Cities continue to be key sites for the production and contestation of inequalities generated by an ongoing but troubled neoliberal project. Neoliberalism’s onslaught across the globe now shapes diverse inequalities -- poverty, segregation, racism, social exclusion, homelessness -- as city inhabitants feel the brunt of privatization, state re-organization, and punishing social policy. This book examines the relationship between persistent neoliberalism and the production and contestation of inequalities in cities across the world. Case studies of current city realities reveal a richly place-specific and generalizable neoliberal condition that further deepens the economic, social, and political relations that give rise to diverse inequalities. Diverse cases also show how people struggle against a neoliberal ethos and hence the open-endedness of futures in these cities.

Cities continue to be key sites for the production and contestation of inequalities generated by an ongoing but troubled neoliberal project. Neoliberalism’s onslaught across the globe now shapes diverse inequalities -- poverty, segregation, racism, social exclusion, homelessness -- as city inhabitants feel the brunt of privatization, state re-organization, and punishing social policy. This book examines the relationship between persistent neoliberalism and the production and contestation of inequalities in cities across the world. Case studies of current city realities reveal a richly place-specific and generalizable neoliberal condition that further deepens the economic, social, and political relations that give rise to diverse inequalities. Diverse cases also show how people struggle against a neoliberal ethos and hence the open-endedness of futures in these cities.

Across the world, cities are being reshaped in myriad ways by neoliberal forms of globalization, a process of urban restructuring with significant implications for educational policy and practices. The chapters in this collection speak to two complementary but analytically distinguishable aspects of the interplay between education, globalization, cities, and neoliberalism. The first aspect relates to the macro relationships between these powerful global forces on the one hand, and cities and their schools on the other. In particular the book considers the stratifying dynamics that exacerbate already existing inequalities related to race, ethnicity, language, class, and gender—inequalities entailing differential access to the city’s various resources. The second aspect deals with the cultural politics, and logics, of these changes in the city. This recognises that globalization is not simply imposed on the city, but rather becomes insinuated into its fabric through the actions and the agency of local actors and social movements. Against this backdrop, the chapters document how the educational politics of urban contexts in the United States, India, Canada, South Africa and Brazil should be understood as sites in which neoliberal forms of globalization are localised, reproduced, and potentially contested. This book was originally published as a special issue of Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education.

Latin America is one of the most urbanized regions of the world. To understand Latin America today it is important to trace the origins and characteristics of the urban-rural divide, inequalities within urban areas, and the prospects for change. This is particularly important and timely given the challenges of widening environmental and social disparities, climate change, and climate justice. The authors critically analyze urban issues within the context of the national and regional political economy, neoliberal governance, and urban social movements. Latin America’s cities are sharply divided into wealthy enclaves and large peripheral areas, reflecting deep social and economic inequalities, leading to notable movements and reforms. This text explores Latin American cities, their history, similarities and differences, and current problems.

The literature on ‘world cities’ has had an enormous influence on urban theory and planning alike. From Manila to London, academics and policy makers have attempted to understand, and to some extent strive for, world city status. This book is a study of Cape Town’s standing in this network of urban centres, and an investigation of the conceptual appropriateness of this world city hypothesis. Drawing on more than a dozen years of fieldwork in Cape Town, McDonald provides an historical overview of institutional and structural reforms, examining fiscal imbalances, political marginalization, (de)racialization, privatization and other neoliberal changes. By examining and analyzes these reforms and changes, McDonald contributes the first radical critique of the world city literature from a developing country perspective.

This edited volume is a lively and timely appraisal of “ordinary cities” as they struggle to implement creative redevelopment and economic growth strategies to enhance their global competitiveness. The book is concerned with new and often unanticipated inequalities that have emerged from this new city movement. As chronicled, such cities – Cleveland (USA), Heidelberg (Germany), Oxford (UK), Groningen (Netherlands), Montpellier (France), but also cities from the Global South such as Cachoeira (Brazil) and Delhi (India) – now experience new and unexpected realities of poverty, segregation, neglect of the poor, racial and ethnic strife. To date planners, academics, and policy analysts have paid little attention to the connections between this drive in these cities to be more creative and the inequalities that have followed. This book, keenly making these connections, highlights the limited visions that have been applied in this planning drive to make these cities more creative and ultimately more globally competitive.

Traces decades of troubled attempts to fund private answers to public urban problems The American city has long been a laboratory for austerity, governmental decentralization, and market-based solutions to urgent public problems such as affordable housing, criminal justice, and education. Through richly told case studies from Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and New York, Neoliberal Cities provides the necessary context to understand the always intensifying racial and economic inequality in and around the city center. In this original collection of essays, urban historians and sociologists trace the role that public policies have played in reshaping cities, with particular attention to labor, the privatization of public services, the collapse of welfare, the rise of gentrification, the expansion of the carceral state, and the politics of community control. In so doing, Neoliberal Cities offers a bottom-up approach to social scientific, theoretical, and historical accounts of urban America, exploring the ways that activists and grassroots organizations, as well as ordinary citizens, came to terms with new market-oriented public policies promoted by multinational corporations, financial institutions, and political parties. Neoliberal Cities offers new scaffolding for urban and metropolitan change, with attention to the interaction between policymaking, city planning, social movements, and the market.