REGENERATION AS THE URBAN DIMENSION OF NEOLIBERALISM John Lovering

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REGENERATION THE URBAN DIMENSION OF LATE
NEOLIBERALISM
CPLAN-SOCSI Joint Seminar on Regeneration
John Lovering
23 March 2006
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1. THERES NO THEORY OF REGENERATION

• Its place in recent urban history
• 1950s Reconstruction
• 1960s Revitalisation
• 1970s Renewal
• 1980s Redevelopment
• 1990s Regeneration
• Peter Roberts and Hugh Sykes (1004) Urban
  regeneration A Handbook Sage and the British
  Urban Regeneration Association

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Regeneration in practice means ...

• New buildings
• High-street transformation
• Building sites
• Rapidly-changing urban development scenarios
• Accelerated uneven development

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2000
Cardiff
2006
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Bangor
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2. REGENERATION AND NEO-LIBERALISM

• Starting points
• Neo-liberalism is the dominant order (Harvey)
• Regeneration expresses and helps constitute
  neo-liberalism
• Urban regeneration means in practice
  gentrification, commodification, and the
  reconstituted of cities for the middle class
  (Neil Smith) ... esp.. in Old World, where it
  entails the dismantling of the Keynesian National
  Welfare State

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• cities have become the incubators for many of the
  major political and ideological strategies
  through which the dominance of neo-liberalism is
  being maintained (Brenner 375-6)

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• the overarching goal of such neoliberal urban
  policy experiments is to mobilise city space as
  an arena for market-oriented economic growth and
  for elite consumption practices(Brenner 2002
  368)

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Retaking the city for the middle classes

• the current language of urban regeneration...
  bespeaks the generalisation of gentrification in
  the urban landscape (439)
• It involves more than just housing Integrated
  housing with shopping restaurants, cultural
  facilities, open space, employment opportunities
• whole new complexes of recreation, consumption,
  production, and pleasure, as well as residence
• Neil Smith 2002 (443)

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Theories of Neo-liberalism's trajectory

• Neo-liberalism is seen in Jessop as
• 1.a utopian market Ideology (a discourse) and
• 2. a strategic policy package and
• 3. an form of organisation (Actually Existing
  Neoliberalism Brenner and Theodore 2002)
• The early phase Roll-back Neo-liberalism
  (Thatcher, Reagan, Kohl, Mitterand, Hawke Ozal,
  etc)
• followed in mid 1990s by Roll-out
  Neo-liberalism (Clinton, Blair, Schroeder...
  WEF, World Bank, IMF...)
• Brenner, Peck and Tickell, Harvey

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Neoliberalism, the State, and Space

• Neo-liberalism as a Gramscian project to identify
  and institutionalise a new Spatial Fix to
  displace, defuse, or resolve the crisis of
  accumulation under the preceding
  Fordist-Keynesian era
• (and geography seems to be central to the project
  Harvey, Smith)
• BUT there are various takes on this
• An economic crisis? Lipietz, Jessop etc
• A crisis of the state/governance legitimacy?
  Habermas, Offe, Macleod, Jones, Ward

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Bob Jessops version

• The analysis
• derived from the theoretical analysis of
  developmental tendencies in capitalism combined
  with observation of national economies within the
  circuits of Atlantic Fordism (2006 p10)
• Leads him to declare that
• the importance of the national scale of policy
  making is being seriously challenged as local,
  regional, and supranational levels of government
  and social partnership gain new powers (Jessop
  2002 460)

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Reimagining the Urban

• Jessop echoes others celebrating new imagined
  economic and social geographies of the urban,
  rooted in supposedly new economic dynamics of
  capitalism
• Command cities Global City nodes in Networks or
  Flows Sassen, Castells etc, Urry
• Innovative cities Cities as centres of
  entrepreneurialism Richard Florida
• Plural Cities - Massey, Thrift etc

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.. by situating the new geography, and
regeneration as

• A general historic trend
• (2) A strategic/policy obligation
• (3) Entailing primarily technical issues
• global transferable Good Practice etc (e.g
  BURA)
• including (elitist) forms of spatial governance
  (Urban development partnerships, etc)

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So, whats the problem with Jessop?

