Whose City? Contradictions and Challenges in Neoliberal Urbanism

Margit Mayer

City University Hong Kong, October 10, 2013

This presentation is part of, a late addition to the conference "Whose City?" which took place in May here at the Dept. of Public and Social Administration – taking off from the late British urban sociologist Ray Pahl's 1969 book with the same title. Looking back at the book from today's vantage point, I was struck by both similarities and differences in the contestations over who cities are supposed to be for, who is running them and in whose interests. Last weekend (Sept 28) in cities across Germany large demonstrations took place under the banner "The City belongs to all" – protesting rising rents, displacement, forced evictions, and the privatization processes underlying all these and the entrepreneurialization of the city governments themselves. In Berlin, thousands were asking "Whose city is Berlin?" and in Hamburg…

Ray Pahl was part of a generation of radical urban scholars who were disenchanted with the hegemonic urban sociology of the time, dominated by functionalism and the Chicago School themes of urban ecology, urban ways of life, and sharply separated from urban economics. This approach felt no longer adequate to "the new urban sociologists" who saw a plethora of urban problems that came to the fore with the crisis of Fordism, and which they felt could no longer be resolved with the tools of technocratic planning that was so essential to Fordist urbanism. They had an ambivalent relation to the Keynesian-welfarist and social-collectivist institutions, which did hold the potential for redistributive justice. So Pahl explicitly embraced welfare statism, but he problematized the role of the 'urban managers' and their ideologies shaping the urban environment and responsible for the uneven distribution of resources in local areas.

While this neo-Weberian perspective so well articulated by Pahl[1] (probably on the basis of his first-hand experience and disillusionment with the planning process he got to participate in as sociologist adviser to various regional plans developed by government bodies) flourished in Britain, in other European countries such as France and Italy, where the social struggles of the 1960s and 70s were strongest, the radical urban scholars were more Marxist in orientation. Foremost amongst them was Manuel Castells (1977) who saw class relations and conflicting class interests behind the unequal access to scarce urban resources, and thus suggested seeing the city in terms of class struggle over collective consumption.

Both tendencies reflect the context in which they emerged and were operating: the Keynesian city, which represented a climax of a very direct relationship between the urban scale and social reproduction. Where the state, in all the advanced western capitalist countries, had taken over a large part of social reproduction and social investment in the urban realm, in more or less authoritarian, more or less technocratic fashion. In this context it made a lot of sense for the radical scholarship that sought to transcend the traditional Chicago School themes, to define the urban in categories of collective consumption (for which Marxist approach was helpful, Castells) or in terms of the distribution of resources through urban managers (for which Weberian perspective emphasizing the role of bureaucracy and the distribution of life chances was helpful, Pahl).

The urban movements of the time also reflected their context: they all responded to or were triggered by the norms and standardization of the Fordist-Keynesian city, its functional zoning, suburbanization, urban renewal, and the "inhospitability" of urban space, as Alexander Mitscherlich famously described the result (Mitscherlich 1965). In Europe, they were mostly spearheaded by youth, students, and migrant workers, whereas in the US the urban rebellions were led by those most excluded from Fordist prosperity, especially by Afro-Americans. Central for the movements in all these western cities was the ‘reproductive sphere’ and issues of 'collective consumption’: demands focused on public infrastructures and services, challenging both the cultural norms and the price and quality of public infrastructures. The movements demanded – just like the sociologist Pahl - not only improved institutions of collective consumption, but also more participation in the decision-making about their design so they would actually meet people's needs.[2] In many cities, the movements developed progressive alternative projects of their own, generating a vibrant infrastructure of community and youth and cultural centers, alternative and feminist collectives, autonomous media, and a host of other self-managed projects. In spite of the breadth of the mobilizations and the vibrancy of the movement cultures at the time, it was not possible during this period to join the movements made up of the culturally and politically alienated,primarily young activists, with those discriminated by or excluded from the blessings of the Fordist model (cf. Marcuse 2009).[3]

This is very different from the neoliberal urbanism confronting today's urban movements and today's urban scholars.

Contemporary neoliberal urbanism

Cities played a central role for the Fordist systems of production, reproduction, and redistribution – through providing the infrastructure for collective consumption, which facilitated a certain way of life, which was essential to guaranteeing accumulation – as long as that virtuous cycle functioned. Once the internal and external limits of this Fordist growth model were reached and the crisis of Fordism set in, cities became key arenas for neoliberal rollback strategies, which consisted in dismantling social welfare infrastructures. In the following phases of neoliberalization, their strategic significance as sites for innovation and growth, and as zones of devolved governance, positioned cities at the forefront of neoliberal rollout programs.[4]

As a result, they now simultaneously figure as:

- sites of regulatory “problems” (ranging from poverty, crime, joblessness, to concentration of informal economies, traffic and environmental problems),

-as a consequence, sites of putative regulatory “solutions” (where new policy prototypes are developed and experimented with, which, if effective, will travel around the world)

- but finally also sites of contradictions and conflicts, where opposition to and protest against such projects/"solutions" manifest – (this is what I want to focus on).

