The shift in the ideological winds toward a "free-market" economy has brought profound effects in urban areas. The Neoliberal City presents an overview of the effect of these changes on today's cities. The term "neoliberalism" was originally used in reference to a set of practices that first-world institutions like the IMF and World Bank impose on third-world countries and cities. The support of unimpeded trade and individual freedoms and the discouragement of state regulation and social spending are the putative centerpieces of this vision. More and more, though, people have come to recognize that first-world cities are undergoing the same processes. In The Neoliberal City, Jason Hackworth argues that neoliberal policies are in fact having a profound effect on the nature and direction of urbanization in the United States and other wealthy countries, and that much can be learned from studying its effect. He explores the impact that neoliberalism has had on three aspects of urbanization in the United States: governance, urban form, and social movements. The American inner city is seen as a crucial battle zone for the wider neoliberal transition primarily because it embodies neoliberalism's antithesis, Keynesian egalitarian liberalism. Focusing on issues such as gentrification in New York City; public-housing policy in New York, Chicago, and Seattle; downtown redevelopment in Phoenix; and urban-landscape change in New Brunswick, N.J., Hackworth shows us how material and symbolic changes to institutions, neighborhoods, and entire urban regions can be traced in part to the rise of neoliberalism.

This book examines the dynamics of neoliberal urban governance through a comparative analysis of Buenos Aires and Chicago, with a special focus on gentrification processes in both cities from 2011 to 2021. This work argues that neoliberal principles, rationales and institutions, along with the elaborate rhetoric that has contributed to their success, are forever present in the US and Latin American region, particularly in global cities like Buenos Aires and Chicago. The year of 2011 marks the (almost) simultaneous election of new executive authorities in each city, and finalizes in 2021—a sufficient time span to observe key patterns, narratives and developments of each neoliberal urban governance. First, this book chronicles the evolving urban neoliberal policies implemented since 2011 in both cities, with special attention to the systematic reduction of affordable housing and privatization of public land that have paved the way for gentrification to advance at a fast pace. Second, it also exposes readers to the prominent rhetoric crafted by local boards, developers, architects, and real estate agents in both cities. Third, this study chronicles how these contemporary neoliberal urban governances currently operate, a critical aspect that remains vastly unexplored. Lastly, until now these governances have been scantly explored from a comparative perspective in Latin American and North American urban settings, and so this book offers a rich new approach.

While participatory development has gained significance in urban planning and policy, it has been explored largely from the perspective of its prescriptive implementation. This book breaks new ground in critically examining the intended and unintended effects of the deployment of citizen participation and public consultation in neoliberal urban governance by the Indian state. The book reveals how emerging formats of participation, as mandatory components of infrastructure projects, public–private partnership proposals and national urban governance policy frameworks, have embedded market-oriented reforms, promoted financialisation of cities, refashioned urban citizenship, privileged certain classes in urban governance at the expense of already marginalised ones, and thereby deepened the fragmentation of urban polities. It also shows how such deployments are rooted in the larger political economy of neoliberal reforms and ascendance of global finance, and how resultant exclusions and fractures in the urban society provoke insurgent mobilisations and subversions. Offering a dialogue between scholars, policy-makers and activists, and drawing upon several case studies of urban development projects across sectors and cities, this volume will be useful for planners, policy-makers, academics, development professionals, social workers and activists, as well as those in urban studies, urban policy/planning, political science, sociology and development studies.

The concept of the neoliberal city has become a key structuring analytical framework in the field of urban studies. It explains both the ongoing transformation of urban policies and the socio-spatial effects of these policies within cities and highlights the prominent role of cities in the new geography of capitalism. Bringing together a team of leading scholars, this book challenges the neoliberal city thesis. It argues that the definition of neoliberalization may be more complex than it seems, resulting in over-simplified explanations of some processes, such as the rise of metropolitan governments or the importance given to urban economic development policies or gentrification. As a structuralist and macro-level theory, the "neoliberal city" does not shed light upon micro-level processes or identify and analyze actors’ logics and practices. Finally, the concept is profoundly influenced by the historical trajectories of the United Kingdom and the United States, and the generalization of this experience to other contexts often leads to a kind of academic ethnocentrism. This book argues that, on its own, the current conceptualizations of neoliberalization are insufficient. Instead, it should be analyzed alongside other transformative processes in order to provide an analytical framework to explain the variety of processes of change, motivations and justifications too easily labelled as urban neoliberalism. This unique and critical contribution will be essential reading for students and scholars alike working in Human Geography, Urban Studies, Economics, Sociology and Public Policy.

