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The urban politics of roll-with-it neoliberalizationRoger Keil

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To cite this Article Keil, Roger(2009)'The urban politics of roll-with-it neoliberalization',City,13:2,230 — 245

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‘Politics, culture and consumerism’, Berlin, Potsdamer Platz, April 2009 (above); and weekly demonstrators against Hartz IV social welfare reform in Frankfurt, Germany, July 2008 (below). Photos: Roger Keil

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CITY, VOL. 13, NOS. 2–3, JUNE–SEPTEMBER 2009

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The urban politics of roll-with-it neoliberalization

Roger KeilTaylor and Francis

Urban politics has changed during a generation of neoliberalization. This paper argues thatnext to the notions of roll-back and roll-out neoliberalization, which have been putforward to explain this change, a third concept might be helpful: roll-with-it neoliberaliza-tion. The three concepts refer to phases, moments and contradictions in neoliberalization.Roll-with-it neoliberalization captures the normalization of governmentalities associatedwith the neoliberal social formation and its emerging crises. The paper outlines an imma-nent critique of roll-with-it neoliberalization to determine possible consequences for urbanpolitics in this current phase: (a) neoliberal governmentality has been generalized to thepoint that it does not have to be established aggressively and explicitly and (b) the far-reaching crises of regulation that have gripped the capitalist urban system as a result ofneoliberal roll-out now demand new orientations in collective action that involve both‘reformed’ neoliberal elite practices and elite reaction to widespread contestation of neolib-eral regulation. The paper differentiates two ideal types of urban political discourses at thecurrent conjuncture and adds a progressive alternative that points beyond the neoliberalagenda. While the previous era created governance conflicts around social cohesion andeconomic competitiveness, the current debate moves to new sectors of social concern, whichbroaden the agenda of urban politics to encompass fields traditionally not included inconsiderations on urban political regulation. The paper concludes that while roll-with-itneoliberalization has changed the game and moved the boundaries of urban politics, it hasalso created new contradictions that demonstrate its own unsustainability as a mode ofregulation. As the financial and economic architecture of global neoliberalism fails, andcommunities world wide are thrown into the maelstrom of crisis, urban politics and theactors that make it need to be reimagined.

Neoliberalism—so long, we hardly knew ya’

arx noted that each social forma-tion carries within it anothersocial formation (Legros et al.,

1979). In this spirit, we need an immanentcritique of the particular form of capitalistsocial formation we have encountered inthe past generation, neoliberalism.1 Suchan immanent critique may reveal thespecific contradictions inherent in the

current conditions and point towards somenew pathways for development. Analyti-cally, neoliberalism is rarely seen as a socialformation but like, for example, in thetypical treatment of the subject in a recentessay by Brand and Sekler (2009, p. 6), as (1)‘a theory and an intellectual movement’,(2) an elite strategy to reconfigure theFordist compromise and (3) a social prac-tice. Indeed, we now have a good generalsense of what neoliberalism has meant as a

M


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theory, ideology and practice of capitalistchange (Harvey, 2005). Jessop hasexplained that there has been an ‘ecologicaldominance’ of neoliberalism, that is, thepredominance of neoliberal ideology in allareas of social life. This leads, as Jessopnotes, to an increased intensity of capitalaccumulation processes, a reinforcement ofexchange-value-oriented activities, generalliberalization, the strengthening of thecoercive power of competition and a rein-forcement of shareholder value in theeconomy. The entire society, even naturemust now be competitive (Jessop, 2008).When looking at neoliberalism as a socialformation as I will in this paper, I am notsuggesting a hermetic and fully developedsystem but accept that in the past 30 yearsmore or less orchestrated and intentionallyinitiated social practices of neoliberaliza-tion have condensed into a geographicallyand culturally variegated set of societalarrangements that display at least some ofthe tendencies mentioned by Jessop above.I will examine these condensations withparticular reference to urban regions.

A generation ago, in the wake of the first oilshock and the global recession of the 1970s,we witnessed the dramatic retooling of urbanregions across the capitalist West as we movedfrom a Keynesian–Fordist regime of accumu-lation to a neoliberal–post-Fordist regime(Hirsch and Roth, 1986). The crisis-inducedrestructuring that followed—which Peck andTickell (2002) have described as a rapidtemporally and spatially entwined interplayof roll-back and roll-out neoliberalization—may now have made room for yet anotherround of restructuring, which will set theseurban regions on a path even more removedfrom their past trajectories than the momen-tous changes of the previous period. I am call-ing this new development roll-with-itneoliberalization. It means, in the firstinstance, the normalization of neoliberal prac-tices and mindsets, the (frequently contested)acceptance of the ‘conduct of conduct’ ofneoliberalism, a manner, as Dardot and Laval(2009) note with reference to Michel Foucault,

