Abstract
In his comment to my paper (Zanotto, 2019b), Edwin Buitelaar raises a valid concern regarding the overuse of the term ‘neoliberalism,’ suggesting that it has been thrown around without much explanation. Because it has been employed abstractly, it has lost its analytical value (so, maybe we should throw it away!). His comment also indicates a concern with the term being generally given a negative connotation. He and I seem to agree that the second concern is not a problem per se. As for the first concern, like Buitelaar, I am – and I hope all scholars are – concerned with the use of abstract terms to mean anything. Thus, like him, I would also like to see more ‘explaining’ done. This is exactly why I conduct research they way I do and why I wrote the paper he commented on. So, while I fully agree with a call for more ‘explaining’ rather than abstraction, I must disagree that my paper is an example of the latter.
In this short reply to Buitelaar’s comment, I raise three important points to clarify how the term neoliberalism was treated in the paper. Rather than using neoliberalism abstractly to mean a lot of things, the paper provides a deeper understand of how a set of principles often related to the notion of neoliberalism operate in practice in a specific context. To do that, the paper provides an account of neoliberalism in action and details its meaning in the context of Brazilian planning in general, and the production of suburban gated communities, in particular.
First, it is important to point out that the purpose of the research from which this paper resulted sought to understand how a particular kind of space (i.e. suburban gated communities), which in planning literature is associated with regressive outcomes, has proliferated in Brazil. As the larger research and the papers published from it (Zanotto, 2019a, 2019b) make clear, the answer does not lie solely on market forces, consumer preference, and the work of private developers. Instead, the proliferation of suburban gated communities in Brazil results from a combination of local and global forces, including specific policies and practices. Planners in both private and public sectors have supported these policies. In justifying and legitimizing potentially controversial policies that advance segregation and the privatization of public spaces, planners and other actors reproduce a dominant discourse. The deconstruction of this discourse, which is the focus of the paper, reveals an ideological basis I identified as neoliberal.
Buitelaar suggests that for something to be associated with neoliberalism it must involve the absence of government. This is, in my view, a narrow understanding of neoliberalism; one that reads well in theory, but has little resemblance to how urban processes happen in practice. As Aalbers (2013) has pointed out, neoliberalism in practice is not necessarily about state withdrawal or deregulation, but about a different kind of state intervention and re-regulation that ultimately benefits only a few. The analysis of the discourse on suburban gated communities in Brazil demonstrated that unquestioned state-enabled privatization, economic efficiency, competition, and individualism help to shape a particular understanding of reality and orient action accordingly. This worldview gives rise to narrow definitions of problems and solutions, and makes alternative actions simply unthinkable.
This leads us to a second important point. I have argued that neoliberalism is expressed in policies and practices, but that it may also be understood as an ideology. Using Van Dijk’s (2006) definition of ideology as a socially shared belief system that controls the attitudes and identifies the values relevant to a social group, neoliberalism constitutes an ideology insofar as it controls particular attitudes regarding the role of the state, market, and regulations, and identifies relevant values such as competition, privatization, and individualism. It is this set of unquestioned attitudes and values that I identified among a range of actors I interviewed and observed. For example, some of the quotes in the paper illustrate a viewpoint that characterizes the role of regulatory agencies as facilitators of private development based on market rules, and naturalizes inter-city competition for investment.
In challenging the construction of neoliberalism as ideology, Buitelaar writes “[n]o-one I know calls him- or herself (a) neoliberal, nor claims to be following a philosophy or ideology of neoliberalism”. This is exactly how naturalized ideologies operate, as actors are generally unaware of the ideological basis shaping their worldview. As Dikeç (2013: 26) put it, ‘taken-for-grantedness is precisely how ideologies establish themselves, making their effects felt as necessary responses to a given situation’. In the same way that racists or sexists rarely self-identify as racists and sexists when discriminating against racial minorities and women, those supporting neoliberal urban policies do not define themselves as neoliberals (Zanotto, 2019b: 123). None of my informants, for instance, used the term ‘neoliberal’ to characterize their worldview. Still, the kind of practice-based research I conducted enables us to identify attitudes and values that constitute the ideological basis for discursive and non-discursive practices.
A third important point I would like to raise is in regards to Buitelaar’s suggestion that “if neoliberalism is everything, then it is nothing.” In my paper, neoliberalism is associated with very specific mechanisms that are context dependent. The paper identifies and describes the specific mechanisms through which neoliberalism is reproduced (i.e. policies, discourses, spaces). And, notably, the context in which these mechanisms are enacted is thoroughly described in a sub-section about neoliberal urbanism in Brazil, mostly based on the work of Brazilian scholars such as Caldeira (2008) and Rolnik (2013). Following Buitelaar’s logic, one might ask if, given that the mechanisms are context dependent and the context itself might be unique to Brazil, shouldn’t I use another word to describe what I analyzed? Why employ the term ‘neoliberalism’? My answer to this legitimate question is that a deeper analysis of the mechanisms – one that is able to identify their ideological basis – reveals a way of understanding the world (and the role of public and private actors) that also provides the basis for very disparate policies and practices in other contexts. In this sense, I do not approach the term ‘neoliberalism’ as a blanket to be put over a bunch of different policies and practices, but as a root that gives rise to a bunch of different policies and practices. Hence, the notion that neoliberalism is flexible and adaptable (Peck et al., 2009), means that it will manifest itself in different forms, policies, and practices in different contexts (this helps explain the various mentions of neoliberal planning policies that Sager, 2011, identified), but each one of those can be traced back to a consistent set of foundational beliefs that reveal a particular way of understanding and intervening in the world.
Thus, returning to the dichotomous option facing us, should we throw neoliberalism around or should we throw it away? My stance is that while throwing around the term neoliberalism abstractly may strip it of its analytical power, throwing it away will weaken our ability to connect local and global processes and to identify foundational beliefs shared and reproduced across the world. Ultimately, a sweeping condemnation of the term neoliberal will obfuscate rather than illuminate our ability to produce theories that help practitioners see beyond what they can already identify. To conduct analyses that reveal deep-seated assumptions about the world is to engage in reflective practices. What is needed, therefore, is more empirical research of specific planning practices in diverse contexts that help us understand neoliberalism in practice. I wrote the paper as a step in that direction.
