Eclipse of Modernist City-Building: The Emergence of Privatized Modes of Urban Governance

Modern urban planning in the twentieth century came into existence “to a large extent as a problem-solving discipline,” emerging in reaction to the perception that the rapid and haphazard growth of the nineteenth-century industrial metropolis was a “problematic construction” that rested precariously on shaky foundations.Footnote ²² At a time when modernist city building and its rational planning models have reached the end of their long reign as the dominant approach to fashioning the “good city,” new orientations and frameworks have not yet come into full bloom. This paradox where old models endure as a ghostly presence and emergent approaches remain in their infancy has defined the parameters within which new city-building practices have begun to appear. Because we can no longer ground urban theory on the modernist expectations of a coherent demarcation between dominant central core and dependent peripheries, we need to develop a new critical theory of global urbanism based on the possibility of multiple trajectories of urban transformation operating simultaneously in the same time and space coordinates. The eclipse of modernist city building and its utopian pretenses make it impossible to center urban theory on a priori standards of rational order, coherent form, and rapid circulation. Yet the very possibility of developing alternative critical urban theoretical orientations largely depends on locating some underlining point of reference, or at least underlying patterns, upon which to ground our thinking.Footnote ²³

At the start of the new millennium, the expansive use of public authority as the main mode of urban governance has increasingly been supplanted by a variety of private interests that have steadily asserted their control over the management of urban space. The steady proliferation of regulatory regimes ranging from business improvement districts, community interest developments, and public–private partnerships are merely the visible expression of a wholesale transformation in the public administration and management of urban space. The range of new types and kinds of regulatory regimes have either replaced or greatly undermined public authority. The rapid rise of “privatized planning” where large-scale real-estate interests have increasingly asserted their power to shape the built environment and to construct mega-projects that fall outside the conventional jurisdiction of public authorities.Footnote ²⁴

The expanded role of large-scale private real-estate developers and hybrid (public–private) planning regimes has become the norm in aspiring world-class cities around the globe.Footnote ²⁵ These trends find visible expression in the steady accretion of privately owned and managed enclaves (ranging from enclosed shopping malls and shoppertainment extravaganzas to gated residential communities and private satellite towns) and the displacement of low-income urban residents who stand in the way of progress. This gentrifying impulse has given rise to new “generic cities,” with their look-alike built environments consisting of a familiar pattern of standardized features, similar ingredients, and stylized aesthetics. Celebrated in an exaggerated way by the well-known “starchitect” Rem Koolhaas and his collaborator Bruce Mau in 1995, these so-called “generic cities” display a variety of shared characteristics, no matter where they appear around the world.Footnote ²⁶ These common features typically include a decided preference for large-scale redevelopment projects, an aesthetic attachment to signature “trophy buildings,” the private provision of physical infrastructure, mono-functional land uses, standardized and uniform building typologies, unfettered suburban sprawl, a fixation with security, a deliberate disregard for underlying local ecologies, a bland indifference toward cultural heritage (that is, building “cities without history”), a neo-Corbusierian disdain for disorderly landscapes, and expanded mechanisms of social exclusion.Footnote ²⁷ This trend toward building “generic cities” have gone hand-in-hand with the growing influence of private corporations, philanthropic organizations, and elite “growth coalitions” in what have been conventionally regarded as public processes of urban planning, agenda-setting, and decision-making.Footnote ²⁸

This shift toward privatized planning of urban landscapes represents a significant departure from the modernist vision of city building. As a utopian ideal, modernist principles held that functional efficiency and rational order of urban space were necessary steps required to eliminate the spatial disorder and inefficient land use brought about by the lack of workable regulatory frameworks and unfettered market competition. In its most simplified form, the modernist approach to fashioning the “planned city” rested on the presumption that public authorities operating with little restraint were better able to define and protect the common interests of urban residents.Footnote ²⁹

