Aestheticization and the cultural contradictions of neoliberal (sub)urbanism

Cultural Geographies

Volumn 13, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 466-475

  Walks, R Alan ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 41149101774     PISSN: 14744740     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1191/1474474006eu369oa     Document Type: Review

References (17)

1. A number of authors have discerned similarities in the neoliberal urban experience. These include the shift to what Harvey calls the ‘entrepreneurial city’ and the naturalization of market logics which punish cities that fail to compete intemationally; the rescaling of the state through the adoption of deregulation, privatization and downloading, while at the same time ‘rolling out’ new meso-level layers of market rules; and the marginalization of (or outright attack on) the social welfare state, as evidenced in union-busting, criminalization of the poor and cutbacks to social programmes, welfare entitlements and tax rates (and the adoption of regressive taxation), while at the same time co-opting ethnic diversity and creativity discourses in the employ of intra-urban competition. The result is a form of urbanism beset by multiple contradictions and characterized by increasing social inequality, the impoverishment of longer-term infrastructure budgets, and zero-sum-game policy races to the bottom, all of which effectively act to narrow future policy choices and reinforce emerging crises which must remain hidden if the competitive benefits of urban spectacle are to do their magic. Of course, the geography of ‘actually existing neoliberalism(s)’ is quite uneven, and the local issues, policy tools, political struggles, social movements, mix of sub-cultures, regime strategies and contexts of partisanship (on behalf of the political parties and civil society organizations) in shaping political discourses differ from place to place. See D. Harvey, ‘From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: the transformation of urban govemance in late capitalism’, Geografiska Annaler 71 (B) (1989), pp. 3-17; N. Brenner, New state spaces: urban governance and the rescaling of statehood (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004); J. Peck and A. Tickell, ‘Neoliberalizing space’, Antipode 34 (2002), pp. 380-404; K. Mitchell, ‘Multiculturalism, or the united colours of capitalism’, Antipode 25 (1993), pp. 263-94.
2. J.S. Duncan and N.G. Duncan, Landscapes of privilege: the politics of the aesthetic in an American suburb (London, Routledge, 2004), p. 32.
3. D. Harvey, The condition ofpostmodernity: an enquiry into the origins of cultural change (Oxford, Blackwell, 1989); D. Mitchell, The lie ofthe land: migrant workers and the California landscape (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis, 1996); C. Kutz, Complicity (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000).
4. P. Bourdieu, Distinction: a social critique of thejudgment oftaste, trans. R. Nice (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1984).
5. E. J. Blakely and M.G. Snyder, Fortress America: gated communities in the United States (Washington, DC, Brookings Institution Press, 1997); T. Caldeira, City of walls. crime, segregation, and citizenship in Sao Paulo (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000); M. Mycoo, ‘The retreat of the upper and middle classes to gated communities in
6. the poststructural adjustment era: the case of Trinidad’, Environment and planning A 38 (2006), pp. 131-48.
7. K. Brodkin, How Jews became white folks and what that says about race in America (New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press, 2000).
8. M. Kohn, Brave new neighbourhoods: the privatization ofpublic space (London, Routledge, 2004), p. 123.
9. B. Anderson, Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (London, Verso, 1991).
10. Kohn, Brave new neighbourhoods, p. 123.
11. The term ‘Wobblies’ refers to the group of International Workers of the World (IWW) union members that made numerous claims on the state in the 1930s in the United States, including challenging a number of municipal public space by-laws in court.
12. D. Mitchell, ‘The S.U.V. model of citizenship: floating bubbles, buffer zones, and the rise of the “purely atomic” individual’, Political geography 25 (2005), pp. 77-100.
13. Habermas has written extensively on deliberative democracy. See J. Habermas, The structural transformation of the public sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1991).
14. Kohn, Brave new neighbourhoods, p. 81.
15. K. Goonewardena and S. Kipfer, ‘Spaces of difference: reflections from Toronto on multiculturalism, bourgeois urbanism and the possibility of radical urban politics’, International journal of urban and regional research 29 (2005), pp. 670-78; L. Sandercock, Towards cosmopolis: planning for multicultural cities (New York, Wiley, 1998).
16. Mitchell, The lie of the land; for an empirical example, see J. Hackworth and J. Rekers, ‘Ethnic packaging and gentrification: the case of four neighbourhoods in Toronto’, Urban affairs review 41 (2005), pp. 211-36.
17. G. Robson and T. Butler, ‘Coming to terms with London: middle class communities in a global city’, International journal of urban and regional research 25 (2004), pp. 75-86; T. Slater, ‘Municipally managed gentrification in South Parkdale, Toronto’, Canadian geographer 48 (2004), pp. 303-25.