Abstract
The persistence of scholarship on neoliberalism is as important as it is exhausting. There were, for example, exactly ninety-nine papers that had some form of the word “neoliberal” as a keyword at the 2016 American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting. These panels range from addressing the financialization of ecosystem services and the implementation of neoliberal policies in the Middle East to trying to think beyond the concept, both specifically in discussions of education and in general. Kean Birch and Simon Springer, the organizers of the three-session panel titled “The Mont Pelerin Plague? Revisiting and Rethinking Neoliberalism,” write,
Across a range of disciplines [neoliberalism] is conceptualized in various ways as, for example, a geographical process; a form of governmentality; the restoration of elite class power; a political project of institutional change; a set of transformative ideas; a development policy paradigm; an epistemic community or thought collective; an economic ideology or doctrine; and so on. (Birch and Springer 2016, n.p.)
For Birch and Springer, this focus has “produced a glut of concepts, theories, and analyses” (ibid., n.p.) that has the potential of causing more confusion than enlightenment. Another way of phrasing it: if one sees neoliberalism everywhere, and blames it for everything, can it still serve as a powerful analytical concept?
On the other hand, there was only one paper at the 2015 Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning conference that had any variation of word “neoliberal” in its title. A brief glance through the Journal of Planning Education and Research archive attests to the publication of about eight papers a year, on average, that address the subject over the past decade. These rough comparisons are only meant to illustrate the fact that while the discipline of geography might be approaching “peak neoliberalism,” urban planning either seems to have a healthier relationship with the concept (the best case) or is lacking some of the critical vigor of geography (the worst case).
It is within this analytical field where Wilson, Miraftab, and Salo’s refreshing edited volume enters, combining insights from academics housed in both of these disciplines, as well as in sociology and art. I use the word “refreshing” intentionally because this book situates neoliberalism precisely where it is the most useful: as an underlying political economic condition that contributes to all of the urban phenomena analyzed, but which are nevertheless also realized by a wide range of other determinate local factors. The editors develop this perspective in their introduction by proffering three myths about the relationship between neoliberalism and inequality that the book’s contributors attack across its two parts, entitled “Urban inequalities across the world” and “Resistances and insurgencies: Thoughts and possibilities.”
The first myth “assumes that inequalities are produced through global neoliberal processes and, as such, at the local level we can merely observe minor variations in their forms, features, and causes” (Wilson, Miraftab, and Salo 2015, 3). To challenge this myth, the contributors illuminate the spatiotemporal specificities of inequality that cannot be categorically reduced to a global political economic bogeyman. From this perspective, the multiscalar causation of inequality is taken to revolve around concrete local dynamics rather than global flows of capital. This orientation can clearly be seen in all eight chapters constituting the first part of the book. For example, in his discussion of Detroit, David Fasenfest highlights how race relations have greatly affected contemporary urban inequalities, while Virág Molnár highlights how the literature on luxury gated communities as “spaces of neoliberalism” (cf. Brenner and Theodore 2002) fails to account for the local variations of governance and culture that strongly influence housing policy in Postsocialist Eastern European cities such as Budapest.
The second myth that the editors combat is that “the only important relation to understand is between capitalist-neoliberal processes and a particularly produced inequality” (Wilson, Miraftab, and Salo 2015, 4). Instead, they assert that inequalities are “not stand-alone constructions, but are productive of other kinds of inequalities” (ibid., 5). This perspective can be seen explicitly in Fasenfest’s aforementioned chapter, wherein he notes how racial bias contributed to the layout of the Detroit region’s highway system, which has in turn contributed to the spatial organization of a postindustrial job market that is both inaccessible to inner-city minorities because of an insufficient mass transit system and an educational system that fails to prepare them for these new jobs. The loss of the auto-manufacturing base is therefore seen as an important factor contributing to inequality, but it must be understood as operating in conjunction with other extraeconomic criteria, such as racial bias and land use planning. Similarly, Mi Shih’s exploration of social inequality in Chinese urban redevelopment addresses the compound effects of being a small business owner on land that has seen an astronomical increase in value because of the land leases being made to private developers, but also the difficulties arising from having familial connections to the traditional, less market-friendly strand of communism. To look at either of these cases from the strictly neoliberal-inequality perspective severely limits how various modes of inequality are intensified for minoritarian groups.