Neoliberalism's "market revolution"--realized through practices like privatization, deregulation, fiscal devolution, and workfare programs--has had a transformative effect on contemporary cities. The consequences of market-oriented politics for urban life have been widely studied, but less attention has been given to how grassroots groups, nongovernmental organizations, and progressive city administrations are fighting back. In case studies written from a variety of theoretical and political perspectives, this book examines how struggles around such issues as affordable housing, public services and space, neighborhood sustainability, living wages, workers' rights, fair trade, and democratic governance are reshaping urban political geographies in North America and around the world.

This book argues that the concepts of ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘neoliberalisation,’ while in common use across the whole range of social sciences, have thus far been generally overlooked in planning theory and the analysis of planning practice. Offering insights from papers presented during a conference session at a meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Boston in 2008 and a number of commissioned chapters, this book fills this significant hiatus in the study of planning. What the case studies from Africa, Asia, North-America and Europe included in this volume have in common is that they all reveal the uneasy cohabitation of ‘planning’ – some kind of state intervention for the betterment of our built and natural environment – and ‘neoliberalism’ – a belief in the superiority of market mechanisms to organize land use and the inferiority of its opposite, state intervention. Planning, if anything, may be seen as being in direct contrast to neoliberalism, as something that should be rolled back or even annihilated through neoliberal practice. To combine ‘neoliberal’ and ‘planning’ in one phrase then seems awkward at best, and an outright oxymoron at worst. To admit to the very existence or epistemological possibility of ‘neoliberal planning’ may appear to be a total surrender of state planning to market superiority, or in other words, the simple acceptance that the management of buildings, transport infrastructure, parks, conservation areas etc. beyond the profit principle has reached its limits in the 21st century. Planning in this case would be reduced to a mere facilitator of ‘market forces’ in the city, be it gentle or authoritarian. Yet in spite of these contradictions and outright impossibilities, planners operate within, contribute to, resist or temper an increasingly neoliberal mode of producing spaces and places, or the revival of profit-driven changes in land use. It is this contradiction between the serving of private profit-seeking interests while actually seeking the public betterment of cities that this volume has sought to describe, explore, analyze and make sense of through a set of case studies covering a wide range of planning issues in various countries. This book lays bare just how spatial planning functions in an age of market triumphalism, how planners respond to the overruling profit principle in land allocation and what is left of non-profit driven developments.

Neoliberal Spatial Governance explores the changing nature of English town and city planning as it has slowly but clearly transformed. Once a system for regulating and balancing change in the built and natural environments in the public interest, planning now finds itself facilitating development and economic growth for narrow, sectional interests. Whilst there is a lip service towards traditional values, the progressive aims and inclusivity that provided planning’s legitimacy and broad support have now largely disappeared. The result is a growing backlash of distrust and discontent as planning has evolved into neoliberal spatial governance. The tragedy of this change is that at a time when planning has a critical role in tackling major issues such as housing affordability and climate change, it finds itself poorly resourced with low professional morale, lacking legitimacy and support from local communities, accused of bureaucracy and ‘red tape’ from businesses and ministers and subject to regular, disruptive reforms. Yet all is not lost. There is still demand and support for more comprehensive and progressive planning, one that is not purely driven by the needs of developers and investors. Resistance against the idea that planning exists to help roll out development, is growing. Neoliberal Spatial Governance explores the background and implications of the changes in planning under the governments of the past four decades and the ways we might think about halting and reversing this shift.