‘of inciting the subjects to conduct themselvesafter the model of the enterprise and thegeneral norm of competition’. Whereas roll-back and roll-out entailed clear references tothe previous Fordist–Keynesian social forma-tion, roll-with-it is self-referential and not inrelation to something that has to first bebrought down or brought in. Roll-with-itneoliberalization refers straight to ‘ecologicaldominance’ as a ‘natural’ and often unques-tioned condition of life under capitalismtoday. It also means that to some degree theidea of external actors (e.g. Friedman, Hayek,Thatcher, the Ontario Tories, etc.) bringing inintended change to ‘affected communities’(e.g. university economics departments, theChilean state, miners in Yorkshire, welfarerecipients, etc.) has to be amended by theinsight that when roll-with-it neoliberaliza-tion enters the picture, neoliberal subjects ofall kinds co-construct, sustain and also contesta now normalized neoliberal social reality. To‘roll-with’ neoliberalization means that polit-ical and economic actors have increasinglylost a sense of externality, of alternatives(good or bad) and have mostly accepted the‘governmentality’ of the neoliberal formationas the basis for their action.

While in the first instance I have introducedthe concept of roll-with-it as a new phase ofneoliberalization, which replaces and supple-ments roll-back and roll-out historically, italso, in the second instance, refers to a momentof neoliberalization which exists alongsideand intertwined with its historical predeces-sors. Roll-back and roll-out have not endedbut rather continue to work through theaffected societies. The three moments aresimultaneous and interactive. In the thirdinstance, then, these three moments are dialec-tically related to one another. Actors movingalong their various registers create new contra-dictions, struggles, conflicts and possibilities.The current crisis provides an excellent lensthrough which to observe the interactionamong the different registers as politicians,capitalists and activists want to stabilize,restore and revolutionize ‘the system’ all atonce. As the shifts from roll-back/roll-out to


KEIL:THE URBAN POLITICS OF ROLL-WITH-IT NEOLIBERALIZATION 233

roll-with-it neoliberalization are emergent,the discussion that follows is mostly about thenew and explicit politics of change. In particu-lar, the discursive and rhetorical shifts inpublic policy and political contestation arerelevant here. But these shifts in discourse arealso beginning to lead to institutional transfor-mations and new public policy, and are accom-panied by realignments of social and politicalpower relations, although it is too early tomark a major break from two decades ofneoliberal formulations and realities.2

Clearly, the concept of roll-with-itneoliberalization relates to notions of post-neoliberalism which are now being debatedwidely. No argument is made here thatneoliberalism as a set of ideas and practices issimply going to vanish. By contrast, there is‘the intention … to discuss differentresponses to the (negative) impacts of neolib-eralism and its growing inability to deal withthe upcoming contradictions and crises’. Thefocus here is on ‘a perspective on social, polit-ical and/or economic transformations, onshifting terrains of social struggles andcompromises, taking place on different scales,in various contexts and by different actors’(Brand and Sekler, 2009, p. 6; Demirovic,2009). A new social formation seems to betaking shape, but much of it will carryforward the burdens incurred by a generationof neoliberalization while some yearn for agolden age of Keynesianism, which theywould like to restore, and others dreambeyond capitalism and revive socialist utopiasthat had been considered obsolete. In hisrecent speculations on post-neoliberalism, atthe height of the world financial crisis, BobJessop (2008) insinuated that while it doesn’thave a label yet, such a social formation mightdevelop markedly nonliberal modes of regu-lation and reintroduce de-liberalization,empowerment, socialization, an emphasis onsocial use value, fair trade instead of freetrade, progressive taxation, new forms of stateintervention, the resubjectivation of subjects.Most importantly, perhaps, the ecologicaldominance of neoliberalism may have to beexorcized by a merger of political economy

and political ecology as the central politicalaxis of progressive political praxis.

If we pronounce the end of neoliberalism,at least in its known incarnations, asexpressed in its rhetoric and political agenda,we need to apply a measure of prudence inour prediction. The beast is not dead yet, andas those who think geohistorically andgeopolitically have noted, it may be a whileuntil the current dynamic plays itself out inany recognizable manner (Wallerstein, 2008;Harvey, 2009). But perhaps it is time to beginasking the question—hardly answerable atthis point in time—of whether neoliberaliza-tion was a failure or a success by its ownmeasure? In order to pose this question, letalone answer it, we need to acknowledgeneoliberalization as a programmatic interven-tion, a deliberate attempt to make history(and geography, primarily through complexrescaling processes). In the West it has beenfirst and foremost about the two connectedprocesses of dismantling (the welfare stateand Fordist compromise) and rebuilding (ofless state and more market-oriented forms ofcapital accumulation).