We can roughly distinguish four phases of neoliberalization (roll-back of the 1980s: reacting to the limits of the Keynesian city; roll-out of the 1990s; then, starting with the dot.com crash of 2001 a third phase, when urbanization became a global phenomenon thanks to the integration of financial markets to debt-finance urban development around the world to rekindle new growth). The latest, current round of neoliberalization (where the neoliberal project has been discredited by the crash and the following economic crisis, but certainly not weakened) is characterized by a devolved form of extreme fiscal constraint (whereas private capital owners don't know what to do with their growing returns), which in the still stable countries is projected largely on to subnational state scales, while in Southern Europe it manifests on national levels as well, thanks to the politics of the EU and IMF. Everywhere the municipalities are affected (except in the very flourishing wealthy cities), many of them, especially in the U.S., but not only there, have developed an advanced form of austerity politics (2.0), which now not only dismantles Fordist social welfare infrastructures, but it grinds away at what has survived the repeated rounds of cut-backs and neoliberal restructuring.

Four features of contemporary forms of neoliberal urbanism,four ways in which urban policy makers try to cope with the fall-out of the crisis, are relevant in our context of understanding the dynamics of social movements, because I see these features at the bottom of various contemporary conflicts and contestations:

(i) In terms of overarching political strategy, neoliberal urbanism at this juncture is still characterized by the pursuit of growth first, and urban managers still use various forms of urban spectacles and signature events to accelerate investment flows into the city. For better placements in the interurban rivalry, most cities now engage in forms of locational politics that make use of symbolic and less costly forms of festivalization, and look for low-cost ways to attract "creative classes" to help culturally upgrade their brand. Low-budget ways of doing that include the fostering of internet cafes and coffee shops to open up, but policy-makers are also on the lookout for innovative, especially culture-led efforts to mobilize city space for (unfettered) growth. These cultural branding strategies often benefit or incorporate alternative movements as elements of such 'creative city' upgrading, at least those movements that can easily be fitted into creative city projects -- while further displacing or marginalizing groups lacking such symbolic cultural resources.

(ii) In terms of modes of governance, cities have been adoptingentrepreneurial forms of governancein more and more policy areas: they make use of presumably efficient business models and privatized forms of governance, which they haveincreasingly been complementingwith an increase in bidding for (speculative) investments[5], which has entailed more out-contracting and a shift towards task- and project-driven initiatives such as developing a particular part of town, or competing for mega-events such as Olympics or World Cups, or International Building Exhibits, Garden Shows, etc. In these endeavors mayors and their partners from the business sector (often bypassing council chambers) set up specialagencies to deliver target-driven initiatives that focus on specific concrete objectives. To the extent that this type of governance still entails the production of hegemony, this occurs via small-scale involvement: instead of modes of regulation that were designed in tripartistic, corporate and long-term ways, we now see flexible, small, and constantly changing concessions to changing particular groups. In this ad-hoc and informalized political process, global developers and international investors have come to play even more leading roles: Increasingly it is them or their capital flowing into the upgrading of (old and new) urban centers that shape the urban environment.

These strategies and their lack of public transparency have also given rise to all kinds of struggles over the (erosion of) representative democracy, as more and more people feel excluded from 'the right to the city.'

(iii) In terms of the relation between the Public and the Private, there has been intensifiedprivatization of public infrastructures and services (from public transport and utilities to social housing; especially the socially oriented institutions of the public sector have been rolled back and re- (or dis-)organized and exposed to the market [cf. Hodkinson 2012[6]]). (But counter-movements, especially in energy and water).

In this raiding of public coffers, often by government-sponsored private companies, who are turning public infrastructure and services into options for expanded capital accumulation by dispossession, privatization is actually turning into financialization, as the urban 'scarce' resources (Pahl) are turned into speculative stock.

Intensification of privatization has equally pertained to land: extorting maximal land rent works best through dedicating more and more private spaces to elite consumption, while the privatization of other (public) areas, such as shopping malls or train stations[7]has meant limiting access to and/or making the use of collective infrastructures more expensive.Whole urban centers – from Paris, Manhattan and London all the way to Singapur and right here in Hong Kong – are becoming "exclusive citadels of the elites" (Financial Times). "(T)he middle classes and small companies are falling victim to class-cleansing. Global cities are becoming patrician ghettos" (Kuper 2013).

