Business Improvement Areas and the Justification of Urban Revitalization: Using the Pragmatic Sociology of Critique to Understand Neoliberal Urban Governance

Gentrification has changed in ways that are related to larger economic and political restructuring. Among these changes is the return of heavy state intervention in the process. This paper explores heightened state involvement in gentrification by examining the process in three New York City neighbourhoods: Clinton, Long Island City, and DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass). We argue that state intervention has returned for three key reasons. First, continued devolution of federal states has placed even more pressure on local states to actively pursue redevelopment and gentrification as ways of generating tax revenue. Second, the diffusion of gentrification into more remote portions of the urban landscape poses profit risks that are beyond the capacity of individual capitalists to manage. Third, the larger shift towards post–Keynesian governance has unhinged the state from the project of social reproduction and as such, measures to protect the working class are more easily contested.

The changing state of gentrification

The paper presents the results of an international study of creative industry policies and strategies, based on a survey of public-sector creative city initiatives and plans and their underlying rationales. As well as this survey and an accompanying literature review, interviews were carried out with senior policy-makers and intermediaries from Europe, North America, Africa and south-east Asia. The paper considers the scope and scale of so-called new-industrial clusters in local cultural and creative quarters and sub-regional creative hubs, which are the subject of policy interventions and public—private investment. The semantic and symbolic expansion of the cultural industries and their concentration in once-declining urban and former industrial districts, to the creative industries, and now to the knowledge and experience economy, is revealed in economic, sectoral and spatial terms. Whilst policy convergence and emulation are evident, manifested by the promotion of creative spaces and industry clusters ...

Creative Cities, Creative Spaces and Urban Policy

Ten years after its first publication, the theory of the Creative Class is more relevant than ever. Now for the first time, this original book is revised and updated for a new generation. First published in 2002, "The Rise of the Creative Class" weaved storytelling with reams of cutting-edge research to trace the fundamental theme that runs through a host of seemingly unrelated changes in society: the growing role of creativity in our economy. The idea started a fire. Ten years later, any serious conversation about the creativity, geography, and economic growth must integrate the concept of the Creative Class. Our values and tastes, our personal relationships, our choices of where to live, and even our sense and use of time are changing. Leading this transformation are the millions of people who create for a living. This Creative Class is found in a variety of fields, from engineering to theatre, biotech to education, architecture to small business. Their choices have already had a huge economic impact. In the future, they will determine how the workplace is organized, what companies will prosper or go bankrupt, and even which cities will thrive or wither. Now completely revised and updated, "The Rise of the Creative Class Revisited" takes a deeper look at the forces reshaping our economy and provides a provocative new way to think about why we live as we do today - and where we might be heading.

The Rise of the Creative Class--Revisited

This paper addresses the development of post-disciplinary ‘actuarial’ or risk-based technologies of power. Arguing against models which focus on icreased efficiency as an evolutionary criterion for emerging technologies of power, it suggests that such technologies' place and form are largely dtermined by the nature and fortunes of political programs with which they are aligned. Thus the rise of neo-conservatism and related programs have extensively modified and curtailed programs based on risk models, and expanded those based on punishment and discipline. The paper examines the nature of situational crime prevention in the light of these ideas, and moves on to consider certain broader theoretical implications.

Risk, power and crime prevention

In this introduction to the special section on ‘Assemblage and geography’, we reflect on the different routes and uses through which ‘assemblage’ is being put to work in contemporary geographical scholarship. The purpose of the collection is not to legislate a particular definition of assemblage, or to prioritise one tradition of assemblage thinking over others, but to reflect on the multiple ways in which assemblage is being encountered and used as a descriptor, an ethos and a concept. We identify a set of tensions and differences in how the term is used in the commentaries and more generally. These revolve around the difference assemblage thinking makes to relational thought in the context of a shared orientation to the composition of social-spatial formations.

Business Improvement Areas and the Justification of Urban Revitalization: Using the Pragmatic Sociology of Critique to Understand Neoliberal Urban Governance

References

The changing state of gentrification

Creative Cities, Creative Spaces and Urban Policy

The Rise of the Creative Class--Revisited

Risk, power and crime prevention

Assemblage and geography

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