Neoliberalism and Urban Development in Latin America

The Case of Santiago

Camillo Boano, Francisco Vergara-Perucich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317301806
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios en general

In the 1970s and following on from the deposition of Salvador Allende, the Chilean dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet installed a radical political and economic system by force which lent heavy privilege to free market capitalism, reduced the power of the state to its minimum and actively suppressed civil society. Chicago economist Milton Friedman was heavily involved in developing this model, and it would be hard to think of a clearer case where ideology has shaped a country over such a long period. That ideology is still very much with us today and has come to be defined as neoliberalism.

This book charts the process as it developed in the Chilean capital Santiago and involves a series of case studies and reflections on the city as a neoliberal construct. The variegated, technocratic and post-authoritarian aspects of the neoliberal turn in Chile serve as a cultural and political milieu. Through the work of urban scholars, architects, activists and artists, a cacophony of voices assemble to illustrate the existing neoliberal urbanism of Santiago and its irreducible tension between polis and civitas in the specific context of omnipresent neoliberalism. Chapters explore multiple aspects of the neoliberal delirium of Santiago: observing the antagonists of this scheme; reviewing the insurgent emergence of alternative and contested practices; and suggesting ways forward in a potential post-neoliberal city.

Refusing an essentialist call, Neoliberalism and Urban Development in Latin America offers an alternative understanding of the urban conditions of Santiago. It will be essential reading to students of urban development, neoliberalism and urban theory, and well as architects, urban planners, geographers, anthropologists, economists, philosophers and sociologists.

1
Foucault and Agamben in Santiago

Governmentality, dispositive and space

Camillo Boano

Neoliberalism means different things to different people. It is a ‘slippery concept’ examined from a multiplicity of conceptual categories and disciplinary realms: from cities to labour, from sexuality to race (Springer et al. 2016). It has “no fixed or settled coordinates […] policy entailments, and material practices” (Brown 2015:20). In the recently published Handbook of Neoliberalism Springer et al. suggests that

at a very base level […], we are generally referring to the new political, economic, and social arrangements within society that emphasise market relations, re-tasking the role of the state, and individual responsibility. Most scholars tend to agree that neoliberalism is broadly defined as the extension of competitive markets into all areas of life, including the economy, politics, and society.

(Springer et al. 2016:2)

Furthermore, Wendy Brown suggests neoliberalism “as economic policy, a modality of governance, and an order of reason is at once a global phenomenon, yet inconstant, differentiated, unsystematic, impure” (2015:20).

Despite the amorphous and polysepalous dimensions, neoliberalims is a material reality where all of us are immerse.

Adopting a Foucauldian perspective, neoliberalims seems representing a mode or reasoning, a discursive practice and a “sui generis ideological system” (Mudge 2008) at the crux of ideology, policy and governmentality or, to use Brown’s words “a distinctive mode of reason, of the production of subjects, a ‘conduct of conduct’ and a scheme of valuation” (2015:21) emerged and grounded in historically specific economic and political conditions across the globe. It is worth quoting at length her provisional definition of neoliberalism as

enacting an ensemble of economic policies in accord with its root principle of affirming free markets. These include deregulation of industries and capital flows; radical reduction in welfare state provisions and protections for the vulnerable; privatised and outsourced public goods, ranging from education, parks, postal services, roads, and social welfare to prisons and militaries; replacement of progressive with regressive tax and tariff schemes; the end of wealth redistribution as an economic or sociopolitical policy; the conversion of every human need or desire into a profitable enterprise, from college admissions preparation to human organ transplants, from baby adoptions to pollution rights, from avoiding lines to securing legroom on an airplane; and, most recently, the financialisation of everything and the increasing dominance of finance capital over productive capital in the dynamics of the economy and everyday life.

(Brown 2015:28)

It is a normative reason that shape different governing rationalities and extend to all aspects of life developing both an epistemology as well as an attitude to the self.