These enclosure strategies have also triggered a great variety of contestation, from protests against rent increases via occupations of social centers to guerilla actions in the semi-public privatized spaces of surveillance and consumption (cf. Belina).[8]

(iv) Finally, the neoliberal tool kit for dealing withsocial polarizationthat's been intensified with the above three strategies has also changed. During the roll-out phase it consisted of area-based programs (such as Quartiersmanagement / Soziale Stadt in Germany, similar mixes of neighborhood, revitalization, and activation programs in Britain, France, US) that were to stop the presumed downward spirals in "blighted" neighborhoods. Such programs have been severely curtailed and are superseded by a novel two-pronged policy. It consists, on the one hand, of more and less explicit displacement policies that are pushing the poor and "unfit" to further outskirts or into invisible interstices of blight within the urban walls[9]; and on the other of a bouquet of more benign programsseeking to incorporate impoverished, marginalized areas as well as social groups into upgrading processes, to thereby undergird their efforts to attract growth, investors, creative professionals, and tourists. Large [development] projects and urban spectacles such as Garden Shows, IBA (International Building Exhibit) are thus set up in industrial or social housing districts such as Hamburg Wilhelmsburg, and luxury hotels in the Bronx in NYC in order to upgrade those (with controversial effects, see the dispute between Sassen and aku[10]) and to induce a gradual residential shift.

Part of this benign set of programs are also new policies in support of entrepreneurial migrants in the informal sector, in the context of new [diversity-based] integration strategies (Rodatz 2012).

Two examples:Creative city politics and austerity urbanism

While all these instruments and policies have implications for movements – some trigger protest directly, others impact the movements through the way they shape the political opportunity structure –, I want to focus specifically on two sets of policies that are particularly noteworthy in their contradictory effects on social movements.

The first set of policies, which has evolved as a an increasingly popular growth-oriented strategy and as part of the benign strategies dealing with formerly marginal urban areas (i and iv) can be summed up under the heading of 'creative city policies.' Creativity has become a key concept signaling urban competitiveness, and a broad array of measures (from attracting knowledge-intensive services to subsidizing cultural and creative economies) has been designed to foster a concentration of firms and activities in the areas of new media, new technologies, fashion, advertisement, tourism and cultural industries. The assumption is that only these types of creative industrieswill generate growth in today's first world cities. In order to attract these along with the so-called 'creative classes' (and tourists and investors) urban managers have become enamored with image construction, place branding, and city marketing, while they continue to rely on ever-expanding gentrification and upgrading strategies (which, however, threaten and displace some of the necessary creative actors) (Grodach 2013)

Making use of creativity-led economic and urban development and cultural revitalization as strategies to enhance their unique brand and improve their (global) image, policy makers have also designed various programs and subsidies for artists and other creative professionals, thus fostering the emergence of conducive spaces for (sub)cultural and alternative movement activists. They have also supported, in countries like Germany for the first time, certain migrant communities, whose entrepreneurial activities now come to be seen as evidence of and catalyst for a cosmopolitan culture that welcomes not only the globally mobile business elites, but (with diversity concepts replacing the outdated politics of multiculturalism) also the 'ground personnel' of globalization. [11]

In this re-valuation of soft locational assets, not only the informal economic activities of migrants and the cultural milieus of artists and other 'creatives'have experienced a new appreciation, but alsoradical squats and oppositional movements who, in their own way, mark urban space as attractive, have also been received with more positive attention than the primarily punitive and repressive type of the past. In fact, municipal actors have made advances to movement groups, especially to those whose initiatives can well be tied into the locally specific marketing and upgrading strategies to attract creatives, tourists and investors (cf. Novy/Colomb 2013). As urban governments have discovered cultural revitalization and creativity-based urban development as useful strategies for improving their image, their willingness has grown to meet the demands of movement groups and make concessions. In Hamburg the right to the city activists succeeded only after intense mobilization to save their squatted buildings in the historic Gängeviertel (Füllner/Templin 2011), in other places local politicians did not need such massive pressure to embrace subcultural activism as a locational asset.Such advances happen in all types of cities, from bankrupt Detroit to hip Berlin, where milieus made up of music scenes and hip neighborhoods filled with clubs and beach bars have become key to official city marketing discourses (vgl. Scharenberg/ Bader 2009: 331 for Berlin, Hughes 2011 und Tulloch 2011 for Detroit). Even squats and self-managed social centers may fit into this concept: the sub- and countercultural activists charge such spaces with cultural capital, which, in the scheme of 'creative city' policy then becomes transformed by investors into economic capital.[12]Formerly squatted buildings, open spaces, and other 'biotopes,' which precarious artists made interesting or anarchists spiffed up, become harnessed by clever city officials and (especially real estate) capital as branding assets that contribute to the image of 'cool cities' or 'happening places'.[13]