Nik Theodore

Cities and the Geographies of “Actually Existing Neoliberalism”

This essay elaborates a critical geographical perspective on neoliberalism that emphasizes (a) the path–dependent character of neoliberal reform projects and (b) the strategic role of cities in the contemporary remaking of political–economic space. We begin by presenting the methodological foundations for an approach to the geographies of what we term “actually existing neoliberalism.” In contrast to neoliberal ideology, in which market forces are assumed to operate according to immutable laws no matter where they are “unleashed,” we emphasize the contextual embeddedness of neoliberal restructuring projects insofar as they have been produced within national, regional, and local contexts defined by the legacies of inherited institutional frameworks, policy regimes, regulatory practices, and political struggles. An adequate understanding of actually existing neoliberalism must therefore explore the path–dependent, contextually specific interactions between inherited regulatory landscapes and emergent neoliberal, market–oriented restructuring projects at a broad range of geographical scales. These considerations lead to a conceptualization of contemporary neoliberalization processes as catalysts and expressions of an ongoing creative destruction of political–economic space at multiple geographical scales. While the neoliberal restructuring projects of the last two decades have not established a coherent basis for sustainable capitalist growth, it can be argued that they have nonetheless profoundly reworked the institutional infrastructures upon which Fordist–Keynesian capitalism was grounded. The concept of creative destruction is presented as a useful means for describing the geographically uneven, socially regressive, and politically volatile trajectories of institutional/spatial change that have been crystallizing under these conditions. The essay concludes by discussing the role of urban spaces within the contradictory and chronically unstable geographies of actually existing neoliberalism. Throughout the advanced capitalist world, we suggest, cities have become strategically crucial geographical arenas in which a variety of neoliberal initiatives—along with closely intertwined strategies of crisis displacement and crisis management—have been articulated.

Neoliberal Urbanism: Models, Moments, Mutations

In this article, we analyze the connections between neoliberalization processes and urban transformations. Cities have become strategically central sites in the uneven, crisis-laden advance of neoliberal restructuring projects. However, in contrast to neoliberal ideology, our analysis draws attention to the path-dependent interactions between neoliberal projects of restructuring and inherited institutional and spatial landscapes. Accordingly, we emphasize the geographically variable, yet multiscalar and translocally interconnected, nature of neoliberal urbanism. We also suggest that cities are sites of serial policy failure as well as resistance to neoliberal programs of urban restructuring. For these reasons, urban regions provide an important reference point for understanding some of the limits, contradictions and mutations of the neoliberal project since the 1990s.

Exporting workfare/importing welfare-to-work: exploring the politics of Third Way policy transfer

Abstract The paper presents a critical analysis of ‘policy transfers’ in the field of welfare-to-work or ‘workfare’ programming, focusing on recent experiences in the United Kingdom and the United States. In the 1990s, work-based welfare reform has been established as a policy orthodoxy, a social-policy counterpart to ‘flexible’ modes of labour-market governance. Increasingly, this is celebrated as a paradigmatic example of ‘Third Way’ policy-making. While it has become something of a cliche that British welfare policy has been ‘Americanised’ in recent years, detailed analysis of the policy formation and development process around the Labour Governments New Deal programme for the young unemployed reveals that this has indeed been a sphere of intensive and multi-lateral policy transfers. Categorically, this does not mean that some simple process of policy ‘convergence’ is underway, as the form and function of such policies is prone to change as they are translated and re-embedded within and between different institutional, economic and political contexts (at the local and national scales). Rather paradoxically, while the turnover of the policy-making cycle seems to be accelerating in the field of welfare-to-work — as implementation schedules are intensified, as ‘reform’ becomes a systemic condition, and as extra-local policy learning and emulation is normalised — the effectiveness of policies and programmes remains stubbornly dependent on local economic and institutional conditions — as ‘successful’ programmes remain very difficult to replicate in other locations, as tendentially-decentralising policy regimes exhibit growing spatial unevenness, and as local labour market conditions continue to exert an inordinate influence on programme outcomes. Policy-makers on both sides of the Atlantic are increasingly pinning their hopes on decentralised modes of policy delivery as a means of animating (supposedly latent) innovatory capacity at the local level, despite the growing evidence that sustainable solutions to the problems of unemployment and poverty lie outside the neoliberal policy agenda of market-orientated workfare.

