional infrastructures upon which Fordist–Keynesian capitalism was grounded. The concept of creative destruction is presented as a useful means for describing the geographically uneven, socially regressive, and politically volatile trajectories of institutional/spatial change that have been crystallizing under these conditions. The essay concludes by discussing the role of urban spaces within the contradictory and chronically unstable geographies of actually existing neoliberalism. Throughout the advanced capitalist world, we suggest, cities have become strategically crucial geographical arenas in which a variety of neoliberal initiatives—along with closely intertwined strategies of crisis displacement and crisis management—have been articulated.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Uncorking the neoliberal bottle: neoliberal critique and urban change in China

Neoliberalism’s theoretical ascendancy within urban geography coincided with the rapid growth of scholarly attention to Chinese cities. Therefore, it is unsurprising that neoliberal causality has been a widely used tool for interpreting China’s spatial transformation. This paper critically reviews some of the most prominent debates on neoliberalism in the Chinese context. China’s Leninist political hierarchy and Dual Structure, crucial institutions for the management and regulation of society and economy under Mao, are now reduced to the quirks of “actually existing neoliberalism.” Neoliberal critique applied to China, however, fails to adequately explain China’s spatial development because it assigns causality for social and economic inequality to globalized processes of capital accumulation while ignoring the continued importance of Maoist institutions in China’s present-day political economy. Uncritical acceptance of neoliberalism’s explanatory power for spatial change has led to flawed and inaccurate portrayals of the development and future trajectories of Chinese cities, and misrepresents the sources of social injustice in Chinese society.     

The Evolution of Neoliberal Urbanism in Moscow, 1992–2015

This article examines the urban development of Moscow from 1992 to 2015, arguing that the city's recent transformation from grey asphalt jungle to a “city comfortable for life” is driven by a process of neoliberal restructuring. In particular, the study finds that a set of multi‐scalar dynamics—namely, the global financial crisis, the rise of a local protest movement, and an intensified rivalry between federal and Muscovite elites—were the key driving forces behind Moscow's current evolution. The work advances a conceptual framework of neoliberal urbanisation that enhances the literature on post‐socialist cities and, more generally, the broader debate on actually existing neoliberalism.     

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.     

Urban Systems of Accumulation: Half a Century of Chilean Neoliberal Urban Policies

We analyse a half‐century of Chilean urban reforms to explain the introduction of a system of urban accumulation by dispossession of public resources and opportunities. Three stages have been conceptualised in the imposition of a neoliberal creative‐destructive process: proto‐neoliberalism, roll‐back and roll‐out periods. Empirical studies have traditionally analysed this process by examining a single urban policy's evolution over time. In this paper, we go beyond these types of studies by performing a systemic analysis of multiple urban policy reforms in Santiago, Chile. We use a genealogical thematic analysis to track changes in laws, government programmes and planning documents from between 1952 and 2014. Our analysis identifies different “urban systems of accumulation” by looking at the interplay of four urban policies: (1) urban planning deregulation; (2) social housing privatisation; (3) devolution of territorial taxes; and (4) decreased public service provision. Moreover, our multidimensional policy analysis in Santiago characterises a more radical, fourth expression in the creative destruction process of “accumulation by dismantling”. Consequently, we advocate for more multidimensional urban policy research that goes beyond a three‐period analysis in order to gain a deeper understanding of contemporary neoliberal creative‐destructive processes in variegated geographies.     

Manufacturing Modernity: Cleaning,Dirt, and Neoliberalism in Chile

Since the coming to power in 1973 of the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, neoliberalism in Chile has been discursively tied to the goal of “modernizing” Chilean society. This discourse of modernization has relied for its articulation upon another important discourse, that of “cleanliness” as a marker of progress: clean spaces are seen as those of modernity whereas dirty spaces are taken to represent social and economic “backwardness”. In this paper, then, we explore how spaces which are considered emblematic of the modern economy—shopping malls, giant office complexes, university campuses—are maintained as clean spaces. However, in order for the discourse of cleanliness as modernity to work, it is crucial that the corridors of mobility—train routes, subways, city streets—which allow passage between these nodes of the modern economy also be maintained as sanitary spaces. The result is the construction discursively of an almost seamless nexus of hygienic spaces, one which stands in contrast to the dirty spaces of the “other” Chile. The paradox in all of this, however, is that the workers who are crucial to this project—janitors—have suffered greatly as a result of neoliberalism.     

Crisis,Continuity and Change: Neoliberalism,the Left and the Future of Capitalism

Abstract: This essay's point of departure is the coincident economic and environmental “crises” of our time. I locate both in the dynamics of capital accumulation on a world‐scale, drawing on the ideas of Marx, Karl Polanyi and James O’Connor. I ask whether the recent profusion of “crisis talk” in the public domain presents an opportunity for progressive new ideas to take hold now that “neoliberalism” has seemingly been de‐legitimated. My answer is that a “post‐neoliberal” future is probably a long way off. I make my case in two stages and at two geographical scales. First, I examine the British social formation as currently constituted and explain why even a leading neoliberal state is failing to reform its ways. Second, I then scale‐up from the domestic level to international affairs. I examine cross‐border emissions trading—arguably the policy tool for mitigating the very real prospects of significant climate change this century. The overall conclusion is this: even though the “first” and “second” contradictions of capital have manifested themselves together and at a global level, there are currently few prospects for systemic reform (never mind revolution) led by a new, twenty‐first century “red‐green” Left.     

“An opportunity to hope and dream”: Disaster Politics and the Emergence of Possibility through Community‐Led Recovery

Recent awareness of the role of neoliberalism in fostering tactics of de‐politicisation has cultivated recognition of a narrowing of democratic possibilities. Disaster, as a time of disruption can provoke a heightened awareness of dynamics of power and contestation. This provides a fertile ground to understand the possibility for de‐politicisation alongside that of resistance and hope. This paper weaves together and contextualises these ideas within a case study of community‐led disaster recovery in the city of ōtautahi Christchurch in Aotearoa New Zealand following a series of devastating earthquakes in 2010 and 2011. In exploring the entangled relationship between crisis and hope I discuss how forms of de‐politicisation can emerge in the disaster context as well as the resistance that also emerges at the grassroots and everyday scale. I emphasise the need to see post politics as present‐yet‐incomplete alongside the potential for participatory and radical forms of social change at the grassroots scale.     

Actually Existing Commons: Three Moments of Space of Community Gardens in New York City

Abstract: This paper analyzes an urban space that functions, it is argued, as the commons in the neoliberal city. The space of community gardens in New York City is “unpacked” according to three Lefebvrian moments of space: the material space, representations of space, and the lived space. Engaging alternative conceptualizations of social relations in the urban space, it complicates and explicates the notion of the commons and its actually existing manifestations.