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.

Alan Wiig (Temple University) and I want to thank all of the participants who contributed to our sessions on at the 2014 Critical Geography Conference (hosted by Temple University). The session on Politicizing the Fabric of the City: Rethinking Material Politics in Urban Studies benefited from contributions ranging from my work on the materialities of event-led development to Alan’s on the infrastructural politics of smart cities, from the vital materialities of urban trash (Rosalind Fredericks) to the politics of preserving/demolishing modernist architecture (Renee Tapp). Thanks are due as well for the insightful comments by our discussant, Kristine Unsworth of Drexel University.

Program – Politicizing the fabric of the city

Call for Papers: Association of American Geographers, 2015 annual meeting, Chicago, April 21-25

Revisiting Entrepreneurialism: the logics of urban governance in systemic crisis

Harvey’s (1989) outline of entrepreneurial urban governance remains a staple of urban theory. Consensus is that cities – as constrained by neoliberal institutions – must pursue growth above all else, even at the cost of the well-being of some of their citizens (Merrifield, 2014). Urban governance is therefore seen to rely on technocratic or speculative experiments that are designed to make the city a better enabler of market processes (Gibbs, 2013; Karvonen & van Heur, 2014; MacLeod, 2011; Swyngedouw, 2011). Yet we constantly see that urban growth initiatives are not coherent nor bear predicted results. Over time, speculative initiatives can be subject to regime changes and capitalist crisis that render them something other than what was intended. In addition, political actions are now being taken at the municipal level that appear to contravene entrepreneurial dictates. Can such changes make our urban politics something other than entrepreneurial and/or neoliberal?

In recent years a number of significant urban economic and political events have occurred which appear to demand a revision of popular theories of urban governance. They highlight the limits to entrepreneurialism coordinated according to the logics of growth and, paradoxically, the resilience of entrepreneurial practices despite their inability to deliver growth. Entrepreneurial practices appear to be tearing away from their neoliberal justifications, becoming more apparent manifestations of ideological practices. Such events include the raft of municipal bankruptcies that have shaken the financial ordering of cities by ignoring the governmental rules of financial capitalism. They also include events that seem to cast doubt on the strength and scope of neoliberal dictates; where significant increases in city-based minimum wages are now accepted as politically possible and broad-based mobilizations are challenging who has the authority to govern cities. The logics of entrepreneurialism therefore appear less constraining and/or more easily transcended, even in our so-called post-political times.

This session therefore revisits the political economic condition of urban governance. It examines how urban politics can and have diverged from the entrepreneurial neoliberal condition, and what the implications of such divergences can and might be. Potential topics of papers to be included in the session might include:
Theories of urban governance that develop ideas of entrepreneurialism
Studies of urban events and processes that challenge dominant understandings of urban governance
Attempts to understand urban governance in times of (permanent) political and economic crisis
Studies and theories of political confrontation and change in contemporary cities
Attempts to comparatively understand the varied experiences of cities in times of crisis

Authors are invited to submit 250 word abstracts to John Lauermann (jlauermann@clarku.edu) and Mark Davidson (mdavidson@clarku.edu), by October 6. Likewise, please feel free to contact us with questions or to discuss potential paper topics.

References:
Gibbs, David, Krueger, Rob, & MacLeod, Gordon (2013) Grappling with smart city politics in an era of market triumphalism. Urban Studies, 50(11), 2151-2157.

Harvey, David (1989) From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: the transformation in urban governance in late capitalism. Geografiska Annaler. Series B. Human Geography, 71(1), 3-17.

Karvonen, Andrew, & van Heur, Bas (2014) Urban laboratories: Experiments in reworking cities. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38(2), 379-392.

MacLeod, Gordon (2011) Urban politics reconsidered: growth machine to post-democratic city? Urban Studies, 48(12), 2629-2660.

Merrifield, Andy (2014) The New Urban Question. London: Pluto Press.

Swyngedouw, Erik (2011) Interrogating post-democratization: Reclaiming egalitarian political spaces, Political Geography, 30(7), 370-380.

Call for Papers – Politicizing the fabric of the city: rethinking material politics in urban studies

Alan Wiig and I are organizing a session at the 21st Annual Critical Geography Conference, hosted at Temple University in Philadelphia, 7-9 November 2014. If the following call for papers is of interest, please be in touch!

