A new paper is out in Urban Geography, on ‘The city’ as developmental justification: claimsmaking on the urban through strategic planning. In it I ask why Olympic bidders seek to make claims on ‘their’ cities. It is very common for Olympic bids to brand themselves as representing the potential host city, even though Olympics are usually managed by non-governmental entities and involve both urban and suburban stakeholders Many bid organizations simply refer to themselves by City Name, Year (e.g. “Doha 2020” or “NYC 2012, Inc”) and often make sweeping claims about the supposed motivations of that city. The paper draws on a comparative analysis of 43 Summer Olympic bids, and case studies of bidding politics in New York and Doha, Qatar. I argue that this type of claims making defines ‘the city’ with reference to particular places within it—pilot projects, particularly successful or troubled neighborhoods, zones subject to special legal or fiscal interventions—effectively allocating the right to define the city to the stakeholders who control those places.

Abstract: Municipal governments produce a seemingly endless supply of urban strategic plans, which purport to define the city by making claims on its future development trajectories. Critics note that this claimsmaking on “the city” renders it conceptually vacuous and overextended. Yet it is essential to question the degree to which speculative policymaking is merely rhetorical. Discursive claimsmaking on the city through strategic planning documents is an important technique in urban politics—a form of targeted simplification that benefits particular stakeholders by defining the city around sites in which they are invested. Bids to host sporting “mega-events” like the Olympic Games are a case in point: event planning corporations routinely make claims on the city, which strategically simplify its forms and processes, often by defining the city in ways that mediate between particular land investment projects and broad visions for citywide development. The implication is that claimsmaking on the city through urban strategic planning is intentionally simplistic and acts as an ideological practice for justifying urban development projects.

The paper is behind a paywall, please feel free to email me for an authors’ copy.

Many thanks are due to the outstanding group of authors who contributed to a series of sessions that I organized with Mark Davidson, and a panel I organized with Sarah Moser and Diganta Das.

The paper sessions were focused on Revisiting Entrepreneurialism: The Logics of Urban Governance in Systemic Crisis. Authors offered theoretical commentaries on the entrepreneurial city thesis, the idea (originally advanced by David Harvey) that municipal governments respond to national state decentralization and austerity by proactively investing in revenue-generating opportunities (e.g. public-private real estate ventures). Other authors offered analyses of contemporary urban entrepreneurial ventures, exploring the ways in which the entrepreneurial city has diversified into social entrepreneurship, sustainability initiatives, and progressive forms of entrepreneurial governance.

The panel session on The Entrepreneurial City Reconsidered: New Agendas and Diverse Geographies. brought these into conversation with a parallel set of sessions on entrepreneurial cities in the Global South. Panelist explored South-North, and North-South transfers of entrepreneurial policy, the role of entrepreneurial governance in post-neoliberal cities, and the question of whether progressive politics can emerge through entrepreneurial governance (e.g. through social innovation initiatives).

My contribution to a session co-organized with Alan Wiig (Temple University) at the 2014 Critical Geography Conference; we were lucky to have eight very high-quality papers in the event. My paper argued that there is a need to read long-term ideological strategies in the urban political process: supposedly ‘temporary’ mega-events are often linked to the interests of longer-term political coalitions.

This applies a theoretical argument that Mark Davidson and I made last year in Antipode, and is the basis for a new article currently in working paper form (email me for a current copy if interested!).

Title: Events in urban development: Ideological moments in the urban fabric

Abstract: Events and other temporary initiatives play a key role in facilitating entrepreneurial urban governance: they are viewed as speculative interventions which catalyze long-term urban development. Yet events remain under-theorized, relegated to an instrumental role in two dominant interpretations of spatial-temporal process in urban development: First, events are read as a process of commodifying the urban – of producing capital fixes – by constructing and selling spectacles. But the event-as-fix is typically cast as a function of entrepreneurial regimes of accumulation, simply one more neoliberalization practice in contemporary urban governance. Second, events are read as inducing states of exception in urban politics: calling forth assemblages which allow a temporary state of developmentalism in the city. But event-as-assemblage is typically cast an isolated project, a temporary occurrence which facilitates a pre-defined governance objective but does not reflect back into it. I argue instead that events are better conceptualized as experiments. They are both fix and assemblage, both process and project: they experimentally draw on temporary and de-territorialized policy assemblages in order to produce durable capital fixes in urban land markets. Drawing on a comparative study of land politics surrounding sports mega-events, I show how ‘temporary’ interventions in the urban fabric are materialized into durable capital fixes in real estate markets. This is not a random process; rather, events-as-experiments are strategically deployed in order to produce these fixes. I contribute a framework for tracing temporal inequalities in the politics of the urban fabric, showing how strategic deployment of ‘temporary’ experiments both abbreviates the contemporary democratic process and materializes vested interests through land investments.

 

Keywords: event, spatial fix, assemblage, entrepreneurial city

Please feel free to email me for a copy of the working paper.