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

A century after the publication of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the "Spirit" of Capitalism, a major new work examines network-based organization, employee autonomy and post-Fordist horizontal work structures.

The New Spirit of Capitalism

This essay elaborates a critical geographical perspective on neoliberalism that emphasizes (a) the path–dependent character of neoliberal reform projects and (b) the strategic role of cities in the contemporary remaking of political–economic space. We begin by presenting the methodological foundations for an approach to the geographies of what we term “actually existing neoliberalism.” In contrast to neoliberal ideology, in which market forces are assumed to operate according to immutable laws no matter where they are “unleashed,” we emphasize the contextual embeddedness of neoliberal restructuring projects insofar as they have been produced within national, regional, and local contexts defined by the legacies of inherited institutional frameworks, policy regimes, regulatory practices, and political struggles. An adequate understanding of actually existing neoliberalism must therefore explore the path–dependent, contextually specific interactions between inherited regulatory landscapes and emergent neoliberal, market–oriented restructuring projects at a broad range of geographical scales. These considerations lead to a conceptualization of contemporary neoliberalization processes as catalysts and expressions of an ongoing creative destruction of political–economic space at multiple geographical scales. While the neoliberal restructuring projects of the last two decades have not established a coherent basis for sustainable capitalist growth, it can be argued that they have nonetheless profoundly reworked the institutional infrastructures upon which Fordist–Keynesian capitalism was grounded. The concept of creative destruction is presented as a useful means for describing the geographically uneven, socially regressive, and politically volatile trajectories of institutional/spatial change that have been crystallizing under these conditions. The essay concludes by discussing the role of urban spaces within the contradictory and chronically unstable geographies of actually existing neoliberalism. Throughout the advanced capitalist world, we suggest, cities have become strategically crucial geographical arenas in which a variety of neoliberal initiatives—along with closely intertwined strategies of crisis displacement and crisis management—have been articulated.

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Cities and the Geographies of “Actually Existing Neoliberalism”

We commonly call rehgious ideology, ethical ideology, legal ideology, poli1ical ideology, CIC., SO many "world outlooks." Of course, assuming that "C do not live one of these ideologies as !he trulh (e.g. "behc,c" in God, Duty, Justice, CIC. • .), "c admu that I.he ideology we arc di9CUSSmg from a crittcal point of v1cw,cnmming it as the c1hnologist examines the m)'ths of a "primitive society," 1ha1 1hesc "world outlooks" arc largdy imaginary, i c. do not "correspond to rcalif)." Ho,.c,er, while admining Wt !he) do correspond to reality, i.e. that the) constitute an illusion, we admi1 that they do mal.c allusion to reality, and th•1 1hey need only be "in1crprcted" to disco,cr !he reality of the "orld behind their imagina11 rcprcscntauon of that ,.o,ld (ideology = 1/l,,s10,,f •llus-). There arc different types of interpretation, the most famous of which arc the "'"hanim, type, current in the cightccn1h century (God is the imaginary representation of the real King), and !he "lttrrtfffltu11," interpretation, inaugurated by !he carli<st O.urch Fathers, and revi,ed b) Feucrbach and !he thcologico­ plulosoph1cal school "hich dc,ccnds from him, e.J. !he theologian Barth (to Feuerbach, for example, God is thc essence of real Man). The essential point 151ha1 on condiuon that "c interpret !he imaginary tnnspo6ition (and inversion) of ideolog) "c arrh'e 11 the conclusion !hat in ideology "men represent their real conditions of existence 10 thcmsches in an imaginary form." 295

http://intro2waw.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/files/2016/02/Ideology-and-Ideological-State-Apparatus_REDUCED.pdf

Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses

Introduction 1. 'Class Struggle on Avenue A': The Lower East Side as Wild Wild West 2. Is Gentrification a Dirty Word?I: Toward a Theory of Gentrification 3. Local Arguments: From Consumer Sovereignty to the Rent Gap 4. Global Arguments: Uneven Development 5. Social Arguments: Of Yuppies and HousingII: The Global is the Local 6. Market, State and Ideology: Society Hill 7. Catch 22: The Gentrification of Harlem? 8. On Generalities and Exceptions: Three European CitiesIII: The Revanchist City 9. Mapping the Gentrification Frontier 10. From Gentrification to the Revanchist City

The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City

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

References

The New Spirit of Capitalism

Cities and the Geographies of “Actually Existing Neoliberalism”

Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses

The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City

Rise of the Network Society: The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture

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