The shifting place of planning and governance lies at the heart of the future of urbanism. As modernist and high-modernist doctrines of city building have declined in popularity, privatized planning scenarios and entrepreneurial modes of urban governance have increasingly fallen into the hands of private real-estate developers and large-scale property owners. This trend is especially true in fast-growing cities around the world, where public capacities of urban planning agencies are strained to begin with, and where policymakers and middle-class urban residents alike have endorsed and welcomed private intervention and the development of planning initiatives. Even in the postindustrial creative-entertainment cities in the (so-called) Global North, where public agencies may still play a significant role in comprehensive land use planning, the shift toward entrepreneurial modes of urban governance has gone hand-in-glove with the expanded role of private real-estate interests in shaping urban policies.Footnote ³⁰

As a general rule, the predominance of private proprietary interests in city building is deeply rooted in the past.Footnote ³¹ In earlier centuries, urban form assumed a patchwork pattern where privately owned property and public authority remained somewhat separate and distinct, each operating in accordance with their own principles in their own spheres of influence. The rule of laissez-faire economics – what Sam Bass Warner called “privatism” in his historical study of Philadelphia – played a preponderant role in shaping urban landscapes.Footnote ³² The origins of modern urban planning can be traced to various social movements for municipal reform that arose in the latter decades of the nineteenth century as a reaction against the disorder, insalubrity, and unruliness of the industrial city.Footnote ³³ Many utopian visionaries active at the turn of twentieth century conjured up various versions of an imagined ideal city. Yet the mundane, practical considerations of adequate sanitation, decent housing, unimpeded movement of goods and people, and the much-needed provision of social amenities also animated the desire for planning the city. City and regional planners have long sought to balance the conflicting demands of economic growth, social equity, environmental sensitivity, and aesthetic appeal.Footnote ³⁴ As a general rule, the planning process often involves a formal master plan for an entire city or metropolitan region, a neighborhood plan, a project plan, or a set of policy alternatives. Successful implementation of urban planning proposals usually requires political astuteness and entrepreneurship on the part of planners and their sponsors, despite efforts to insulate and shield the planning process from politics. While historically rooted in the public administration of urban landscapes, planning has increasingly involved the participation of property owners and real-estate developers in joint arrangements, such as “public–private partnerships.”Footnote ³⁵

More than a century ago, the power to shape the direction of city building pitted private real-estate interests against the public administration of the urban landscape. As a reaction to problems associated with the excesses of the late nineteenth-century industrial city, municipal officials turned to modernist planning principles as a way to counteract the deleterious effects of perceived crises in health, sanitation, and infrastructure.Footnote ³⁶ For most of the twentieth century, modernist planning in its different permutations and guises shaped city building in the capitalist core of the world economy. Modernist planning principles sought to impose order, coherence, and rationality on the perceived disorder of street life and chaotic urban form of industrial cities in order to bring about much-needed social improvement. The modernist quest for an ordered and rational urban form claimed to offer universal solutions to the myriad problems and perceived chaos of the industrial city. Over time, city-builders exported these planning principles to growing cities in the rest of the world, albeit with mixed results.Footnote ³⁷

The construction of “new towns” gave modernist planners a blank slate on which to create their vision of the ideal urban landscape. Modernist doctrine rested on the conviction that taming the disorderly city depended upon a combination of professional expertise and the deliberate use of public authority to impose solutions on unruly urban landscapes and the people who inhabited them.Footnote ³⁸ At root, modernist planning principles were grounded in the faith in the possibility of systematically attacking, and obliterating, the “moving chaos” of urban life, characterized by narrow streetscapes containing a “volatile mixture of people and traffic, businesses and homes, rich and poor.”Footnote ³⁹ Such comprehensive, holistic goals as efficiency of movement, rational order, and functional specialization relied on a spatial imaginary of a coherent and legible urban form with clearly demarcated patterns of land use.Footnote ⁴⁰ Modernist planning principles rested on the assumption that detached objectivity, scientific rationality, and expert knowledge could engender a singular,universally correct solution that was superior to other sources of judgement.Footnote ⁴¹

