Theorizing neoliberal urban development: A genealogy from Richard Florida to Jane Jacobs

Radical History Review

Volumn , Issue 112, 2012, Pages 65-88

  Tochterman, Brian ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84856363091     PISSN: 01636545     EISSN: 15341453     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01636545-1416169     Document Type: Article

References (84)

1. Jane Jacobs, "The City: Some Myths About Diversity," in Did You Ever See a Dream Walking? American Conservative Thought in the Twentieth Century, ed. William F. Buckley Jr. (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), 338-354.
2. For more on Buckley's fondness for Jacobs, see: Robert Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982); and Anthony Flint, Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City (New York: Random House, 2009).
3. Shanita Anderheggen, "Four Decades of Local Historic District Designation: A Case Study of Newport, Rhode Island," The Public Historian 32 (2010): 16-32.
4. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2-3.
5. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism., 44-45
6. Examinations of neoliberalism in New York City during this period include: Robert Fitch, The Assassination of New York (New York: Verso, 1993).
7. Kim Moody, From Welfare State to Real Estate: Regime Change in New York, 1974 to the Present (New York: New Press, 2007).
8. Jonathan Soffer, Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
9. On public-private partnerships and their place in U.S. urban history
10. Gregory D. Squires, "Partnership and the Pursuit of the Private City," in Urban Life in Transition, ed. Mark Gottdiener and Chris Pickvance (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1991), 123-40.
11. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 47-48.
12. William F. Buckley, Jr., "Contemporary Challenges and the Social Order," in Buckley, Did You Ever See a Dream Walking? 213-220
13. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1961).
14. Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Vintage Books, 1975)
15. Fred J. Cook and Gene Gleason, "The Shame of New York," Nation, October 31, 1959, 261-321.
16. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).
17. community development, particularly in underserved black neighborhoods languishing in the early urban crisis. SDS, 'The Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society, 1962,' www.h-net.org/~hst306/documents/huron.html (accessed March 28, 2011).
18. The Exploding Metropolis, which Jacobs contributed to, served as a moderate critique of urban renewal policy at a time when few critics were willing to offer one. While the grassroots groundswell against urban renewal intensified throughout the 1950s, Jacobs's and William H. Whyte's considerations of the design problems as well as problems with the implementation of the policy in the late 1950s were relatively fresh in the realm of criticism. The Editors of Fortune, eds., The Exploding Metropolis: A Study of the Assault on Urbanism and How Our Cities Can Resist It (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958). Martin Anderson critiqued the federal government's involvement in the remaking of U.S. cities. Anderson's work highlighted the costs and benefits of the program for U.S. taxpayers and certainly served as an influential text for the burgeoning libertarian Right of the era. Martin Anderson, The Federal Bulldozer: Critical Analysis of Urban Renewal (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964).
19. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, revised ed. (New York: Bantam, 1993). On the collaboration of corporate power to alter the nature of the postwar economy,
20. Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009).
21. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 42.
22. Perhaps the most pragmatic discussion of this shift is in architectural history.
23. Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins, and David Fishman, New York 1960: Architecture and Urbanism between the Second World War and the Bicentennial (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995).
24. Flint, Wrestling With Moses, 4-20.
25. On gentrification and urban pioneers, see Neil Smith, 'Gentrification, the Frontier and the Restructuring of Urban Space,' in Gentrification of the City, ed. Neil Smith and Peter Williams (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1986).
26. These struggles govern the narrative of Flint, Wrestling With Moses.
27. Flint, Wrestling With Moses., 18-26.
28. William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956).
29. Jane Jacobs, "Downtown Is for People," in Editors of Fortune, The Exploding Metropolis, 145-146. On Victor Gruen,
30. M. Jeffrey Hardwick, Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). On Daniel Burnham and the City Beautiful movement,
31. Richard E. Foglesong, Planning the Capitalist City: The Colonial Era to the 1920s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986).
32. Sorkin, Twenty Minutes in Manhattan; Zukin, Naked City.
33. Jacobs, "Downtown Is for People." Le Corbusier, The City of To-Morrow and Its Planning (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1929).
34. Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century.
35. Jacobs, Death and Life, 23, 15.
