Abstract
Neoliberal Cities: The Remaking of Postwar Urban America is an edited volume that uses placed-based case studies to “understand neoliberalism on the ground, as it emerged in the context of everyday life, gained consent, and shaped public policies.” 1 The aim of this work extends beyond providing a historical account of how today’s neoliberal cities came to be, and it is meant to be a “fresh methodological approach” to neoliberalism that is rooted in urban historiography. The editors, Andrew J. Diamond and Thomas J. Sugrue, detail the ambition of this work in the introduction while the empirical chapters (1-7) provide examples of the approach in action. The methodology, in short, combines macro-level theory with case study approaches. The volume provides a contribution to studies of neoliberalism because the careful, place-based histories reveal how hallmarks of neoliberalism—like market-based policies—existed in the postwar period, which contrasts with common portrayals of the neoliberal era as an abrupt break with the past starting in the 1970s.
While the book examines the past, the methodological approach Diamond and Sugrue layout is timely as the COVID crisis and the Biden administration’s stimulus package (the American Rescue Plan Act), may, as historian Adam Tooze has argued, mark the start of a rupture with neoliberalism and a new economic era. 2 As such, Neoliberal Cities provides both rich histories of the 20th and 21st centuries and a methodological approach that can be used to trace what may become the post-COVID urban landscape. The book is accessible to a wide range of readers, including professional scholars and students of American history and can be read in its entirety or as standalone chapters.
The introduction provides a useful and brisk synthesis of the key schisms between two camps of scholarship concerning neoliberalism and may be best suited for those who have some familiarity with the term and academic debates concerning it. Historians and urban sociologists, write Diamond and Sugrue, have approached neoliberalism from a “resolutely local” orientation and focused on “specific cities or metropolitan areas with attention to electoral politics, social movements, and racial and ethnic conflicts.'' 3 In contrast, social theorists and geographers, with David Harvey cited as a foundational figure, have emphasized “macro-level transformations in finance, modes of production, and governance” in their work. 4 . While these two areas of scholarship have been largely siloed from one another, Diamond and Sugrue advocate for a fresh approach that draws from both. The urban historiography approach they advance is an important intervention especially meant to address and overcome the “the frequent silences on race in many theoretical accounts of neoliberalism.” 5 The empirical chapters that follow are meant to embody their methodological proposal in-action.
The empirical chapters provide detailed case studies of policies and historical moments that have enabled and formed today’s neoliberal cities in the United States, focusing on Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, New York City, Los Angeles, and the larger southern California region. All the chapter authors engage the work of social theorists and geographers, either critically or informing their own understanding of neoliberalism. Mary Pattillo’s contribution is an especially good example of the methodological approach that is central to Neoliberal Cities. She details the transformation of North Kenwood-Oakland (NKO), a neighborhood in Chicago that lies south of downtown, home to the University of Chicago, and transitioned from majority-white to majority-black in the mid-twentieth century. Pattillo neatly ties NKO’s history and transformation with larger historical moments and federal policy shifts, like the Great Migration and 1949 Housing Act. By examining the neighborhood’s history and political dynamics between different stakeholders in conjunction with larger federal and state policies, Pattillo shows that neoliberalism does not represent a clean break with the “mid-century big state interventions, but rather an intensification of practices that have long been central to a capitalist political economy.” 6
Also noteworthy is Kim Phillips-Fein’s close study of New York City’s 1975 fiscal crisis, which is often cited as a key moment in the broader shift to neoliberal governance. The chapter focuses on the local, political dynamics of the time and shows how the shift to neoliberalism was not straightforward or easily accomplished. As an example, Phillips-Fein details a battle over the city’s plan to shutter a firehouse (Engine Company 212), which activists feared was a “larger plot by the city to withdraw services, drive residents away, claim the waterfront land of the neighborhood and turn it over to industrial businesses to keep them in New York.” 7 Phillips-Fein’s work demonstrates that fiscal crises are not a mere technocratic matter of how to balance a budget, but are bound up with questions about the very nature of a city and “who the city government ought to serve and to whom it should be accountable.” 8
While the book is titled Neoliberal Cities, some readers may note an absence of a definition of what exactly constitutes a neoliberal city, and how we might distinguish one from other, non-neoliberal cities (if such places exist). This is in part because the authors engage theorists with very different political perspectives: Thomas Adams (Chapter 2), for example, draws on Wendy Brown’s critical theory approach to neoliberal governance, while Sylvie Tissot (Chapter 6) uses the history of Boston’s South End to critique Neil Smith’s work and neo-Marxists more generally. Implicitly (and sometimes explicitly), the authors frame neoliberalism as political ideology and/or policy paradigm. Their approaches differ from others who conceptualize neoliberalism as a form of governmentality and focus on the formation of neoliberal subjectivities. 9 The aim of the book is not to advance a theoretical concept, but instead to show that while a temporal bright line is often presented as neatly separating the Keynesian and neoliberal eras from one another, historical analysis reveals the demarcation to be much more blurry and non-linear. Here, I think there is much agreement and overlap between historians and many geographers and urban scholars.
An especially important contribution of the book that is carried throughout the chapters is the importance of race. Megan French-Marcelin, for example, uses the history of New Orleans to show that in that city, “initial proponents of [neoliberal] strategies mobilized narratives of racial progressivism and inclusiveness to underwrite uneven growth” that in-turn led to “an even more unequal city”. 10 In their introduction, Diamond and Sugrue stress the need to center race in accounts of neoliberalism, and point out that it is too often ignored or downplayed by “[m]any prominent theorists of neoliberalism.” 11 They link their argument with the work of David J. Roberts and Minelle Mahtani, two geographers, who explicitly called for “focusing on the ways neoliberalism (its underlying philosophy) is fundamentally raced and actively produces racialized bodies.” 12 This book therefore parallels work by a growing number of geographers and urban studies scholars who view neoliberalism as shaped by the logics of racial capitalism. 13 Neoliberal Cities’ emphasis on race is especially relevant and timely for the field of planning. For example, in a 2020 article for the Journal of the American Planning Association, Ed Goetz, Rashad Williams, and Anthony Damiano passionately advocate for the discipline to adopt a new framework that centers Whiteness as a “means for placing the racial politics of urban development within a theoretical framework explaining embedded systems of racial injustice that produce and reproduce White advantage in American metropolitan areas.” 14 The methodological approach offered in Neoliberal Cities aligns well with Goetz et al.’s theoretical framework, providing a novel way forward for planning. By blending case studies of particular places with macro theories, the book shows how political-economic eras transition over time and the important role of local and regional contexts in neoliberalization.