To some degree this double dynamics hasbeen a rational process. Starting in the early1970s in all seriousness, neoliberalization wasa concerted, deliberate—and in many of theless ideological cases even well-intended—reaction to the perceived or real crisis ofFordism/Keynesianism. In this sense, it was aresponse to and ultimately driver of techno-logical change (flexibilization, end of Taylor-ism, end of social compromise and itsattached technologies of power). ThomasLemke has perhaps captured this neoliberalrationality better than anyone else:

‘Neo-liberalism is a political rationality that tries to render the social domain economic and to link a reduction in (welfare) state services and security systems to the increasing call for “personal responsibility” and “self-care”. In this way, we can decipher the neo-liberal harmony in which not only the individual body, but also collective bodies and institutions (public administrations, universities, etc.), corporations and states


234 CITY VOL. 13, NO. 2–3

have to be “lean”, “fit”, “flexible” and “autonomous”: it is a technique of power.’ (2001, p. 203)

But inseparably, neoliberalization also hashad an irrational bent to it. This is not to saythat ‘the irrationality of the markets’ is anaberration but that this irrationality issystemic and fits neoliberalism’s ulteriorgoals as well as similar ‘non-economic’ influ-ences on its inner workings, such as thetestosterone-driven lifestyle of the traders(McDowell, forthcoming). As an unregu-lated, anarchic process, neoliberalizationcreated unprecedented scandals, a culture ofgreed and a general vindictiveness directed atthe working classes and the poor. Often, thetwo processes were entwined and hardly aday goes by without another corporateleader caught stealing, and another politicianrevealed to have treated the state’s coffers as abase from which to roll out a feast for aclique of friends. When thinking about thenew politics of roll-with-it neoliberalism, wewill have to deal with both, the rational andthe irrational elements of neoliberalization.

Meanwhile, the neoliberal agenda hasbecome a hard sell just at the time whenneoliberalism enjoys its ecological domi-nance most visibly. Roll-out neoliberalism aspolitical rhetoric has run it course in manyjurisdictions. It is close to impossible for anypolitical party in the current period to win anelection with an openly revanchist andneoliberal program. In previous periods ofneoliberalization, the roll-out of moremarket-oriented, less welfarist policy wasoften greeted with electoral success at variousscales: politicians like Rudy Giuliani in NewYork City, Mike Harris in Ontario or Marg-aret Thatcher in the UK were voted in onprograms that explicitly celebrated ‘revolu-tionary’ neoliberal shifts. Yet, persuadingvoters to buy revanchism and privatizationunder their true label has become a moredifficult affair of late. They must be articu-lated with other political registers to work. Inthe fall of 2008, the conservative Canadiangovernment presented a budget update in the

neoliberal tradition of zero deficit spending.But a huge public outcry and a politicalthreat from the opposition forced it to renegeon its original plans and it came back with amuch different proposal in early 2009, whichreflected some spending deemed necessary inlight of the crisis in the Canadian economy.Similarly, the Sarkozy government in Francereacted to general strikes and protest actionin January and March 2009 with an infusionof social policy rhetoric that had previouslybeen absent from the government’s discourse(Figure 1). Yet the (all-but) disappearance ofroll-out rhetoric does not mean the end ofroll-out neoliberalism in practice. Even thehistoric victory in the American presidentialelection of Barack Obama, whose campaignhad sent post-neoliberal signals in contradis-tinction to Bush era disaster capitalists(Klein, 2007), has consolidated into a broadand sweeping policy program which reveals aseries of measures hardly alien to the primephilosophical tenets of neoliberalization.Responsibility remains heavily invested inindividuals, the poor are hardly in the pictureof reform, ‘creative’ economic policies areput in place and the state grows deeper intoits role as handmaiden of certain groups ofcapital that drive the new and old economies(Widmann, 2008, p. 14; Keil and Wilson,2009).

Urban neoliberalization

This paper deals specifically with the urbanproblematic. The social and spatial conditionsof urban regions in advanced capitalist econo-mies continue to undergo dramatic changes.Even before the world financial crisis alteredthe dynamics of the game, the most recentperiod of neoliberalization has seen wide-spread deindustrialization and very sparsereindustrialization in many cities and regionsas China moved to become ‘l’atelier dumonde’; we have witnessed the almostcomplete disappearance of a blue collar indus-trial workforce in many former industrial coreregions in Europe and North America where



workers are now fighting a desperate fight tokeep their plants open and where ‘boss-nappings’, hunger strikes and other spectacu-lar defenses have become de rigueur; but evenperipheral production sites have lost appealby comparison with what China has had tooffer; various waves of apparent rejuvenationof the global capitalist machine, most obvi-ously the electronic industries in the late1990s, and the real estate triggered boom ofrecent years, have failed spectacularly in thedotcom and subprime crises, respectively.