• The Schumpeterian Workfare PostNational Regime
  is not an ideal type but a reductionist box
• Schumpeterian? - not often
• Workfare? - not always
• PostNational? - not really
• Regime? - not
• Jessop embodies the lacunae of Regulation Theory?
  Implicit economic reductionism plus a
  voluntaristic theory of the state

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4 RECONCEPTUALISING NEO-LIBERALISM

• Primarily an ideological discourse (Mesaros)
• Rooted in the natural ideology of capitalist
  daily life (Marx) and the psychoanalytics of
  Identity (Lacan)
• This ideology best articulated by Hayek and
  operationalised as a strategy of social
  engineering to make markets work (create
  self-generating systems)
• A discourse that has been re-mobilised since the
  1970s as a result of not of economic necessity
  but nationally contingent social, cultural and
  economic tensions (US tax revolt, white flight,
  the crisis of Keynesianism... US regaining
  hegemony)

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Neo-liberalism as a partisan policy bias

• Not a Strategy for All Capital
• Effects are economically contradictory
• (a failure in terms of reviving accumulation)
• Thereby encouraging the diversion of capital
  towards assets fixed property
• (seeking Ricardian rent rather than
  Smithian/Marxist accumulation)

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The US, now global, property market bubble

• The property / housing boom consequences of the
  global expansion of credit
• The burgeoning of finance capital over productive
  capital is typical of historic eras in which the
  regulatory order is insecure
• A sign not of a new regime (a new fix) but of
  an indeterminate interregnum
• (Arrighi)

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Ideological neo-liberalism and the
respatialisation of governance

• Less (a la Jessop) a functional adaptation to a
  new set of given (neo-liberal) economic circuits
  and imperatives
• than a conceptually chaotic package, the result
  of a series of contingent political-cultural
  interventions which also constitute those new
  economic flows and imperatives.
• These interventions influenced by the
  contingencies of global political-economic
  authority (the hegemony of the US state, from
  the Baker Plan to The Washington Consensus to
  Third Way, etc
• (Peter Gowan, Walden Bello...)

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Urban Governance in this perspective

• Admits/Points to contradictions invisible through
  Jessops ideal -typical spectacles
• esp. the general lack of real influence of
  municipal governments over urban economic
  development
• Urban governance very rarely expresses,
  represents, or mobilises a coherent localised
  economic entity
• (there is generally no real locally organised
  capital to represent)
• Hence ubiquitous emphasis on constructing
  networks, discourses, projects

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Urban Regeneration in this perspective

• Less a rationalistic response of governance
  seeking clear (economic) goals than a set of
  interventions driven by the need to make
  governance appear purposeful
• demonstrated by endorsing an authoritative
  discourse
• So emphasis on constructing and celebrating a
  shared discourse and image of regeneration
  (just so you know it really is happening)

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So Regeneration fetishises the Visual

• Characteristically
• an emphasis on the Gaze (regeneration as about
  the Visual urban environment, citizenship as
  shared consumption of the spectacle)
• and a emphasis on performing governance as
  visibly as possible

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Regeneration and the Gaze
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Urban Governance for Regeneration as an exercise
in symbolic Politics ( but it needs good timing)
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The economic non-logic of neo-liberal
regeneration

• Cities are not generally in competition,
  (Northern) cities are not primarily bases for
  global production (but some Southern and Asian
  ones are)
• In general it is not economically proven that
  cities are the motors or drivers of the
  national, let alone the global, economy.
• Even less is it true that their global flows
  drive cities
• Empirically Most urban economies are driven by
  complex exchanges and flows at all scales
• Theoretically there is no reason to assume the
  crucial scale in the expanding division of labour
  is the global one

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Regeneration (like competitiveness) has no
substance..

• .. until it is given some... by the most powerful
  local interests
• so the neo-liberal shift licenses a proliferation
  of boosterism and boosterists, focussed on
  property sector (swollen by the diversion of
  capital to assets)
• hence Urban Regeneration often means remaking
  the worlds cities in American style (not the
  worlds most successful form of urbanism)

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5 A PROPOSAL

• I. The notion of the Regional/Urban Service
  Class
• II. The transmission of Regeneration (analyses,
  rhetorics, policies, outcomes..) as the
  construction of a global market in commodified
  policy ideas

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I The Regional/Urban Service Class

• Its composition
• contingently variable
• Its role
• sounding out various ideas of what has been
  happening, what is going to happen, and how to
  intervene
• to prospect a plausible future and synthesise
  some quite decent new clothes for a reality still
  emergent, naked, and not quite conscious of
  itself (Nairn 1973), (Karl Renner, Kees van der
  Pijl

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II The institutional construction of the global
regeneration-ideas market

• Demand
• the proliferation of units of 'governance,
  devolution, decentralisation
• Now 300 city regions (Scott, Soja etc)
• Plus new nation states
• Supply
• the emergence of global analysis-policy products
• Brand Leaders, franchises and local followers
  (Porterism)
• discourses of Professional expertise (strategic
  brokers, new subjectivities... (Cindy Katz)

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So why does regeneration look the same
everywhere?