The immediate aftermath of World War II signaled the high-water mark of high-modernist city building in North America and Europe with its stress on comprehensive planning and expanded public authority. Seen retrospectively, this relatively short moment in time represented a historically distinct period with limited geographical reach. At this historical conjuncture, single-minded application modernist planning axioms became the international norm, applying objectivity and scientific rationality to city building through decision-making processes regarded as technical (not political) by municipal authorities who were assumed to be neutral and guided by the public interest – which itself was imagined to be the common good. The application of modernist planning principles aimed to “produce a coordinated and functional urban form organized around collective goals.”Footnote ⁴² Urban planners successfully institutionalized modernist planning formulas as the basic toolkit of the interventionist state authorities.Footnote ⁴³ Public authorities either implicitly or explicitly presumed that the standards of modernist planning served the common good. The implementation of planning goals was a top-down undertaking, because urban planners with technical expertise were considered to have a comprehensive perspective that allowed them to dispassionately recognize the “overall public interest.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Rooted in the scientific rationality of positivism, modernist planning doctrine assumed the aura of universal applicability. The theory and practice of modernist planning coalesced around the belief that the concepts, methods, and techniques that had been fashioned and perfected out of the experience of the large industrializing metropolises of North America and Europe were the “social equivalents of natural laws and, as such, universally applicable.”Footnote ⁴⁵

As the assumed universal path to progress, modernization theory became the dominant model for development on a world scale by the second half of the twentieth century. Policymakers operated with the assumption that the practice and ideology of modernization represented the universal path to progress.Footnote ⁴⁶ In short order, the tenets of modernist urban planning became thoroughly embedded as major components of modernization theory. Policymakers looked upon the application of these guiding principles as the universal solution to the perceived “disorder” and chaos of (so-called) Third World cities. They justified the export of the modernist planning model overseas as a way of bringing a “benevolent and progressive “modernization process” to a backward Third World.”Footnote ⁴⁷ With few exceptions, modernist planning precepts have always revolved around a mixture of politics and moralism: the idea of replacing unpredictable and chaotic activities with an overarching master plan, on the one side; and a prescriptive approach “tied to a utopian project driven by politico-moral ambitions,” on the other.Footnote ⁴⁸

The fundamental flaw of modernist (and high modernist) city building revolved around the mistaken belief that there are universal and exclusive (i.e., necessary and unavoidable) “truths” that are superior to alternative approaches and that legitimately replace and exclude all traditional solutions to urbanism.Footnote ⁴⁹ Modernist thinking rested on a particular narrow and blinkered “way of seeing,” which reduced complex phenomena into a set of simplified and calculable variables that produced a highly simplified and stylized image of the city. In other words, the scientific knowledge production of modernist planning thought was premised on the possibility of holding constant those features of urbanism that are indeed always in flux.Footnote ⁵⁰

In the postwar rush to turn urban planning into an applied science with universal appeal and applicability everywhere, much was lost – the sense of city building as layered palimpsest, the city of collective memory, the enduring importance of place, and the art of place-making. By the final decades of the twentieth century, critics – and especially those with poststructuralist sensibilities – started to question the underlying assumptions regarding the alleged neutrality of the technocratic “rule of experts” that undergirded the modernist planning canon. In time, the once-enduring faith in the power of modernist (and high-modernist) planning to bring order and coherence to urban life began to wane. Modernist planners, architects, and engineers regarded themselves as detached, high-minded experts who could bring scientific objectivity and technical rationality to the goal of providing for the collectively defined public interest. Despite their claims to universality and comprehensiveness, modernist planning models failed to accomplish their goal of constructing the orderly, rational city.Footnote ⁵¹