Reinhold Martin (2016) uses the term neoliberal “as defined along two intersecting axes. The first, political-economic dimension of neoliberalism has been associated with the widespread deregulation, privatization” based on Harvey’s inclusion of all human actions into the market, a “sociopolitical (or biopolitical) dimension has been defined by the philosopher Michel Foucault as the transformation of the modern subject, understood as homo economicus, into ‘human capital’, an ‘entrepreneur of himself’ (p. 59–60). Dardot and Laval (2014), argues that neoliberalism has entailed the reshaping of subjectivities through the promotion of particular ways of thinking about ourselves ‘economically’: as business enterprises, as efficiency impact, again in relation to Foucault’s notion of homo economicus. All this has not only political implications but material and spatial. Again with Foucault, space is the medium and the locus where the intersections of powers and knowledge manifest, develop and reproduce. If space is the ‘place’ where the neoliberal phenomena operates, cities and urban space become the perfect battlefield for both critically understanding both its operation and on-going power. David Harvey defines neoliberal inefficiencies and subsequent economic disparities as a system of accumulation by dispossession (2007:178). A process that is spatial in nature and that starts with a spatial gesture of privatisation and commodification, wherein all public assets are subsumed as private goods becoming a new source of wealth and capital gain (Harvey 2007:160): space in all different form is put into production not only to produce wealth but to produce subject.¹

Urban neoliberalism refers to the interaction of processes of neoliberalisation and urbanisation and how such ideology are shaping and producing the form, the image and the life in the cities. As Keil (2016:387) suggests “urbanization and neoliberalization are material and discursive processes that lead to real (and imagined) constellations through which modern capitalist societies are being reproduced”. Neoliberal urbanism is then a descriptive category that is able to depict the spatio-temporal material and discursive practice and its operative analytical capacity of producing urban space. A material condition that designates a governmental technologies, discursive and spatial dispositifs that fuelled political imagination locally and globally that “penetrates the bodies of subjects, and governs their forms of life” (Agamben 2009:14) through accelerated production urban projects, seclusions and marginalisation, hyper-spectacular (Ortiz and Boano forthcoming) architectural forms, consumption spaces and housing policies of all sorts.

Neoliberal urbanism should be read in line to a Foucault-inspired critique that focuses on the recalibrated relationships of the citizen to the state and the corporate economy, or its ‘governmentality’ (Keil 2016:387). Foucault’s governmentality as the new life-administering power dedicated to inciting, reinforcing, monitoring and optimising the forces under its control (Foucault 2003), assemblage that has an important role in depicting the spatial complicity and active role as the techniques and procedures for directing human behaviour, defined as an “ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics” (Foucault 1977:20), Foucault viewed governmentality as a very specific and complex form of power that was effected through a range of ‘technologies’ and ‘dispositives’: an aggregate of physical, social and normative infrastructure – amongst which space, architecture and its manipulation – are put into place to deal strategically with a particular problem.

Even though Foucault emphasises that power cannot be localised in a state apparatus, the conception of the state is crucial in addressing how power operates. The state is conceptualised as a ‘transactional reality’ and part of ‘practices of government’. The state is the result of an ensemble of power relations that produces a specific political knowledge to conduct and control populations. Actors use their “political knowledge” (Foucault 1977:67) embodied in “statistical accounts, architectural plans, bureaucratic rules, and graphs to represent data for political action” (Lemke 2007:48). Neoliberalism typically diminishes the role of the State, but as Peck argued, the “ideological shape of the State has not changed as much as neoliberal reformers would have us believe” (2004:397). Often rather than diminishing the State enjoy a rather expanded “elasticity, and the ability to, under the premise of reform, reinvent its roles and responsibilities in the project of development and the political economy of urbanism […] through its collaborations with private investors” (Abu-Hamdi 2017:102).

When neoliberalism is understood as a political rationality that shapes the ‘conditions of possibility’ for thinking and acting in a certain way (Collier 2009), we understand it as a form of ‘conduct of man’ made by a diffuse power that “is embodied in every aspect of discourses, in formal routines, informal practices, and physical structures” (ibid). Therefore, the production of spaces in the neoliberal cities occurs through techniques, procedures and institutional arrangements in re-combinatorial processes and redeployments. Foucault insists that is made by a series of dispositif: an ensemble of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, and moral propositions. Interesting for the argument here is the aim of the gesture of the governmental dispositif that for Foucault is essentially a gesture of normalisation. Foucault stated clearly this important concept in Abnormal where he posit,

the norm brings with it a principle of both qualification and correction. The norm’s function is not to exclude and reject. Rather, it is always linked to a positive technique of intervention and transformation, to a sort of normative project.