Neoliberalism and the urban condition

Over two decades ago, the term “restructuring” became a popular label for describing the tumultuous political‐economic and spatial transformations that were unfolding across the global urban system. As Edward Soja (1987: 178; italics in original) indicated in a classic formulation: Restructuring is meant to convey a break in secular trends and a shift towards a significantly different order and configuration of social, economic and political life. It thus evokes a sequence of breaking down and building up again, deconstruction and attempted reconstitution, arising from certain incapacities or weaknesses in the established order which preclude conventional adaptations and demand significant structural change instead […] Restructuring implies flux and transition, offensive and defensive postures, a complex mix of continuity and change. In the 1980s and early 1990s, scholars mobilized a variety of categories—including, among others, deindustrialization, reindustrialization, post‐Fordism, internationalization, global city formation, urban entrepreneurialism, informalization, gentrification and sociospatial polarization—in order to describe and theorize the ongoing deconstruction and attempted reconstitution of urban social space. These concepts provided key intellectual tools through which a generation of urbanists could elaborate detailed empirical studies of ongoing urban transformations both in North America and beyond. In the early 2000s, such concepts remain central to urban political economy, but they are now being complemented by references to “neoliberalism,” which is increasingly seen as an essential descriptor of the contemporary urban condition. This widening and deepening interest in the problematic of neoliberalism among urban scholars is evident in the papers presented in this special issue of CITY: all deploy variations on this terminology—“neoliberalism,” “neoliberal,” “neoliberalized,” “neoliberalization,” and so forth—in order to interpret major aspects of contemporary urban restructuring in North American cities. At the same time, like earlier analysts of urban restructuring, the contributors to this special issue reject linear models of urban transition, emphasizing instead its uneven, contentious, volatile and uncertain character. Indeed, each of the contributions included here suggestively illustrates Soja’s conception of restructuring: whether implicitly or explicitly, each postulates a systemic breakdown of established forms of urban life (generally associated with postwar, Fordist‐Keynesian capitalism) and the subsequent proliferation of social, political, discursive, and representational struggles to create a transformed, “neoliberalized” urban order.

Follow the Policy: A Distended Case Approach

The paper reflects on the methodological challenges involved in research on the movement and mutation of fast-moving policies, through globalizing networks and across translocal settings. Inspired by ‘follow the thing’ methods and by the global ethnography program, it outlines a distended case-study approach to the study of policy mobilities.

Neoliberal Urbanism Redux

Neoliberalization processes have been reshaping the landscapes of urban development for more than three decades, but their forms and consequences continue to evolve through an eclectic blend of failure and crisis, regulatory experimentation, and policy transfer across places, territories and scales. The proliferation of familiar neoliberal discourses and policy formulations in the aftermath of the 2007-09 world financial crisis masks evidence of more deeply rooted transformations of policies, institutions and spaces that continue to combatively remake terrains of urban development. Accordingly, the critical intellectual project of deciphering the problematic of neoliberal urbanism must continue to evolve. This essay outlines some of the methodological and political challenges associated with (re)constructing a ′moving map′ of post-crisis neoliberalization processes. We affirm a form of critical urban theory that adopts a restlessly antagonistic stance towards orthodox urban formations and their dominant ideologies, institutional arrangements and societal effects, tracking their endemic policy failures and crisis tendencies while at the same time demarcating potential terrains for heterodox, radical and/or insurgent theories and practices of emancipatory social change.

Voting With Their Feet Nonprofit Organizations and Immigrant Mobilization

In 2006 immigrants and their supporters participated in a series of marches in cities throughout the United States. The enormous size and scale of the demonstrations were surprising to some observers, who saw the marches as a spontaneous outburst of frustration. This article argues the unprecedented turnout at the demonstrations should be seen not as a spontaneous outburst but in large part the result of long-standing cooperative efforts and networks of immigrant-serving nonprofit organizations. Immigrant-serving organizations were at the forefront of organizing public education campaigns, advocacy activities, and community mobilization efforts leading up to the demonstrations. Using Chicago and New York City as case studies, the article analyzes data from a survey of 498 nonprofit organizations conducted in 2005, just prior to the demonstrations. The authors show how a history of collaborations, organizational network ties, and the existing relations between organizations in key coalitions became the foundation for the mobilizations.