The period of roll-back and roll-outneoliberalization saw globalization coupledwith de- and selective reindustrialization,de- and selective recentralization of activitiesand—often state-induced—privatization inmajor urban centres (for an early andprescient description of this development seeSoja et al., 1983). ‘Globalization’ and‘neoliberalization’ created the conditions formassive urbanization in the global South andfor expansive (sub)urbanization in the

industrialized North. Those countries andregions where industrialization has movedfastest and most intensively (China, India,Brazil for industrialized agriculture andmanufacturing of consumer durables, forexample; California, the South of France,parts of Japan for high-tech, etc.) have alsohad the most explosive urban growth. Thewinner regions of the past period of restruc-turing—for example, Ontario, Languedoc-Roussillon, Baden-Württemberg—are nowstruggling to stay on top as other regions arebeginning to bypass them on the globalmarketplace. There is some consolidation ofwinner regions (see Frankfurt, Toronto,Paris, Montreal) but there are also consider-able shifts in regional power and economicinfluence as the crisis unfolds.

Urban regions and the urban process arecentral to neoliberalization:

‘Urbanization … has played a crucial role in the absorption of capital surpluses, at ever

Figure 1 Participants in general strike, Montpellier, France, March 19, 2009.


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increasing geographical scales, but at the price of burgeoning processes of creative destruction that have dispossessed the masses of any right to the city whatsoever. The planet as building site collides with the “planet of slums”.’ (Harvey, 2008, p. 37, citing Davis, 2006)

Based on the general acceptance of the ideathat capitalism survives through urbanizationand urbanism, that is, in the broader sensethrough the production of space (Lefebvre,1976, 1991, 1996, 2003; Harvey, 1982), somewriters in the tradition of critical urban stud-ies have pointed to recent neoliberal develop-ments as confirmation of the importance ofurban regions to the political, spatial andeconomic regulation of capitalism (Brennerand Theodore, 2002; Brenner, 2004).

There has been the sprawling metropolita-nization of global city economies beyondeven the 100 km circle of the previous periodand post-suburbia has emerged as the domi-nant form of urban life. Not just the socialand institutional structure of cities changesunder the impact of neoliberalization, thebuilt environment becomes a haven formegaprojects and iconic development.Massive investment flowed into theseprojects which are built in a liberalized, unre-strained manner, often pushed by ambitiouslocal, regional and national states keen ondistinction in a globalized inter-jurisdictionalcompetition (Diaz Orueta and Fainstein,2008; Lehrer and Laidley, 2008). Many urbanregions have seen a growing socio-spatialpolarization with a continued weakening ofmiddle income groups and of the entire ideaof a secure middle-class society; alongside,we have seen in Europe and North Americathe increasing racialization of poverty andthe re-emergence of catastrophic healththreats (such as TB) to the poor areas of thecity; the negative aspects of these dramaticchanges have not been offset by the timidinstitutionalization of ecological moderniza-tion policies in the face of a growing aware-ness of global ecological crisis; rather, wehave observed an increase of vulnerabilitiesand risk to all but few.

These shifts took three decades to maturesince Reagan, Thatcher and their acolytes inthe 1980s first floated ideas about urbanenterprise zones, defunded or sold publichousing, destroyed urban school systems andbuilt up local police states with vindictivephilosophies of social cleansing directed atracialized youth and the poor. Furthermore,whereas the shift from Fordism–Keynesian-ism to Post-Fordism–Neoliberalism includedinter alia a shift in scalar regulation from thenational state to the urban region itself, andwhile now strategic differences and distinc-tive profiles among those regions in a globalmarketplace are more important than theirequal accoutrement in national urbansystems (Brenner, 2004), we now encounteran even more dramatic shift away fromregional territoriality to predominantlytopologically constructed relationships ofmetropolitan spaces (Amin, 2004). This iscontradictory: deterritorialization is taken asan economic given at the same time as urbanregions struggle as territorially definedcollective actors in order to harness globalstreams of capital, investment and skilledlabour. Articulating fixed scales and opentopologies (Jessop et al., 2008), new urbangovernance forms must be viewed as prod-ucts of complex struggles in networked andhierarchical interrelations among oftenantagonistic actors.