Over time, modernist principles of rational ordering of space through land- use planning, efficiency of movement across the urban landscape, and functional specialization declined as the main driving force behind city-building efforts around the world. The rise of neoliberal urbanism paralleled the retreat of modernist approaches to city building. By promoting market competitiveness as the primary sorting mechanism for the distribution of social services and urban amenities, entrepreneurial modes of urban governance have effectively delivered the coup de grace to comprehensive master planning as a public undertaking.Footnote ⁵² Over the past three to four decades, municipal officials have increasingly turned to private companies to provide housing, water, waste disposal, transportation, and a variety of core social services. Private real-estate financing has played an increasing role in the provision of places for social congregation and chance encounter. To a certain degree, the practice of urban planning has become a branch of private enterprise as an increasing number of city administrations work with paid consultants on strategic planning initiatives, rather than conducting comprehensive, holistic planning in-house.Footnote ⁵³

This movement toward expanded corporate influence over entrepreneurial modes of urban governance does not represent a return to premodernist city building where the predominance of private (and parochial) interests was more or less the norm. Instead the steady encroachment of real estate capital in city building and the diminution of public authority have signaled the beginning of a new era where the buying and selling of urban space itself has emerged as a new site for capital accumulation. Globalizing cities with world-class aspirations have become embedded in global flows of financial capital at an unprecedented scale. The resulting competitive rivalry for access to free-floating capital for investment in urban space has resulted in the production of “city-winners” and “city-losers” in the unequal geography of global capitalism.Footnote ⁵⁴

Shifting Fault Lines for Global Urbanism: Privatized Planning and Entrepreneurial Urbanism

Over the past three decades, a key component of the restructuring of urban governance has been a fundamental shift in planning practice from a focus on comprehensive planning (and a primary concern with the location, intensity, form, amount, and harmonization of land use) to a stress on more locally specific strategic projects.Footnote ⁵⁵ One of the principal aims of conventional planning practice has been to use public funding and expertise to direct infrastructure investment in ways that serve as mechanisms for tying the urban fabric together, while simultaneously controlling and guiding private real-estate development through a combination of land-use planning rules, zoning regulations, and financial incentives. What began to take coherent form at the end of the twentieth century was a different type of spatial planning, one that moved away from a largely defensive and reactive approach aimed at controlling land use through the blanket application of zoning regulations to a more flexible, market-oriented, and development-led approach that called for direct and selective intervention. This shift from comprehensive spatial planning to a focus on localized “strategic projects” went hand-in-hand with the replacement of public regulatory regimes and policy instruments with a more laissez-faire approach to land use development.Footnote ⁵⁶ The intrusion of an entrepreneurial ethos into the realm of urban planning has not been limited to the direct involvement of large real-estate and property developers, but also includes an entourage of private consulting firms selling “expert” services.Footnote ⁵⁷ Private planning consultants are often hired by public–private coalitions in order to give expert advice on shaping the future of cities. Advocates for this shift to privatized planning frequently claim that the interventions they propose and institute are consensus-based, collaborative, and even inclusionary, rather than elite-centered and expert-driven. Yet on closer inspection, large-scale real-estate developers have been able to manipulate “visioning” processes to serve their own ends with little public oversight.Footnote ⁵⁸

For more than a century, the term “urban planning” has evoked images of municipal agencies, policymakers, city officials, bureaucrats, and technical experts engaged in the provision of public services, the maintenance of infrastructure, and the introduction of land-use regulations. As Sophie Body-Gendrot, Jacques Carré and Romain Garbaye have suggested, “Planning is traditionally perceived as the paradigmatic product of twentieth-century welfarist urban government, as a technique of land use that was supposed to wrench cities from the clutches of speculators and develop them, hopefully, in the public interest.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Yet private real-estate developers and property owners have also engaged in land-use planning, in the regulation of the built environment, in the provision of infrastructure, as well as in the distribution of a variety of social services.Footnote ⁶⁰ These kinds of comprehensive “private planning” were typical in the “company towns” and underresourced cities of the nineteenth century. At the start of the twenty-first century, privatized planning has again become popular in the practice of city building, particularly in so-called “contractual territorial communities,” like gated residential estates, homeowners” associations, shopping malls, and office parks.Footnote ⁶¹ Private planning initiatives have always played a significant role in various types of small-scale infill developments, ranging from single-family housing to multiunit apartment and condominium complexes. But the engagement of these privatized planning interventions has moved far beyond scaled-down additions to the built environment to encompass everything from large-scale redevelopment projects to entirely new satellite cities.Footnote ⁶² The growing popularity of such institutionalized entities as public-private partnerships provides ample evidence that “private developments” do not always exist entirely outside state regulation and control. Nevertheless, privatized urban planning has increasingly resulted in the clustering of upscale mega-projects that are designed as self-enclosed enclaves. Large-scale “private cities” rely upon extraterritorial regulatory regimes operating outside of public jurisdiction.Footnote ⁶³

