The ongoing global financial crisis has exposed the limits of post-Fordist growth models and the supposedly democratic structures underpinning them. Economists from different theoretical perspectives are now admitting the shortcomings of deregulated speculative finance, while ordinary citizens since 2011 have been taking to the streets in cities such as Madrid, London, New York, Istanbul, Athens, Cape Town , Sao Paulo, Paris and Santiago to mobilize against the status quo of global neoliberalism and its devastating effects on individual and collective life. If the financial collapse of 2008 undoubtedly signalled an acute failure within the circuits of capital, its aftermath also exposed the related inability of political institutions at multiple scales to provide the basic rights and securities foundational to a stable polity and to effectively manage the economy so as to ensure the necessities of social reproduction. Narratives of “zombie” (Giroux, 2011; The Economist, 2013), “post-” (Crouch, 2004), “undone” (Brown, 2015), and “façade” (Habermas, 2014) democracies thus continue to proliferate as the longstanding ills of the modern state are no longer adequately pacified through the highly stratified provision of social and political rights or through the myths of universal inclusion, equality , and participation. The putative ‘financial’ crisis is inextricably tied to other related impasses: an administrative crisis in which state capacity and sovereignty has been undermined, a crisis of legitimacy in which it is harder and harder for governments to act as if the social contract is being upheld, and a crisis of citizenship in which the exclusive nature of the new world order has been laid bare, yet new forms of belonging have yet to fully emerge. These profound transformations have been most viscerally felt in cities .
Yet urban scholarship—itself at a historical impasse—is struggling to fully anticipate or appreciate the revolutionary changes in subjectivity , authority, citizenship, and territory brought about by the end of neoliberalism’s heyday. In an era where the ground is rapidly shifting beneath our feet, critical urban theory is losing its capacity to render the world knowable, let alone to change it. How might the events surrounding the Great Recession cause us to rethink the relationships between capitalism, the urban, and the political?
This book is an attempt to take stock of the varieties of critical urban scholarship that mark the contemporary moment and in so doing, to better understand the meaning and significance of the urban political signalled by the late neoliberal condition. The guiding inquiries framing the collection include: What constitutes the urban political today and where and how does it take place? What is the relationship of the polis to post-crisis urban spaces in a variety of contexts? How do cities act variously as objects of contention, terrains of action, mobilizing structures, and agential forces in processes of politicization? What material relationships and activities activate and institute these political practices? How have the dynamics between constituted urban orders and constituent powers been transformed in recent years? What do the collective mobilizations of what we might call ‘the long 2011’ reveal about the constitutive relationship between cities and citizens? And to what extent have these events—as well as less spectacular experiments in collective action—revolutionized global urban organizations and ways of life?
In responding to these questions and in bringing to the foreground not merely the internal contradictions of late neoliberalism’s regimes of accumulation, but its inherently political tensions and potentialities, the various contributions in this book provide an important perspective on the contemporary urban condition and on its dynamics of power. They provide us with direction, in other words, on how to see the political “like a city” (Magnusson, 2013). The Urban Political provides a bridge linking critical accounts of urban governance and development with scholarship on urban political movements. By focusing on the governmental and the insurrectionary dimensions of urban politics at the same time, the book also sheds light on the related dynamics of control and emancipation and on the inherent instability of late neoliberal regimes. More empirically, in considering the contingent dynamic between urban economic restructuring and processes of political mobilization in particular cities, the book illuminates innovative means of tracing the relationship of the political to its socio-spatial conditions of possibility.
As editors and contributors, we seek to better conceptualize and define today’s urban problematic and to trace the concrete trajectories of post-crisis politics across a range of sites. Although they vary significantly in terms of theoretical frameworks and empirical engagements, the chapters take the legacy and the present realities of the post-crisis formation as a common starting point for rethinking urban politics and critical urban studies. Even when the chapters do not engage the notion of the financial crisis as such, this is the implicit event that has occasioned the reflection and analysis. This book thus reflects and engages in an important conversation about the meaning of the political and the city-globalization-capitalism nexus in a context of post-recession transition. In so doing, we echo the conviction that more work of this kind is necessary (Dikeç & Swyngedouw, 2017).
The chapters that follow develop a number of key unifying themes. First, the collection asserts that the urban is a key terrain of political activity and is an important site through which neoliberal dynamics are being reworked. While contributing authors are resistant to drawing a direct line between structural conditions and contingent actions, and diverge on whether the urban has any particular provenance in the realm of the political, they nevertheless converge on the idea that the late neoliberal condition is being articulated through place and space specific forces (see also Peck, Theodore, & Brenner, 2010). Second, the chapters offer more or less explicit critiques of the post-political or post-democratic thesis. Rather than viewing the late neoliberal condition merely, or even primarily, as a process of constraining politics through consensual forms of rule (MacLeod, 2011; Paddison, 2009; Swyngedouw, 2007, 2011; Wilson & Swyngedouw, 2014), they equally address co-existing dynamics that may foment democratic possibilities (Davidson & Iveson, 2015; Purcell, 2013a, 2013b). The volume thus emphasizes that we live in highly unstable and ambivalent times. Third, the chapters offer varied insights on how to re-engage critical urban theory . For while critical urban scholarship has undergone a normative turn toward just, democratic and egalitarian cities, many urbanists have been reluctant “to venture too far down the path of political philosophy” (Barnett, 2014). The authors here boldly take this path in order to deeply reflect on changing realities and representations of the political domain.
In the first part of this introductory chapter, we therefore outline our general conceptualization of the late neoliberal condition. Stemming from its internal tensions as an accumulation regime, neoliberalism gives rise to contradictory political outcomes in urban spaces. These are heightened in times of instability. In the second part of this introductory chapter, we look at late neoliberal urbanization as a process of dismantling and reconstruction. Moreover, in addition to chronicling the reiterated workings of neoliberalism as a destruct...