Neoliberal urban politics

During the roll-back and roll-out phases/moments of neoliberalization a distinctivepolitics took shape, and a more and morepredictable set of policies such as workfare,targeted policing and public–private partner-ships were disseminated through ‘fast policytransfer’ to many cities around the globe (Peckand Theodore, 2001). The elements of thishave been poignantly summarized by DavidWilson in a review of Spaces of Neoliberalism:

‘[P]rograms flagrantly bolstering business and corporations, hypermarket rhetoric,



punitive and inflammatory discourse against the poor, and the intensification of social segregation. In this new reality, welfare benefits are shrunk and tied to five-year limits, cities balkanized into mosaics of segregated communities, ghettos left to rot, and public spaces virulently policed to control access and use. The more polarized city visibly displays society’s growing inequalities in its evolving form and fabric.’ (2004, p. 676)

In the case of Toronto the competitive citywas characterized by entrepreneurialism,revanchism and differential social segrega-tion, often couched in a language of opportu-nity and diversity (Kipfer and Keil, 2002).

Neoliberal urban governance has takenhold in what can be termed, following ErikSwyngedouw (2005, 2007), the ‘local state ofpost-politics’, built on the political neutral-ization of dissent through cooptation andmarginalization of critique in current urbangovernance agendas. The ‘right to the city’

became redefined, in many instances, as theright of the consumer to privatized urbanspace and differential commodities on themarketplace rather then the right of the urbaninhabitants to the possibilities the urbanizedsocieties have to offer and to the historicalachievements previous social struggles haveyielded (Mitchell, 2003) (Figure 2).

Just as local welfare states were mostneeded by a growing and diversifying clien-tele, they were undercut and much responsi-bility was shifted to the voluntary sector or tothe patients, clients and citizens at the receiv-ing end of state assistance. At the same time,the organizations of affected communitiesand individuals changed their strategies.Chouinard and Crooks have examined, forexample, how

‘disability organizations are experiencing significant pressures to change how they deliver services and support to disabled people in need. These include pressures to diminish levels of service provision to clients,

Figure 2 Politics, culture and consumerism, Berlin, Potsdamer Platz, April 2009.


238 CITY VOL. 13, NO. 2–3

particularly those in greatest need, to reduce staffing levels and institute survival strategies that negatively impact working conditions, to rely even more heavily upon volunteer labour, and to modify their operations and organizations in a struggle to cope with harsh neoliberal conditions.’ (2008, p. 173)

Third sector and security services, for exam-ple, became part of the overall shadow stateon which much of neoliberal governmental-ity came to rest (Eick et al., 2003, 2007).Under these conditions, as Harvey said,politics changed: ‘This is a world in whichthe neoliberal ethic of intense possessiveindividualism, and its cognate of politicalwithdrawal from collective forms of action,becomes the template for human socializa-tion’ (2008, p. 32).

In terms of the urban politics of neoliber-alization, there was a re-bourgeoisement ofthe political process (the renewed politicalactivism of more conservative urban middleclasses in lieu of working class or populargroups in liaison with progressive middle-class groups); there was also an international-ization of politics as inter-urban competitionbecame a game played out locally throughbenchmarking and market-oriented perfor-mance standards against which all socialservices came to be measured. At the sametime, the registers of collective politicalaction changed noticeably, became selectiveand geared towards specific classes and othersocial groups: more coercive political actionby the state was directed against racializedyouth, for example, while evocative, creativetypes of politics and governance were offeredto other segments of the urban population;and while public spaces became more andmore restricted and policed, more innovativeuses of privatized, festivalized and spectacu-larized spaces were created to capture theimagination of a new politics of lifestyle,talent, performance, consumption and events(Florida, 2002; Lehrer, 2005, 2006).

Urban regions became the collective actorand strategic terrain in the globalized strug-gle for location of individual enterprises,

sectors of the economy, branch plants ofmultinational corporations, creative workers,museums, sports teams and more fleetingimagined benefits such as the Olympics,world exhibitions, large scientific congressesand so forth (Boudreau et al., 2007). Theneoliberalization of urban-regional gover-nance often entailed intense pressures on thepublic economy as privatization anddownloading were part of the rescaling ofgovernment architectures.

In sum, then, cities and regions have beenboth prime sites of and major laboratories ofneoliberal restructuring and state rescaling(Brenner and Theodore, 2002; Brenner, 2004,2009; Keil and Mahon, 2009). Yet, when wespeak of urban neoliberalism and neoliberal-ization today, we refer to a strongly contra-dictory and contradicted process—acontested landscape of social struggles (Leit-ner et al., 2007). Also, many programs thathave been brought in by aggressive roll-outgovernments in earlier years have beenshown to have little or detrimental effect andhave been rescinded by the same or futuregovernments (for the Ontario case seeBoudreau et al., 2009). This is not to belittlethe devastating impact of decades of neolib-eral-led capitalist restructuring. Any HartzIV recipient in Germany can attest to thecruelty of structural adjustment on his or herback (Figure 3). The poor and the workingclass have come through these devastations asthe true ‘creative class’ (Wilson and Keil,2008). It is also undisputed that the strategicpositions from which the left has resisted andcontested have been hollowed out, as tradeunions, social movements and progressivepolitical parties have been among the losersof the political game accompanying neoliber-alization in many, even progressive jurisdic-tions. The terrain has been thoroughlybounded by the limits set through normal-ized neoliberal governmentalities.