The third myth, which is commonly expressed as There Is No Alternative (TINA) to increasingly voracious neoliberalism, is the final one that the editors seek to dismantle. In particular, they write that “neoliberalism and its modes of governing are turbulent and inherently unstable formulations” (ibid., 6). This flexible mode of governance is therefore seen as both proactive and reactive, in that it strives to install market-based social relations on the one hand, but also responds to variable local conditions on the other. Shih highlights an active process of discipline when she distinguishes between the political punishment that a displaced grocer in Shanghai received in the form of withholding a business license and a month of imprisonment, and the economic resolution that amounted to a small payout in exchange for halting all protest. Moreover, she also highlights the reactive movement in her explication of how traditional weiquan (rights-protection) movements are combatted by individualizing the actors through these punishments and resolutions, thereby successfully making larger-scale collective mobilization unlikely.
This open-ended conception of neoliberalism also sets the stage for the second, and unfortunately too short, part of the book which focuses on resistance. Whereas the first part is to be credited with bringing a more nuanced conception of the relationship between neoliberalism and inequality into conversation with a wide range of empirical studies—it also includes excellent discussions of Rust Belt city exploitation, affordable housing policy in Atlanta, inequality and violence in Latin American cities, luxury redevelopments in Africa, and the informal economy in small Indian cities—the second part brings two compelling theoretical essays together with two less traditional chapters that explore the visual culture of resistance movements and translocal solidarities regarding antieviction strategies in Chicago and Cape Town, South Africa.
Erik Swyngedouw opens this part of the book with a compelling argument for the theorization of “the political as a relatively autonomous domain of engagement and practice” (Swyngedouw 2015, 177) rather than as an effect of interactions between actors including politicians, social organizations, business elites, and various artifacts. He argues that the political field should be seen as immanent event emerging from “the coming together of people in a process of common acting in the name of equality” (ibid., 180). This is to be sharply distinguished from a political program built on presenting demands to those in power and instead revolves around enacting the principle of egalitarian emancipation that grounds our conception of the political. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s conception of democracy, Mark Purcell makes a powerful and compatible argument that hinges on the notion that politics must proceed from the assumption of equality, rather than that of inequality, if the goal is anything beyond equality in the end. Crucially, to posit equality as an end blocks the possibility of democracy, since equality is a prerequisite for genuine democracy; moreover, setting equality as the goal “limits us to thinking that the best possible future is nothing more than bringing the have-nots up to material and political parity with the haves” (Purcell 2015, 189).
The energy of these two contributions paired with Ryan Griffis and Sarah Ross’s graphic-heavy catalog of the art of social movements around the world, and Ken E. Salo’s documentation and analysis of extensive discussions of experiences and strategies between antieviction activists in Chicago and Cape Town, creates a sense of momentum that leaves the reader hoping for more such work. This points to the only significant drawback to the volume, for it ends having committed much less space to theoretical and aesthetic work than to the more traditional empirical investigations that constitute the first part. Such an organizational shortcoming does not, however, detract from the important and nuanced reconceptualization of the relationship between neoliberalism and inequality that both underpins the entire project, and turns the reader’s attention away from the now-standard indictments of neoliberal governance and toward the complexity of how it unfolds in different contexts. But it does suggest that a more evenly distributed collection of empirical, theoretical, and aesthetic research that addresses a few key locations rather than such a broad collection of sites could be an incredibly powerful way to present research that takes neoliberalism as initial condition, and illuminates the diverse and overlapping extraeconomic forces that shape how urbanization and the urban experience are realized. In sum, this volume’s combination of a much needed conceptual innovation with respect to neoliberalism as an insufficient explanation for all forms of inequality, the interdisciplinarity of the contributions, and the demonstration that empirical, theoretical, and aesthetic perspectives each contribute unique lenses for thinking about urbanization makes it an exciting intervention that should be studied carefully and developed further.