One of the defining characteristics of global urbanism at the start of the twenty-first century is the unprecedented shift toward increased corporate influence over regional planning initiatives. Large-scale real-estate developers have conceived of urban development plans on a metropolitan-wide scale, and begun to implement these mega-projects, sometimes with the assistance of municipal authorities and sometimes completely on their own accord without any public oversight.Footnote ⁶⁴ In cities where municipal regulatory regimes have become highly compromised, the only true “comprehensive planning” occurs within large-scale, private real-estate development projects.Footnote ⁶⁵ New modes of privatized urban governance have replaced the once sacrosanct commitment of municipal authorities to the public administration of urban space. The breakdown of public administration and holistic spatial planning has produced new regimes of authority in the form of public–private partnerships, privately managed spaces of social congregation, and “common interest developments” with their own rules and regulations governing the use of urban space.Footnote ⁶⁶

The goal of urban governance is to establish regulatory regimes that can sustain some kind of order, stability, and predictability.Footnote ⁶⁷ Urban governance regimes consist of a vast and complex array of special authorities, extralegal instruments, and quasi-autonomous regulatory agencies charged with decision-making, rulemaking, and the provision of bulk goods and services for collective consumption. At the start of the twenty-first century, large metropolitan regions are often saturated with an overabundance of overlapping and interdependent authorities established to deal with an almost infinite variety of problems and concerns. Despite what might appear at first glance to be an incoherent and messy juridical mosaic, this fragmentation of metropolitan governance is not accidental. The shape of urban governance constantly changes in haphazard ways.Footnote ⁶⁸

The proliferation of these sometimes intersecting and sometimes parallel governance regimes conforms to underlying logics and competing rationalities that often arise in response to pressures from powerful property-owning stakeholders who are intent on shaping the cityscape in conformity with their narrow interests.Footnote ⁶⁹ Governing bodies in metropolitan regions regularly invent new agencies and establish new authorities, often in ad hoc fashion, that enable them to address problems as they arise. This ongoing process of tinkering with makeshift governance practices (or what Michael Storper has called “governance bricolage”) often takes place without the benefit of sweeping institutional reforms and outside of public scrutiny. The forms and types of tinkering varyconsiderably, and include (1) the expansion of classical types of public provision of collective goods and services “through the creation of new agencies or their division or recombination”; (2) the establishment of new special-purpose authorities; (3) “the ad hoc invention” of hybrid private–public corporate entities, such as quasi-autonomous nongovernmental organizations or NGOs (so-called Quangos), along with other public–private partnerships for supplying goods and services for collective consumption; (4) privatization under public contract or special charter; (5) regulated private monopolies in the public service; and (6) intergovernmental agencies that provide services on a cost-recovery basis.Footnote ⁷⁰

