Abstract
The term neoliberalism has been asked to do an awful lot of conceptual work. It is used to describe a set of pro-free market ideas; novel forms of governance; policy reforms in areas from labour market activation to health care and financial regulation; and a new political regime for capitalist accumulation. On top of all this, it is perhaps the key framework within which the critique of capital has been articulated by scholars and activists in recent decades, such that the term has become invested with a certain strategic-political significance for many. Given the use of the term to cover such a wide variety of themes, it is hardly surprising that it often appears over-stretched.
The application of the concept in urban studies has however been enormously fruitful, in particular benefiting from a longstanding insistence on its deployment in ways that are sensitive to specific geographic, cultural and political contexts (Brenner and Theodore, 2002). Urban scholars have focused on how local and national states have set in motion new forms of urban governance characterised by a particular orientation to ‘the market’. These entrepreneurial strategies work with and through market mechanisms, in particular private development and real estate markets, to guide and shape how cities develop and to stimulate urban economies.
The great strength of Neoliberal Urban Policy and the Transformation of the City is to trace the development of such forms of governance in Dublin since the 1980s from a variety of perspectives. The Irish capital represents a highly relevant terrain for this project both because of the wide variety of transformations that have occurred at the level of urban governance and because of the ways those transformations are linked to a profound boom/bust cycle in the property and financial systems.
Part I of the book sets the context, situating Dublin within the international (Chapter 1) and national (Chapter 2) experience of neoliberalism. Chapter 3 discusses the deregulation of the banking sector and its meteoric growth in the 1990s and 2000s, while the remaining chapters in Part I explore the emergence of entrepreneurial planning at a number of levels, particularly within local government. Part II specifically looks at the dynamics of the property boom with an emphasis on the role of credit in producing over-development in the office (Chapter 6) and residential (Chapters 7 and 8) markets. Chapter 8 provides a particularly interesting theorisation of these dynamics in terms of the ‘financialisation of homeownership’. Part III delves into the neoliberalisation for urban governance at a variety of levels. Hearne’s chapter on Public Private Partnerships explores the production of an ‘institutional infrastructure’ which made possible a specific form of ‘privatisation by stealth’ and subjected local and national government to the growing power of global capital. Kelly’s piece on urban regeneration and gentrification reveals how the interaction between ‘land-use change, house price increases and the loss of low cost housing’ (p. 184) has reshaped Dublin’s inner city such that neoliberalism has become embedded and embodied in the urban form and built environment. Part IV comprises two concluding chapters, both of which consider resistance to and contestation of neoliberalism in Ireland. A particularly interesting piece by Michael Punch examines the role of working class inner-city communities in resisting regeneration processes and raises questions about the extent to which this kind of community activism has been incorporated and entangled in the urban regeneration agenda, even as it tries to resist it. The final chapter examines some of the fallout from the Irish economic crisis and the limitations and possibilities of resistance to the continual entrenchment of the neoliberal regime at a national level.
The book’s breadth makes for a fascinating analysis of how manifold processes of urban neoliberalism develop and interact to shape a city. This allows a picture to emerge of the interaction between the deregulation of the financial system, the ‘entrepreneurialisation’ of planning and urban governance and the property bubble in shaping the development of Dublin over the last three decades. It also provides a comprehensive understanding of the fallout of these interacting processes: widespread vacancy (Chapters 6 and 7); excessive mortgage debt (Chapter 8); and displacement and gentrification (Chapters 11 and 12). What will make this particularly compelling to a contemporary audience is that the analyses of neoliberalism’s development in Dublin are placed in dialogue with the rapid growth and transformation of the Irish financial system and the process of financialisation it entails. While the relationship between finance and urban development has been in some senses central to the literature on neoliberal urbanism, the relationship between the latter and the process of financialisation remains somewhat under-explored and under-theorised. The chapters by Kelly and Downey are particularly revealing in terms of understanding the ways in which housing was transformed into a financial asset. While the inter-relationship between neoliberalism and financialisation is not addressed at a theoretical level, the way the two sets of processes worked on and through each other in Dublin makes for an important contribution to both fields.
The limitations of the book in some ways reflect some of the difficulties with the concept of neoliberalism in general, as touched on at the beginning of this review. Whereas the literature examining neoliberal urbanism in the unfolding of new forms of urban governance in specific contexts has tended to be rich and analytically robust, some literature on neoliberalism more generally has lapsed into overly schematic accounts of how a set of pro-market ideas have driven an alleged global shift of political-economic regime. Neoliberal Urban Policy and the Transformation of the City is at points characterised by a tension between a close attention to the urban processes which are the book’s main focus, and a more general analysis of neoliberalism as a cohesive capitalist programme. With regard to the latter, at points the analysis reproduces a kind of opposition between ‘the state’ and ‘the market’ and between ‘public’ and ‘private’ which is common to critiques of neoliberalism but risks obscuring the ways in which ‘economies of power’ and ‘the power of the economy’ interact in specific forms of governance such that these distinctions are called into question (Donzelot, 2008; Lemke, 2002). Bresnihan’s (2016) recent critical work on neoliberal environmental governance provides a powerful example of this more Foucauldian sensitivity in understanding particular experiences of neoliberalism in Ireland, one which eschews a ‘tendency to focus on the negative social and environmental effect of neoliberal policies’ in favour of a close attention to ‘the logic and practice that enable neoliberalism to have such a hold on our lives (Bresnihan, 2016: 10; see also Bresnihan, 2015).
Further attention to the peculiarities of the Irish experience would also have been welcome. At points there appears to be an underlying suggestion that neoliberalism in Ireland represented a departure from something that was much better. In some other contexts, of course, the Kenysian-Fordist regime of the post-war era serves as the backdrop. This never existed in Ireland, and as such it is not all that clear what neoliberalism represents a departure from. Similarly, aspects of Ireland’s recent political history that are at odds with the concept of neoliberalism could have been given greater attention. For example, while the development of a corporatist, ‘social partnership’ model for negotiating wage increases at a national level is noted, the fact that this represents a challenge to the concept of neoliberal theory is not interrogated. Some of the peculiarities of neoliberalism ‘Irish style’ are more central to recent work by Kitchin et al. (2012), and figure prominently in alternative analyses of Ireland as a ‘developmental’, rather than neoliberal, state (O’Riain, 2000, 2014).
For the most part these limitations do not take away from the empirical and analytical contribution of the book; for while the application of the concept of neoliberalism to capture an epochal shift of political-economic regime risks diluting conceptual specificity and critical purchase, when approached as a series of forms of governance characterised by a particular interaction between local and national states and market processes deployed to respond to particular problems and problematisations, the development of the concept of neoliberalism in the book is robust, illuminating and compelling.