• The Mechanisms of conformity ...
• exploring the interplay of the structuration of
  the market for regeneration ideas
• and the composition of the regional/urban Service
  Class
• inc. shared cognitive and normative discourses

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And how to change it?

• Barriers
• The social composition of the Local Service
  Class, its constitutive discourse
• The neo-liberalisation of academic research, and
  commodification of spatial policy
• Identifying spaces for alternative groups, ideas,
  goals
• First show that the orthodoxy is not the
  necessary
• Ideology

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THE ARGUMENT

• We need to situate Regeneration in relation to
  neo-liberalism
• But the dominant analyses of neo-liberalism are
  too rationalistic
• The urban dimension is then read-off as the
  (fatalistic) spatial corollary of capitalisms
  crisis-management
• I argue for neo-liberalism as primarily a name
  for an ideology, shaping a diverse set of
  neo-liberalising policies
• With contradictory effects
• Regeneration can then be seen as an ideological
  construct at several scales, and a partisan - and
  challengeable - process

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This suggests a Research Agenda

• Q Who are the (global-local) agents of this
  construction?
• A Nodal groups in the new global urban policy
  making community, the Local Service Class as a
  set of Cadres
• Q What are the institutional developments that
  give rise to their existence?
• A the (global policy driven) proliferation of
  units of governance, the consequent emergence
  of a market for ideas, and the response of
  suppliers (Branded Consultants, their academic
  echoes etc)
• Q How can regeneration be given more progressive
  substance?
• A By changing the Local Service Class
  representative of whom? Motivated by what?

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References

• Giovanni Arrighj (2005) The social and political
  economy of global turbulence New Left Review 20
  March-April 2003 5-69
• Giovanni Arrighi (2005) Global governance and
  hegemony in the modern world system in Global
  Governance edited by Alice D. Ba and Matthew
  Hoffman Routledge 2005
• Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore (2002) Cites and
  the geographies of 'actually existing
  neoliberalism Antipode 34
• John Lovering (2006) The New Imperial Geography
  in Economic Geography, Past Present and Future
  edited by Helen Lawton Smith and Sharmi
  Bakhti-Sen, Routledge
• David Harvey (2005) A Brief History of
  Neoliberalism Oxford University Press
• John Lovering (2003) The regional service class
  in The competition for inward Investment edited
  by Nicholas.J. Phelps and Philip Raines Edward
  Elgar
• John Lovering (1995) Creating discourses rather
  than jobs the crisis in the cities and the
  transition fantasies of intellectuals and policy
  makers in Healey P, Davoudi S Graham S and
  Madani-Pour A (Eds) Managing Cities the new
  urban context Wiley Chichester 109-126

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• Gordon MacLeod (2001) New regionalism
  reconsidered Globalisation and the remaking of
  Political Economic Space International Journal of
  urban and regional research 25 (4) 804-
• Saad-Filho and DeborahJohnston (2005)
  Neoliberalism a reader Pluto Books
• Isvan Mesaros (2006) The Power of Ideology Zed
  Press
• Jamie Peck, Adam Tickell 2002) Neoliberlaising
  space Antipode 34
• Bob Jessop (2002) Liberalism New Liberalism and
  urban Governance A state-theoretical perspective
  Antipode 34
• Cindy Katz (2002) Partners in crime?
  Neoliberalism and the production of new politcal
  subjectivities Antipode 37
• Saskia Sassen (1994) Cities in a World Economy
  Pine Forge, London
• Allen J, Scott. John Agnew, Edward W. Soja,
  Michael Storper (2005) Global City-regions An
  overview
• Neil Smith (2002) New Globalism, New Urbanism
  Gentrification as Global Urban Strategy Antipode
  34
• Neil Smith (1996) The New urban frontier
  Gentrification and the revanchist City Routledge
• Ellen Meiksins Wood (2003) The Empire of Capital
  Verso
• Kees van der Pijl (1984) The Making of an
  Atlantic Ruling Class London, Verso
• Kees van der Pijl (1998) Transnational Classes
  and International Relations London, Routledge