Neoliberalism
Urban neoliberalism is the dominant way of governing cities since the 1980s: the municipality stops providing and starts competing to attract investment, privatises services, promotes with public money and sells land and housing to the market. David Harvey called it the shift from managerialism to entrepreneurialism (1989).
Its products are recognisable: the mega-event, the star museum, the innovation district, the public-private partnership. Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore described how it is applied differently in each place —actually existing neoliberalism—; Andy Merrifield and Peter Marcuse, its effects on the right to the city.
Videos on this term (23)
- Urban history
Christine Boyer: How the City Turns Memory into a Tool of Power
M. Christine Boyer shows in The City of Collective Memory that heritage and urban images are selected and…
Christine Boyer 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Fulong Wu: The Chinese State Still Leads Urban Transformation
Fulong Wu explains how China's shift to a market economy changed urban production without removing the state: land,…
Fulong Wu 3 min read - Urban economy
Neoliberalism from Below: Verónica Gago's Popular Economies
Verónica Gago's neoliberalism from below explains how popular economies, such as La Salada in Buenos Aires,…
2 min read - Public space
Raúl Zibechi: Urban Social Movements and Territories in Resistance
Raúl Zibechi argues that Latin America's urban movements build non-state powers in their neighbourhoods. His ideas…
Raúl Zibechi 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Bob Jessop: The State and Neoliberal Urban Restructuring
Bob Jessop explains how the state moved from Keynesian welfare to competitive workfare and what it means for…
Bob Jessop 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
David Theo Goldberg: Race, Space and Power in Cities
David Theo Goldberg shows that racism organises urban space: ghettos, peripheries and zoning manufacture race.
David Theo Goldberg 3 min read - Urban economy
Nik Theodore: Neoliberal Urbanism, Informal Work and Migrants
Nik Theodore explains how neoliberal urbanism produces precarity, what his studies of day labourers and migrants in…
Nik Theodore 2 min read - Urban economy
Rebel Cities by David Harvey: Right to the City and Urban Revolution
Rebel Cities (2012) by David Harvey explains that capitalism's crises have urban roots and that the right to the…
David Harvey 3 min read - Urban economy
Andy Merrifield: Critique of Neoliberalism and the Right to the City
Andy Merrifield describes the neoliberal city as parasitic and proposes replacing the right to the city with a…
Andy Merrifield 2 min read - Urban economy
Peter Marcuse: Social Justice and Urbanism Against Neoliberalism
Peter Marcuse explained how neoliberalism put planning at the service of capital and what a just city requires.…
Peter Marcuse 2 min read - Urban economy
Jamie Peck: Constructions of Neoliberal Reason and the City
Jamie Peck's Constructions of Neoliberal Reason explains neoliberalism as a process that finds its laboratory in…
Jamie Peck 2 min read - Housing
Martha Rosler: art against gentrification
How Martha Rosler uses art to critique gentrification and urban capitalism: from If You Lived Here… to the city…
Martha Rosler 2 min read - Urban AI
Manuel Castells: from neighbourhood struggle to network city
Castells read urban movements as structural responses to power, then showed how information networks reconfigured…
Manuel Castells 2 min read - Urban economy
Critical Urban Studies by Davies and Imbroscio: Social Justice
Critical Urban Studies (2010), edited by Jonathan Davies and David Imbroscio, revisits urban studies from social…
2 min read - Urban economy
David Harvey: the right to the city under neoliberalism
David Harvey explains how neoliberalism turned housing into a commodity, and why the right to the city means…
David Harvey 3 min read - Housing
Loïc Wacquant: why the ghetto is not an accident
Wacquant compares American ghettos with French banlieues and shows that advanced marginality is not residual but…
2 min read - Urban economy
Poverty Capital by Ananya Roy: The Critique of Microfinance
Poverty Capital (2010) by Ananya Roy shows how microfinance turned poverty into a market. From Grameen to…
Ananya Roy 2 min read - Housing
Neil Smith and Gentrification: Rent Gap and the Revanchist City
Neil Smith explained why gentrification happens: the rent gap that draws capital and the revanchist city that…
Neil Smith 2 min read - Housing
Alfredo Rodríguez: Santiago, Social Housing and Los con Techo
Alfredo Rodríguez documented how Chilean housing policy produced ghettos on Santiago's periphery.
Alfredo Rodríguez 3 min read - Public space
Margit Mayer and the Struggle for the Right to the City
Margit Mayer explains how urban movements win the right to the city and how neoliberalism co-opts them with mottos…
Margit Mayer 3 min read - Urban economy
Touristification: Zukin, Sassen and the city for tourists
What touristification is and how Sharon Zukin (Naked City) and Saskia Sassen explain it: authenticity turned into a…
2 min read - Public space
Citizen Participation in Urban Governance: Keys and Limits
Citizen participation decides who shapes the city. What Neil Brenner and Saskia Sassen explain, which mechanisms…
2 min read - Urban economy
How Capitalism Shapes Cities: David M. Gordon and Harvey
How capitalism shapes cities according to urban political economy: David M. Gordon's three phases, Harvey's…
2 min read