As our planetary condition is increasingly an urban condition, calls to rethink the ontology of the city are common (Brenner 2013, Merrifield 2014, Scott & Storper 2014). Indeed, references to our urban age have become “an all pervasive metanarrative” analogous to ‘modernization’ in the 1960s or ‘globalization’ in the 1990s (Brenner & Schmid 2014, p 4). Many of these attempts at reframing the definition of the planetary urban condition seek to re-engage with urban materiality, looking towards urban assemblages (McCann & Ward 2011), metabolisms (Heynen et al 2006), or networked ecologies/infrastructures (Graham & Marvin 2001). This work has produced innovative frameworks for re-thinking the territoriality of urban materials: spatial extension/concentration, translocal networking, (un)boundedness, and (non)contiguity. This session asks contributors to not only re-territorialize urban materialities, but also to politicize the ‘fabric’ of urban space: the multiple layers of land use, infrastructure, and technology which are co-present in the built environment (cf. Gandy 2014, McFarlane & Rutherford 2008). In doing so we seek to reframe interpretations of urban inequality. We explore the geographical-historical dimensions of land, infrastructure, and technology with recognition that the ‘mega’ projects and lasting material legacies which characterize the urban built environment are particularly adept at reproducing inequality at broad scales and over long temporal horizons. We seek to build conversations across critical geography paradigms, considering pathways by which political economic logics and drivers are assembled, performed, and reproduced through urban fabrics. We invite papers which explore strategies in pursuit of more progressive cities by engaging the urban fabric. This includes papers which consider topics like, but by no means limited to:

• The impact of translocal assemblages and mobilities on and through urban materialities
• The political economic logics and drivers which assemble/reproduce urban fabrics
• Politics of the more-than-human dimensions of the urban fabric
• Points of engagement between historical materialism of the city and the increasingly complex forms of urban territoriality
• Diverse, ordinary, and comparative geographies of urban fabrics

Abstracts of 250 words should be sent to John Lauermann (jlauermann@clarku.edu) and Alan Wiig (alanwiig@temple.edu) by 3 September 2014. More information about the conference is available at tucriticalgeography.org

Works cited:
Brenner, Neil. (2013). Theses on urbanization. Public Culture, 25(1), 85-114.
Brenner, Neil, & Schmid, Christian. (2014, online early). The ‘Urban Age’ in question. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. doi: 10.1111/1468-2427.12115
Gandy, Matthew (2014 forthcoming). The fabric of space: water, modernity, and the urban imagination. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Graham, Stephen, & Marvin, Simon. (2001). Splintering urbanism: networked infrastructures, technological mobilities and the urban condition. London; New York: Routledge.
Heynen, Nik, Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw (eds.) 2006. In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism. London; New York: Routledge.
McCann, Eugene, & Ward, Kevin (eds) (2011). Mobile urbanism: cities and policymaking in the global age. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
McFarlane, Colin & Rutherford, Jonathan (2008) Political infrastructures: Governing and experiencing the fabric of the city. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 32(2): 363-374.
Merrifield, Andy. (2014) The new urban question. London: Pluto Press.
Scott, Allen J., & Storper, Michael. (2014, online early). The nature of cities: the scope and limits of urban theory. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. doi: 10.1111/1468-2427.12134

I recently attended the Summer Institute in Urban Studies at the University of Manchester. Organized by cities@Manchester, this was a forum for early career urban studies scholars, from across the social sciences and humanities. It was a pleasure to meet the future leaders of the field (and a number of the current leaders as well!).

Summer Institute in Urban Studies 2014 participants

As an added bonus, the legacies of the 2002 Manchester Commonwealth Games were a recurring theme during the event: we even managed to make a trip to ‘Sport City’ – the primary cluster of venues for the Games (built over what used to be an open-pit coal mine).

The primary venue cluster for the 2002 Manchester Commonwealth Games: now a variety of sports training facilities, and the Manchester City Football Club.

A regeneration project jointly owned by the Manchester City Council and the Man City Football Club. The site includes parts of the 2002 Commonwealth Games ‘Sports City’ site.