The implementation of more market-oriented planning initiatives has greatly undermined conventional approaches to the public administration of urban landscapes.Footnote ⁷¹ Impatient property developers have accused conventional land-use planning protocols of creating unnecessary obstacles to real-estate development and investment because of excessive regulation, costly delays, and uncertainty.Footnote ⁷² As a comprehensive and holistic approach to urban governance, conventional urban planning aims to both facilitate and support market-led growth through private entrepreneurial initiatives, and to regulate and mitigate the deleterious excesses of unfettered competition. The shift from a reactive and defensive planning culture to a proactive and enabling one has signaled a dramatic shift in the conventional balance between public authority and private initiative. The increasing privatization and devolution of planning processes involves the increasing involvement of private real-estate developers in the preparation and realization of land-use zoning plans, the outsourcing of planning assessments and controls to private consultants and practitioners, and, finally, the management of public spaces and of entire urban areas by private entities.Footnote ⁷³

One important dimension of this ongoing process of transformation is the proliferation of what Phil Allmendinger and Graham Haughton have called the “soft spaces” of governance, particularly evident in multi-scalar spatial planning practices and regeneration initiatives. In contrast to “hard” statutory spaces of public administration with their fixed territorial boundaries, “soft spaces” of spatial governance refer to the “in-between” spaces that exist outside, alongside, or parallel with the formal statutory scales of public regulatory authority.Footnote ⁷⁴ Ranging from small-scale spatial planning to multiregional growth strategies, these “soft spaces” often involve the establishment of new private or quasi-private regulatory regimes that sit alongside and potentially challenge existing territorial arrangements or the dominance of particular scales of governance. As Jonathan Metzger and Peter Schmitt have argued, these “soft spaces” constitute new kinds of nonstatutory vehicles for spatial planning – typically informal or semiformal – “with associations and relations stretching both across formally established boundaries and scalar levels of planning and across previously entrenched sectoral divides.” In varying degrees, these emergent soft spaces of spatial governance can sometimes supplement and sometimes supplant existing “hard” (i.e., formally recognized and defined in public statues) spatialities of planning.Footnote ⁷⁵

Soft spaces with fuzzy boundaries have become new instruments for experiments in neoliberal governmentality. By breaking down the old rigid boundaries that characterized conventional regulatory regimes, new forms of neoliberal governmentality have reworked the very nature of planning itself, rendering it less focused on broad, comprehensive visionary schemes and more concerned with pragmatic negotiations around practical considerations of the “sensible” and the “necessary” in the context of the seeming inevitability of market-oriented kinds of policy rationality. This narrowing of the analytic horizons of planning practice has made it virtually impossible to offer an alternative to what has become the new mainstream paradigm.Footnote ⁷⁶

The concern for more flexible and responsive planning regimes goes along with the search for a greater involvement of private real-estate developers in the production and implementation of property development plans. The creation of various legal instruments, like planned unit developments (PUDs), tax incremental financing (TIFs), Urban Development Corporations (UDCs), and various other kinds of quasi-autonomous NGOs operating outside of existing municipal regulatory regimes, have in effect institutionalized, and enriched, the practice of privatizing the planning process. At the same time, various exceptions to existing planning regulations, including zoning variances, interim development controls, and incentive zoning, transfer authority from the hands of public authorities to those of private developers.Footnote ⁷⁷ Incorporated into local zoning ordinances, such instruments as PUDs and TIFs give real-estate developers the extraordinary latitude to come forward with their own proposals for street patterns, lot layouts, and land use on any large parcel of land.Footnote ⁷⁸ Such soft space experiments in administrative and spatial deregulation as Enterprise Zones (EZs), empowerment zones and enterprise communities (EZ/ECs), and Simplified Planning Zones (SPZs) have circumvented existing regulatory frameworks, while such entities as Urban Development Corporations (UDCs) have shifted planning powers from elected local authorities to business-led boards, appointed commissions, and special agencies.Footnote ⁷⁹ Finally, a range of financial instruments, like tax credits, bond provisions, and tax exemptions to individuals and businesses, have provided extra incentives that subsidize fresh investments in designated zones of the city while bypassing others.Footnote ⁸⁰

