Bob Jessop: The State and Neoliberal Urban Restructuring

Bob Jessop is the state theorist who gave critical urban studies its framework for understanding how neoliberalism reorganised cities. A sociologist at Lancaster University, Jessop developed from the 1980s the strategic-relational approach, according to which the state is neither a neutral apparatus nor a simple instrument of capital but a set of institutions that favours some strategies and actors over others. In The Future of the Capitalist State (2002) he applied that approach to the transformation of the welfare state, and with Neil Brenner he extended the analysis to space, showing that cities are the stage on which the neoliberal state becomes concrete.

From the Keynesian welfare state to the Schumpeterian workfare regime

His central thesis describes a transition between two types of state. The postwar Keynesian welfare national state pursued full employment, redistributed at national scale and treated cities as pieces of a territory to be balanced. The Schumpeterian workfare postnational regime that replaces it from the 1980s prioritises innovation and competitiveness, makes social benefits conditional on work, transfers functions upward, to the European Union and international bodies, and downward, to regions and cities, and delegates to public-private networks what the administration once did. Each word of the name marks a change of goal, scale and mode of governing.

The entrepreneurial city: the state as facilitator of capital

For cities, that transition has direct consequences. If the state no longer balances the territory but backs competitive places, urban governments must attract investment, talent and events to survive. Jessop calls this the entrepreneurial city, in dialogue with David Harvey: partnerships with developers, flagship projects, city marketing and a social policy subordinated to competitiveness. It is not that the state withdraws, Jessop insists, but that it changes function: from provider of welfare to facilitator of capital, with the same capacity for coercion and new instruments of management.

Strategic selectivity: why the outcome is not written

The strategic-relational approach also offers a tool for understanding why some cities follow one path and others another. The state has a strategic selectivity: its rules, scales and procedures favour certain interests, but that selectivity is not closed and can be contested. A neighbourhood movement, a municipal government or a regional coalition can exploit the contradictions between levels of government to impose alternative strategies. Jessop rejects both economic determinism and the idea that politics is autonomous: the outcome depends on the relationship between structure and the strategies of actors.

State spatial strategies and territorial inequality

With Brenner, Jessop developed the notion of state spatial strategies. Every state policy privileges some places and scales: special economic zones, metropolitan areas, infrastructure corridors or neighbourhoods targeted for regeneration are decisions about where to concentrate resources and where not to. That geography of the state explains the growing inequality between winning and losing regions and helps read phenomena such as gentrification induced by public projects or competition between cities for headquarters and events. In The State: Past, Present, Future (2015) Jessop synthesised four decades of work along these lines.

Jessop's work has been criticised for its conceptual density and for paying more attention to structures than to the everyday life of cities, but its influence on critical urban geography is hard to overstate. It offers an explanation of how neoliberalism settled into institutions without any need for conspiracy, and a reason not to resign oneself: if the state is a relation and not a thing, its selectivities can be changed. For those who govern or study cities, that idea turns every plan, every budget and every scale of decision into a terrain of political dispute.