Introduction 1 Freedom's Just Another Word  2 The Construction of Consent 3 The Neoliberal State 4 Uneven Geographical Developments 5 Neoliberalism with 'Chinese Characteristics' 6 Neoliberalism on Trial 7 Freedom's Prospect Notes Bibliography Index

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A Brief History of 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.

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Cities and the Geographies of “Actually Existing Neoliberalism”

Debates about the future of urban development in many Western countries have been increasingly influenced by discussions of smart cities. Yet despite numerous examples of this ‘urban labelling’ phenomenon, we know surprisingly little about so‐called smart cities, particularly in terms of what the label ideologically reveals as well as hides. Due to its lack of definitional precision, not to mention an underlying self‐congratulatory tendency, the main thrust of this article is to provide a preliminary critical polemic against some of the more rhetorical aspects of smart cities. The primary focus is on the labelling process adopted by some designated smart cities, with a view to problematizing a range of elements that supposedly characterize this new urban form, as well as question some of the underlying assumptions/contradictions hidden within the concept. To aid this critique, the article explores to what extent labelled smart cities can be understood as a high‐tech variation of the ‘entrepreneurial city’...

Will the Real Smart City Please Stand Up?: Intelligent, progressive or entrepreneurial?

The Rise of the Creative Class

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers

This article develops a critique of the recently popularized concepts of the ‘creative class’ and ‘creative cities’. The geographic reach and policy salience of these discourses is explained not in terms of their intrinsic merits, which can be challenged on a number of grounds, but as a function of the profoundly neoliberalized urban landscapes across which they have been traveling. For all their performative display of liberal cultural innovation, creativity strategies barely disrupt extant urban-policy orthodoxies, based on interlocal competition, place marketing, property- and market-led development, gentrification and normalized socio-spatial inequality. More than this, these increasingly prevalent strategies extend and recodify entrenched tendencies in neoliberal urban politics, seductively repackaging them in the soft-focus terms of cultural policy. This has the effect of elevating creativity to the status of a new urban imperative — defining new sites, validating new strategies, placing new subjects and establishing new stakes in the realm of competitive interurban relations.

L’article presente une critique des concepts de ‘classe creative’ et ‘villes creatives’ publies recemment. La portee geographique et la pertinence politique de ces discours s’expliquent non par leurs merites intrinseques, ceux-ci pouvant etre remis en question a plus d’un titre, mais en tant que fonction des paysages urbains fortement neoliberaux qu’ils ont traverses. Quant a leur manifestation concrete de l’innovation culturelle liberale, les strategies de creativite derangent a peine les orthodoxies qui subsistent en politique urbaine, fondees sur une competition interlocale, un marketing de lieu, une expansion axee sur la propriete et le marche, un embourgeoisement et une inegalite socio-spatiale normalisee. Mais surtout, ces strategies toujours plus presentes prolongent et recodifient des tendances bien installees en politique urbaine neoliberale, les rhabillant de maniere attrayante dans un flou artistique terminologique de politique culturelle. Ainsi, la creativite est elevee au statut de nouvel imperatif urbain pour definir de nouveaux sites, valider de nouvelles strategies, positionner de nouveaux sujets et instaurer de nouveaux enjeux dans la concurrence interurbaine.

Struggling with the Creative Class

Across the broad field of heterodox political economy, ‘neoliberalism’ appears to have become a rascal concept – promiscuously pervasive, yet inconsistently defined, empirically imprecise and frequently contested. Controversies regarding its precise meaning are more than merely semantic. They generally flow from underlying disagreements regarding the sources, expressions and implications of contemporary regulatory transformations. In this article, we consider the handling of ‘neoliberalism’ within three influential strands of heterodox political economy – the varieties of capitalism approach; historical materialist international political economy; and governmentality approaches. While each of these research traditions sheds light on contemporary processes of market-oriented regulatory restructuring, we argue that each also underplays and/or misreads the systemically uneven, or ‘variegated’, character of these processes. Enabled by a critical interrogation of how each approach interprets the geographies, modalities and pathways of neoliberalization processes, we argue that the problematic of variegation must be central to any adequate account of marketized forms of regulatory restructuring and their alternatives under post-1970s capitalism. Our approach emphasizes the cumulative impacts of successive ‘waves’ of neoliberalization upon uneven institutional landscapes, in particular: (a) their establishment of interconnected, mutually recursive policy relays within an increasingly transnational field of market-oriented regulatory transfer; and (b) their infiltration and reworking of the geoinstitutional frameworks, or ‘rule regimes’, within which regulatory experimentation unfolds. This mode of analysis has significant implications for interpreting the current global economic crisis.

Variegated neoliberalization: geographies, modalities, pathways

1. Relocating Neoliberalism 2. Rebooting Freedom 3. Finding the Chicago School 4. Between Gotham and the Gulf 5. Creative Liberties 6. Decoding Obamanomics

Constructions of Neoliberal Reason

Mobilizing policy: Models, methods, and mutations

Austerity budgeting in the public sector, selectively targeting the social state, is a long-established trait of neoliberal governance, but it has been enforced with renewed systemic intensity in the period since the Wall Street crash of 2008. The paper develops the argument that these conditions are defining a new operational matrix for urban politics. Examining some of the leading and bleeding edges of austerity's ‘extreme economy’ in the USA, the paper seeks to locate these developments in the context of mutating processes of neoliberal urbanism, commenting on some of its social and spatial consequences.

Jamie Peck

Papers

Struggling with the Creative Class

Variegated neoliberalization: geographies, modalities, pathways

Constructions of Neoliberal Reason

Mobilizing policy: Models, methods, and mutations

Austerity urbanism: American cities under extreme economy