This shift toward the creation of experimental deregulatory spaces has meant that practices of exception, both within and beyond the confines of existing legal frameworks, have become a new system of flexible and fuzzy governance that relies on parallel networks, ad hoc rule-bending, and informal delivery mechanisms.Footnote ⁸¹ Public authorities have increasingly turned to making “exceptions” to their legally instituted practices of territorial administration and spatial zoning in order to gain a competitive advantage in the global economy through the selective ad hoc management of urban space.Footnote ⁸² Instruments such as “spot zoning,” that is, obtaining a site-specific exceptions to the rules that generally govern height, density, parking spaces, uses, and other features of street life, effectively hollow out existing regulatory frameworks.Footnote ⁸³ The creation of such coordinating mechanisms as public–private partnerships to oversee the construction of large-scale urban redevelopment projects almost invariably rely upon “exceptionality” measures, such as the relaxation of conventional planning tools, bypassing statutory regulations and institutional bodies, the creation of “project agencies” with special or exceptional powers of intervention and decision-making.Footnote ⁸⁴ These privatized governance regimes “lie at the margins” of conventional statutory planning, and they involve a “significant redistribution of policymaking powers, competencies, and responsibilities to quasi-private and highly autonomous organizations.”Footnote ⁸⁵

The steady accumulation of “spaces of exception” has greatly undermined any reference to a standard benchmark from which exceptionality serves as a deviation. In this sense, exceptionality has become the norm. As Mariana Valverde has argued, zoning regulations are the “state of exception that becomes the rule.” The very structure of the legal system, that is, its regulatory architecture, encourages a constant proliferation of discretionary, site-specific exceptions and rules that apply only to micro-spaces. At first glance, this withering array of special allowances creates the Orwellian impression of inconsistency and confusion, while in the long run, they actually conceal deliberate strategies that serve narrow interests outside the glare of public scrutiny. The incredibly cumbersome and geographically limited character of the land use planning and zoning rules “make more general, policy-driven, rational, city-wide change difficult if not impossible.”Footnote ⁸⁶

Governing Territory Instead of Disciplining People

At the start of the twenty-first century, the expansion and entrenchment of entrepreneurial modes of urban governance have gone hand-in-hand with a shift of emphasis – sometimes subtle and invisible, and sometimes dramatic and very visible – toward the management and control of space instead of “improving” (and reforming) populations.Footnote ⁸⁷ In the classical Foucauldian formulation, disciplinary tactics focused on fixing people in their proper place, classifying them into discrete populations, and acting upon them via a balance between incentives and “punishments.” The adoption of these disciplinary techniques – which Michel Foucault referred to as “transform[ing] the confused, useless or dangerous multitudes into ordered multiplicities” – constituted the primary (yet certainly not exclusive) mode of urban governance that prevailed at the dawn of modernist city building and persisted beyond.Footnote ⁸⁸ For Foucault, the technologies of power were inextricably linked with processes of subjectification – or the constitution of compliant subjects through monitoring of the “conduct of conduct.”Footnote ⁸⁹

This shift in urban governance from the stress on the production of compliant social subjects to the regulation of territory amounts to a wholesale reconfiguration of the relationship between power and place. In what Seth Schindler has referred to as “entering a territorial moment,” the management of space, rather than the control of populations, has become “the overriding objective of urban governance.”Footnote ⁹⁰ These territory-based urban governance regimes are increasingly geared toward the transformation of urban space itself where material infrastructures, architecture, and the built environment seem to take on a life of their own in regulating the use and occupation of urban landscapes.Footnote ⁹¹