36. Writing two years later, but from the perspective of a conservative academic economist, Martin Anderson also noticed the message of modernist design: 'These buildings symbolize the progress of the urban renewal program, and in most cases they are the main justification for it. The city planners, the mayors, the urban renewal officials, and others connected with urban renewal can all point their fingers toward the material masses rising skyward and say, 'Look, I helped destroy the slum and built that' ' (emphasis added). Anderson, The Federal Bulldozer, 91.
37. Jacobs V, Death and Life.
38. Jacobs V, Death and Life.
39. Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities (New York: Random House, 1969), 36, 129.
40. There is an extensive historiography of the urban crisis, but the following offer a primer on the political economy and culture of the period
41. Robert A. Beauregard, Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of U.S. Cities, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2003)
42. Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, Princeton Classic ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
43. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 47.
44. David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism (London: Verso, 2006), 78
45. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, vol. 1 of The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2000), 77.
46. Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 5
47. Castells, The Rise of Network Society, 409-416.
48. Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class. And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002).
49. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 69.
50. David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Touchstone, 2001)
51. Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class
52. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).
53. Susan S. Fainstein, "New Directions in Planning Theory," Urban Affairs Quarterly 35 (2000): 451-78
54. Susan S. Fainstein, The Just City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010). On social justice and the city
55. David Harvey, "Social Justice, Postmodernism and the City," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 16 (1992): 588-601
56. David Harvey, "The Right to the City," New Left Review, no. 53 (2008): 23-40. On the "right to the city"
57. Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, trans. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (New York: Blackwell, 1995). For an excellent overview of contemporary theory and practice regarding the just city
58. Peter Marcuse et al., Searching for the Just City: Debates in Urban Theory and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2009), which features contributions from Susan Fainstein, David Harvey, and Peter Marcuse, among others.
59. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 42.
60. Richard Florida, The Flight of the Creative Class (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 41-42.
61. The description of the Creative Class Group comes from Creative Class, "Meet the Team," creativeclass.com/creative_class_group/team/ (accessed March 28, 2011).
62. Paul Maliszewski, "Flexibility and Its Discontents," Baffler, no. 16 (2004): 69-79.
63. For an example of this critique see the 'Creative Class Debate' series from Next American City. Issue 7, 'Kids and Cities,' Next American City, January 2005, americancity.org/magazine/ issue/i07/.
64. Florida, The Flight of the Creative Class, 38.
65. Florida, The Flight of the Creative Class.
66. Richard Florida, "The Great Creative Class Debate: Revenge of the Squelchers," Next American City, July 2004, americancity.org/magazine/article/the-great- creative- Class -debate- revenge- of- the- squelchers- florida/.
67. Alec MacGillis, "The Ruse of the Creative Class," American Prospect, January 4, 2010, 12-16.
68. Richard Florida, Who's Your City? How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (New York: Basic Books, 2008).
69. Details of Florida's speaking fees come from MacGillis, "The Ruse of the Creative Class."
70. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 77.
71. For this critique of Bloomberg
72. Jonathan Mandell, "Is New York the Cultural Capital of the World?" Gotham Gazette, October 2005, www.gothamgazette.com/article/arts/20051020/1/1624.
73. Quoted from interview transcript at Big Think, "Upgrading Power People," bigthink.com/ ideas/18243 (accessed March 28, 2011).
74. Creative Class Group, "Articles," May 2008, www.creativeclass.com/rfcgdb/articles/Richard%20Florida.pdf.
75. Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, 20-23.
76. On the tremendous influence and application of creative-class strategy in Milwaukee, Wisconsin,
77. Jeffrey Zimmerman, "From Brew Town to Cool Town: Neoliberalism and the Creative City Development Strategy in Milwaukee," Cities 25 (2008): 230-242.
78. Greg Lindsay, "Richard Florida's Creative Destruction, Spatial Fix and the Great Reset," Fast Company, May 5, 2010, www.fastcompany.com/1637457/richard-floridas-creative-destruction.
79. David Harvey, "Globalization and the 'Spatial Fix,' " geographische revue, no. 2 (2001): 23-30.
80. Richard Florida, The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity (New York: HarperCollins, 2010).
81. Richard Florida, The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity., 6.
82. Richard Florida, The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity.
83. Fainstein, The Just City; Harvey, "The Right to the City";
84. Marcuse et al., Searching for the Just City.