(Foucault 2003:50)

That urbanism is a dispositif in itself is not a novelty in urban studies: planning policies and regulations, either holistic or selective, employ spatial devices – such as dimensions, location, separation, connection and housing typologies – that increase or decrease social difference and the distribution of welfare/well-being. One of the spatial dimensions of the overlapping of neoliberalisation and urban-isation has been the introduction of new and changing infrastructures in the form of what Graham and Marvin’s named “splintering urbanism” (2001): sharply segregated, class-divided, privatised and access-controlled infrastructures in cities and suburbs. A massive modifications of infrastructures in water, transportation, communications and transport have not only alternated the urban and metropolitan landscape controlled and governed the access and the behaviours of urban dwellers but also altered set of modes of production and consumption till the development of new forms of urban ‘smart’ model (Datta 2015). As Keil suggests this new urban dispositives not only demonstrate

a particular techno-economic strategy which laid the groundwork for novel constellations of firms and workers in ‘creative economies’, it also prompted heretofore unseen techno-social and techno-spatial constellations […] whose reliance on tech labour markets and (fast-moving, yet often precarious) turboconsumerism has fed a deregulated explosion of inner city urbanism, sometimes coupled with processes of displacement and gentrification in former inner city working-class neighbourhoods.

(Keil 2016:393)

The infrastructures of neoliberalism shape new forms of segregations through the combined action of land policies, real estate land speculations, urban displacement where the poor are driven from the “gentrified centres of the neoliberal city and reassemble in the ‘in-between’ spaces of inner and outer suburbs” (ibid), that expand and explode in the global production of a ‘planetary urbanization’ (Brenner 2014).

As briefly outlined above that following key authors as Springer, Brown as well as Dardot and Laval neoliberalism is a specific form of capitalism possessed and productive of its own apparatus of power, displayed and made possible through the central Foucauldian concept of governmentality and the one of dispositive. What is important in these reflections is what recently Douglas Spencer suggests that is a

less exclusive preoccupation with technologies of domination to a position more attentive to what he terms ‘technologies of the self’ [where] Foucault’s agenda shifts from questions of how individuals are subjugated by power to ones of how subjectivity is actively produced

(Spencer 2016: 22).

The self and the individual both as subject and as conduct are quite an important element in the discussion on neoliberal urbanism where the market logic, its apparatuses and its mode of powers is “working to produce the mentalities and dispositions conducive to its continued operation” (ibid). As such it is not a disciplinary power as it not directly segregate subjects or impose normative conducts but to exercise of freedom: “Foucault’s understanding of the neoliberal governmentality of the self corresponds with neoliberalism’s own perspectives on how power should, in the interest of liberty, operate: not through the vertical application of external force but horizontally and immanently” (p. 23). The subject is not confined with limited action, not rendered dominated fully, but when

neoliberalism rediscovers the care of the self, it is not to reduce domination to ‘as little as possible’ but to legitimate and extend its reach. The care of the self is not undertaken for the self, as a ‘practice of freedom’, but in order to maintain the economic order. The ‘work on the self by the self’ is not an autonomous practice, but one demanded by the conduct of the market to which the subject must accommodate and continually adapt itself.

(Spencer 2016: 25)

Neoliberalims is then a form of existence or a form of life to use an Agambenian terminology or as per Dardot and Laval: “neo-liberalism is nothing more, nor less, than the form of our existence – the way in which we are led to conduct ourselves, to relate to others and to ourselves” (p. 3).

Techne oikonomike: Agamben’s managerial paradigm

Aristotle made a fundamental distinction between politics and economics, techne politike and techne oikonomike, a set of decision for the public good, the commons, the elements of the collective living together. The polis emerges as the space of the many and because the man is ‘a political animal’ by nature, the politics emerge precisely because the existence of polemos, possible conflicts in such space. Precisely because politics is incarnated in the polis “the project of the city […] holds...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: a Fabula Santiago
• 1 Foucault and Agamben in Santiago: governmentality, dispositive and space
• 2 The neoliberal urban utopia of Milton Friedman: Santiago de Chile as its realisation
• 3 Urban space production and social exclusion in Greater Santiago, under dictatorship and democracy
• 4 The politico-economic sides of the high-rise new-build gentrification of Santiago, Chile
• 5 Urban universalism: the housing debt in the context of targeted policies
• 6 The mobility regime in Santiago and possibilities of change
• 7 Retail urbanism: the neoliberalisation of urban society by consumption in Santiago de Chile
• 8 Under the politics of deactivation: culture’s social function in neoliberal Santiago
• 9 Transparent processes of urban production in Chile: a case in Pedro Aguirre Cerda District
• 10 Artists’ self-organisation on the context of unregulated transformations in territories and communities
• 11 Building the democratic city: a challenge for social movements
• 12 Especulopolis: a play in seven acts. A history of celebrations, displacements, schizophrenia, utopias, colonisation and hangover
• Afterword: a conversation with Miguel Lawner
• Index