These new policies did, of course, notremain unopposed. And while under thehegemony of neoliberalization most criticalpolitical forces were pushed into a registerbetween criminalization and creativity, there



has been growing unrest or at least uneaseabout the victimization of large parts of theurban population (Leitner et al., 2007), andstruggles to democratize urban politics haveoccurred in many places (Purcell, 2008). Noteverywhere was doom and gloom andneoliberal compliance. In Porto Alegre, forexample, new forms of radical municipalismwere tested; in Europe, many red–greengovernments defended progressive agendas,and social movements continued to see thecity as their main terrain of action (Nicholls,2008).

A new urban politics

Urban and regional regulation, widely seen ashaving included often simultaneous processesof roll-back and roll-out neoliberalism (Peckand Tickell, 2002), has now moved to a thirdmoment, roll-with-it neoliberalization. Polit-ically, this contains primarily two elements:

(a) neoliberal governmentality has beengeneralized to the point that it does not haveto be established aggressively through anexplicit policy of roll-back and roll-out (ashappened, for example, during the Harrisyears in Ontario; Keil, 2002); and (b) the far-reaching crises of regulation that have grippedthe capitalist urban system as a result ofneoliberal roll-out now demand new orienta-tions in collective action that involve both‘reformed’ neoliberal elite practices and elitereaction to widespread contestation of neolib-eral regulation. I propose to typologicallycapture the range of potential kinds of collec-tive action in this period as Roll-with-it 1(referring to more authoritarian, capital-oriented, market-serving policies and politicalconstellations) and Roll-with-it 2 (meaningmore democratic, populist, reformist, ecolog-ical options) (Table 1). The two versions ofroll-with-it governance and politics oftenexist side by side and many current govern-ments that struggle to find ways to address the

Figure 3 Weekly demonstrators against Hartz IV social welfare reform in Frankfurt, Germany, July 2008.


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current crisis are Janus-faced. Black–green orred–red coalitions in Germany, for example,express some of the spectrum of realpoliticalreactions to the challenges of the currentperiod. Alongside, and often intertwined withofficial politics, are areas of contestation andresistance that open up possibilities of changewhich point beyond the limits of neoliberal-ization. Attached to these ideal types ofneoliberal politics in the current period arepossible new political orientations that tran-scend the horizon of current roll-with-itneoliberalization.

Globalized urbanization, then, continueslargely in a ‘neoliberal context’ but it alsoopens new conditions for reformist politics(official and not) and contestation. Neolib-eral governmentalities in a globalized urbanworld have been normalized despite ongoingcontestations. Larner et al. have captured thenew complexity in a period of what they call‘after neoliberalism’ in an analysis of NewZealand:

‘the economic and social configurations that characterize after neoliberalism are emerging out of a range of political projects that are only now being consciously aligned into a

new stance on how to participate in the globalizing economy. Each of these projects constitutes its objects and subjects of governance in distinctive ways. Moreover, while there are many conjunctures between them, the ambitions of these projects may work, if not in opposition then at least tangentially to each other—global versus domestic orientations, elitist versus democratic impulses, national versus regional economic ambitions, economic versus social capital.’ (2009, p. 222)

Yet there is, at this point, little imaginationbeyond thinking neoliberally. Even in theremarkable municipal anti-neoliberal experi-ments of Latin America or in the leftistregions of France, for example, we have seenmarkets on the march in areas of collectiveand individual consumption, have seencampaigns for efficiency in governmentprograms and bureaucracies and have seen thegap between rich and poor grow wider. Butwhat we do register now is the end of theconventional crisis-induced restructuring thathad been characteristic of socio-spatialitysince the 1970s which operated by simplereplacement of one form of doctrine withanother and a sequential and sometimes

Table 1 Possible pathways of urban politics in an era of roll-with-it neoliberalization

Roll-with-it neoliberalization 1 Roll-with-it neoliberalization 2 Contestation, alternatives, hope

Authoritarian government; revanchism

Governance; neoreformism Political liberation; the right to the city

Splintering urbanism New forms of communal service provision; cooperative ownership; community-based ecological modernization schemes in cities

Politics of hope

Disaster capitalism Crisis capitalism ‘Yes we can!’Infection as metaphor of globalization

Global cooperation in public health Rising awareness and positive politics of health

