Liberalism, neoliberalism, and urban governance: A state-theoretical perspective

This paper discusses the recurrence and the recurrent limitations of liberalism as a general discourse, strategy, and regime. It then establishes a continuum of neoliberalism ranging from a project for radical system transformation from state socialism to market capitalism, through a basic regime shift within capitalism, to more limited policy adjustments intended to maintain another type of accumulation regime and its mode of regulation. These last two forms of neoliberalism are then related to a broader typology of approaches to the restructuring, rescaling, and reordering accumulation and regulation in advanced capitalist societies: neoliberalism, neocorporatism, neostatism, and neocommunitarianism. These arguments are illustrated in the final part of the paper through a critique of the World Report on the Urban Future (1999) both as an explicit attempt to promote flanking and supporting measures to sustain the neoliberal project on the urban scale and as an implicit attempt to naturalise that project on a global scale. The novelty of recent neoliberal projects lies in their discursive, strategic, and organizational reformulation of liberalism in response to three recent developments: the increasing internationalization and/or globalization of economies; the interconnected crises of the mixed economy and the Keynesian welfare national state associated with Atlantic Fordism, of the guided economy and developmental state in East Asia, and of the collapse of the Soviet bloc; and the rise of new social movements in response to the economic, political, and social changes associated with the preceding two changes. Although neoliberal projects are being pursued on many different and often tangled scales, it is in cities and city-regions that the various contradictions and tensions of “actually existing neoliberalism ” (Brenner and Theodore this volume) are expressed most saliently in everyday life. It is also on this scale that one can find major attempts to manage these contradictions and tensions in the hope of consolidating the neoliberal 1 turn through supplementary and/or flanking strategies and policies