The Temporary Staffing Industry: Growth Imperatives and Limits to Contingency

Abstract The temporary staffing industry (TSI) in the United States has enjoyed explosive growth since the 1970s, during which time the market for temporary labor has become increasingly complex and diverse. Rather than focus, as has typically been done, on the wider labor market effects of this sustained expansion in temporary employment, this article explores patterns and processes of industrial restructuring in the TSI itself. The analysis reveals a powerfully recursive relationship among evolving TSI business practices, the industry’s strategies for building and extending the market, and urban labor market outcomes as the sector has grown through a series of qualitatively differentiated phases of development or “modes of growth.” Moreover, the distinctive character of the TSI’s geographic rollout raises a new set of questions concerning, inter alia, the links between temping and labor market deregulation, the nature of local competition, the scope for and limits of value-adding strategies, and the emerging global structure of the temp market. This idiosyncratic industry—which has been a conspicuous beneficiary of growing economic instability—has, throughout the past three decades, restructured continuously through a period of sustained but highly uneven growth. In so doing, it has proved to be remarkably inventive in extending the market for contingent labor, but has encountered a series of (possibly structural) obstacles to further expansion in its domestic market. These obstacles, in turn, have triggered an unprecedented phase of international integration in the TSI, along with a new mode of development—global growth.

MIGRANT CIVIL SOCIETY: NEW VOICES IN THE STRUGGLE OVER COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT

ABSTRACT: Port-of-entry immigrant neighborhoods have long been a feature of the American city. Dense cross-border networks are reshaping port-of-entry immigrant neighborhoods and creating “transnational communities” where forces of global economic restructuring and practices of everyday life combine into a distinctive form of urbanization. Yet immigration has also created tensions and conflicts. Lack of affordable housing, inadequate access to quality schools, substandard employment, and unmet basic needs are among the problems facing large segments of society. Their resolution has been rendered more problematic by questions concerning the immigration status of many residents. The lack of recourse for undocumented immigrants to the state has meant that the task of resolving these social problems has been displaced onto civil society. This article considers the role of nonprofit, community organizations and social movement organizations—part of an emergent migrant civil society—in responding to a variety of social and economic concerns affecting residents of Albany Park. The community area of Albany Park on Chicago’s north side has for decades served as a first destination for immigrants. In 2000 the foreign-born population in Albany Park climbed to 52%, making it one of the most diverse neighborhoods in Chicago. Through an examination of neighborhood social struggles we consider the ways in which transnational flows of people, commerce, culture, and social practices come to ground in neighborhoods like Albany Park. Then we present two case studies of social activism by segments of migrant civil society. The first examines the antigentrification movement launched by the Balanced Development Coalition, while the second considers workers’ rights activism in support of day laborers. Finally, we reflect on the implications of the Albany Park cases for the study of migrant civil society more broadly.

Framing neoliberal urbanism: Translating ‘commonsense’ urban policy across the OECD zone

The paper explores the evolution of urban policy discourses among advanced industrial nations in the period since the early 1980s, by way of a case study of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). The OECD, it is argued, has provided an arena for the consolidation of a particular form of neoliberal urbanism, conceived here as a mutating policy frame. As a consensus-finding organization, the OECD is more of a mediator than a unilateral driver of policy conventions. It is not a site of hard-edged or radical policy innovation, but seeks to define a ‘common ground’ in the form of a positive policy consensus. As such, the OECD’s coordinative discourse both reflects and refracts a particular reading of the ‘soft center’ of the urban policy consensus, revealing how (far) this has moved since the early 1980s. Hardly preordained, this transnational mode of neoliberal urbanism has been a constructed project, subject to significant adaption and evolution.