American empire New multilateralism World Social ForumNew normal Transparency and Rechtsstaat Civil society basedFinancial capitalism Melt-down Regulation; redistributionMilitary–urban complex Ecological modernization; techno-fixes Peace economies; environmental

justiceAutomobile production; road building

New public infrastructures; transit, etc. Off the grid ecologies, cycling, community energy systems

Privatization of public health assets; abstention policies; control; illness redefined as wellness

New public health debates Re-communalization of health care



simultaneous deployment of roll-back androll-out measures. Instead, we are entering aperiod of profound uncertainty about thefuture path. Recent state actions to stem thewave of financial crises around the globecontained some important aspects of findingnew modes of engagement, to alter the verypremises on which capitalist restructuring hasbeen built for a generation. As elite strategiesfor survival of the fittest assets and mostcompetitive investments abound, alternative,critical and contesting counterstrategies willhave to be recalibrated, too.

While the previous era created governanceconflicts around social cohesion andeconomic competitiveness, the currentdebate moves to new sectors of socialconcern, which broaden the agenda of urbanfutures in Europe and North America. In thecontext of this development, urban gover-nance has been expanded to encompass fieldstraditionally not included in considerationson urban political regulation. Among thesenew policy areas/fields are public health,human security, infrastructure and urbanecology (Figure 4). Despite the pressingissues served up to urban and regional agen-das in an era of post-SARS, pre-avian flu (Aliand Keil, 2008), post-9/11 concerns aroundsecurity, massive splintering of urban infra-structure systems and continued pressures onurban environments, the political and policyprograms of cities have been brought under

the public hegemony of creative economicsand cultural politics.

In past decades cities have been thegrounds of rearguard battles around collec-tive consumption (neoliberalization ofservices, for example) as well as aroundworkers’ status and rights as well as jobs ingeneral. These struggles have not disap-peared. But there are now new collectiveactor constellations (hegemonic and subal-tern), which push for a rather new type ofurban politics. As urban elites struggle toreorient themselves in a frantic world ofinter-urban competition, they introducedrastic austerity policies on their budgets andcommunities while toying with conceptssuch as the creative class and the cultureindustry to save their position vis-à-vis otherurban regions who follow the same path(Peck, 2005). While many progressivesjustifiably find the creative turn threateningto progressive political agendas, the politicsof the creative city, a celebration of cultural-ized hegemony will have to be engaged with.The idea of creativity will need to be linkedto a redistributive anti-poverty politics innew and innovative ways (Wilson and Keil,2008).

As we come to terms with the dramaticconsequences of the financial crisis for thecoffers of cities and communities, globallymobile investors that had once been seen assaviours of public transportation and hous-ing are now moving their assets out or failaltogether. In this situation, a courageous,politically correct and often populist appealto recollectivize the ways in which weconsume shelter and move around willunfortunately not be enough. New forms ofpost-Keynesian modes of collectiveconsumption will need to be invented.Poverty and social polarization have them-selves reached catastrophic levels in manypost-neoliberal cities. But they are now madeworse by the threat and reality of a politics ofsocial and ecological catastrophe in an age ofcalculated ‘disaster capitalism’ (Klein, 2007).This includes a progressive politics of riskand vulnerability that does not abandon the

Figure 4 Flu preparedness billboard, Athens, Georgia, October 2008.


242 CITY VOL. 13, NO. 2–3

field of dealing with cataclysmic or pandemicthreats to the statist and authoritarian rightor the liberal and deregulated markets.

Such a reorientation of progressive strat-egy would also need to extend to a politics ofmobility which lives up to the multivariantneeds of a widely differentiated urban societyand still is guided by fundamental socialjustice concerns of affordable mobility for all(Cass et al., 2005). There needs to be an openand positive reengagement by the urban leftwith a politics of socio-technologies andsocio-natures in order, as Coutard and Guyhave proposed, to repoliticize our ‘paniccities’ with a politics of hope: we need ‘toidentify an urban technological politics thatbreaks free from technological pessimismand offers some hope for change’ (Coutardand Guy, 2007, p. 731; Monstadt, forthcom-ing). Similarly, a politics of dwelling andplace must break down the boundaries estab-lished by gentrification—which Smith (2002)denounced as a global strategy of neoliberal-ism—and reintroduce dignity into the strug-gle for cooperative and collective ownership,rental housing and against homelessness.Steve Graham (forthcoming) ends his chillingbook on cities and war with an appeal forpolitical resistance. It is a difficult proposi-tion because we cannot fight the fire that hasbeen brought to our cities with fire. We needto disable the military–urban complex thatchokes the urban system with other means.Similarly, we need to recapture a sense ofpublic health with the emphasis on bothaspects of this compound term. An aware-ness of and a struggle for democratic formsof organizing healthy lives on a continuum ofsocial justice concerns and medical consider-ations rather than in a catastrophic regime ofhealth and wealth in peace times for some,and poverty and sickness in times of crisis formost (Ali and Keil, 2008). We learned fromHurricane Katrina that dealing with disasterdoes not start once the dam breaks but has tobegin in the preparation and affirmativeaction taken to support the infrastructures ofthe neighbourhoods and worlds in which thepoor and disadvantaged live their everyday

lives. Any surprise about systematic inequi-ties in the landscapes from which people haveto escape in times of crisis can thusly beavoided (Young and Keil, forthcoming).

