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‘Don't Waste a Crisis’: Opening up the City Yet Again for Neoliberal Experimentation
Author(s) -
Oosterlynck Stijn,
González Sara
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
international journal of urban and regional research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.456
H-Index - 114
eISSN - 1468-2427
pISSN - 0309-1317
DOI - 10.1111/1468-2427.12064
Subject(s) - politics , corporate governance , rationality , phenomenon , government (linguistics) , financial crisis , political economy , sociology , economic governance , creative cities , dimension (graph theory) , economy , economic system , political science , economics , epistemology , philosophy , linguistics , mathematics , finance , pure mathematics , law , macroeconomics , creativity
This essay calls for a systematic investigation of the financial‐economic crisis as a source of new urban governance rationalities across E urope. We propose combining an understanding of neoliberalization as a variegated social phenomenon with a cultural political economy approach sensitive to the discursive dimension of variegation and the evolutionary mechanisms through which discursive variation is translated into geo‐institutional differentiation. We illustrate how this theoretical framework may help to analyse the impact of the crisis on urban governmental rationalities. Rather than offering a complete cultural political economy account of the responses of E uropean cities to the financial‐economic crisis, we analyse how the crisis and the responses to it have been represented in discourses on urban policies and development by focusing on two discursive sites that are of strategic importance, namely OECD LEED and URBACT . Our preliminary findings suggest a re‐assemblage of existing discourses rather than the emergence of a new post‐neoliberal urban government rationality.