Conclusion

This paper has argued that there have beendifferent ‘phases’ and ‘moments’ of urbanneoliberalization that have been linkedthrough dialectical contradictions: in the1990s a narrative of outside influence waspresent in much of the debate on neoliberal-ization and the city. Cities were ostensiblyattacked by neoliberal policies and over-whelmed by ‘foreign’ concepts derived froman ‘alien’ Thatcherism or Reaganism. Roll-back of more welfarist modes of social regu-lation and roll-out of more market-orientedforms, for example, defined the battlegroundof social struggles in many cities in the 1980sand 1990s. In the 2000s, we have experienced‘neoliberalization from within’: in Toronto,for example, this marked the shift from themayoralty of conservative Mel Lastman tothat of social democrat David Miller(Boudreau et al., 2009). To some degree, thislatest shift has entailed a naturalization andnormalization of neoliberal concepts inpublic policy and everyday life. I have calledthis process ‘roll-with-it’ neoliberalization inorder to capture a new phase and moment ofneoliberalization at this present time. Thisshift also pointed to the implication andcollusion of most actors in urban politicswith the doctrines and beliefs set by threedecades of neoliberalization. Seen as an inter-nalized process now, and not as an externalthreat to a (more collective, solidaric, redis-tributive) social mode of regulation, neolib-eralization builds more and more on theexistence of already socialized neoliberalsubjects that have internalized neoliberalgovernmentalities. The paper has argued thatwhile roll-with-it neoliberalization haschanged the game and moved the boundariesof urban politics, it has also created newcontradictions that demonstrate its own



unsustainability as a mode of regulation. Asthe financial and economic architecture ofglobal neoliberalism threatened to fail, andcommunities world wide were thrown intothe maelstrom of crisis, the neoliberal subject‘crashed’. Viewed by many neoliberals, whodon’t believe in society as a concept, as thecentre piece of the myriad rational profitseeking decisions that define our existence,the neoliberal subject appears to have cometo the limits of its capacities (Dardot andLaval, 2009).

Perhaps in the next decade, we will see adeparture from neoliberalization? There maybe two larger options if that occurs. We couldsee stepped up polarization, fascism, war. Orwe could alternatively see a renewed empha-sis on redistribution, democracy, peace. LeoPanitch and Sam Gindin have said recently:

‘It is possible that a new form of social rule within capitalism may emerge to succeed neoliberalism. But given how far subordinate social forces need to go to reorganize effectively, it is most likely that the proximate alternatives to neoliberalism will either be a form of authoritarian capitalism or a new form of reformist social rule that would reflect only a weak class realignment.’ (2008)

In all likelihood neoliberalism’s ‘moments’—roll-back, roll-out and roll-with-it—willcontinue to exist side-by-side, layered or inrhyzomatic embrace for a while and willdemand a certain nimbleness on the side ofits declared political adversaries.

Acknowledgements

Research for this paper was supported bySSHRC and Infrastructure Canada. I thankKaren Bakker for her comments on an earlierdraft.

Notes

1 1 I am aware of the Althusserian undertones of the term ‘social formation’. In this sense, I am

implying that neoliberalism, in all its many differentiated forms, has now congealed into something of a structural whole with its ideological state apparatuses firmly aligned with the project of making capitalism free from social constraints that had been put in place as a result of 100 years of class and other struggles. Pointing beyond Althusser, though, is the insight gained from Lefebvre and Foucault that such a project can only succeed through the colonization of everyday urbanity and through the recasting of the technologies of power that rule urban space.

2 2 I would like to thank Margit Mayer who pointed out this important distinction between rhetoric and reality of change. While I focus on the discursive shifts in political programs and rhetoric particularly since the emerging global crisis, I also rest my argument on a decade of empirical work in areas such as the urban governance of global infectious disease outbreaks, the relationships of homelessness and disease, the urban political ecology of (failing) social and technical infrastructures in cities and the restructuring of governance in globalized city regions. References to these real (rather than just discursive) areas of neoliberalized urban reality are sometimes made explicit, but mostly serve as implicit reference to the arguments developed here.

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Roger Keil is the Director of the CityInstitute at York University, Canada.Email: [email protected]


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City - The Urban Politics of Roll-With-it Neoliberalisation