The transformation in the logic of urban governance does not necessarily entail a radical break where one disciplinary mode of regulation displaces another.Footnote ⁹² This shift in emphasis in urban governance is not to suggest that the production of populations and the making of subservient social subjects has entirely disappeared, but to argue that these formerly dominant modes of regulation assume a subordinate role in the overall management of space.Footnote ⁹³ Put in another way, the instrumentalization of architecture and the built environment as integral features undergirding strategies of urban governance does not replace the management of populations but folds into it as a kind of mutually dependent co-presence.Footnote ⁹⁴ The Foucauldian disciplinary techniques appeared in their most dramatic form during the Industrial Revolution and after, when the creation of docile laboring classes and the stress on mass consumption became the twin pillars of industrial capitalism. In contrast, the governance of territory focuses on aestheticizing urban spaces for affluent urban residents who do not wish to rub shoulders with the unwanted and structurally redundant urban poor.Footnote ⁹⁵

The Erosion of Territorial Sovereignty and the Emergence of Extraterritorial Modes of Urban Governance

The introduction of legal “practices of exception” has become a useful heuristic device through which to delineate new territorialities of rule, thereby providing a convenient platform for the proliferation of extraterritorial zones within cities.Footnote ⁹⁶ Set loose from conventional administrative protocols that oversee the regulation of urban space, these self-contained enclaves operate as autonomous zones that are temporarily or permanently administered in ways different from the rest of the municipal territory. These extraterritorial zones exist as island-like bubbles outside of the conventional framework of laws, borders, and territories, generating radically new forms of urbanism that undermine and dissolve the conventional regulatory powers of public authorities to administer urban space. These kinds of extraterritorial redoubts are metaphorically (if not functionally) akin to Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopia, spaces of otherness that exist primarily as a counterpoint to the normal order of things. For without the presence of conventional modes of law-abiding territorial governance, these extraterritorial zones could not exist. These extraterritorial “free zones” both stretch and manipulate space in order to work around or evade inconvenient rules and regulations.Footnote ⁹⁷

In seeking to draw attention to such generic sites as airports and other transitory spaces, Marc Augé distinguished between places and nonplaces. In a manner analogous to this distinction, extraterritorial enclaves belong to the netherworld of the nonplace urban realm – outside the jurisdiction and scrutiny of public authorities and spaces formed in relation to certain ends or purposes.Footnote ⁹⁸ In trying to make sense of the breakdown of conventional territorial sovereignty, Keller Easterling has employed the concept of the Zone, and has described the tangled political and economic processes that influence and direct the installation of extraterritorial enclaves as Extrastatecraft – literally, statecraft applied to extraterritoriality, but more figuratively, the process of crafting extraterritorial “free zones.”Footnote ⁹⁹

The proliferation of extraterritorial zones marks a clear departure from the conventional view of sovereign territory that consists of a series of more or less homogenous spatial jurisdictions separated by clearly demarcated borders in a continuous spatial flow. The idea of the “archipelago city” is a useful metaphor for drawing attention to the steady increase in the number of discrete extraterritorial zones. These are the spatial expressions of a multiplicity of “states of exception” that are either created through deliberate withdrawal (whereby public authorities abdicate their exclusive regulatory powers or annul existing legal regimes) or that appear de facto outside the official sanction of the law. The existence of these extraterritorial spaces challenges or deposes the sovereign powers of public authorities, and as a consequence marks the eclipse of uniform territorial sovereignty.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

In the contemporary postsovereign era, the once vital connection between state-sponsored municipal authority and the territorial integrity of the urban landscape has come apart.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The introduction of privatized regulatory regimes has produced new kinds of shared sovereignty where intersecting modes of public and private authority are dispersed and decentered. With the existence of extraterritorial spaces, municipal officials no longer have the exclusive authority to define the public administration of urban space or to monopolize the organization of the field of urban planning. New modes of urban governance in the postsovereign era are part of an ad hoc landscape consisting of both uninterrupted flows and hindering barriers that both intersect and overlap in complicated ways. The introduction of new regimes of governance signals a blurring between the inside and the outside of authority. These new modes of governance appear less as the installation of physical barriers but more as the decline and undermining of public authority over the administration of urban space.Footnote ¹⁰²

In aspiring world-class cities around the globe, the adoption of entrepreneurial modes of urban governance has gone hand-in-hand with a significant hollowing out and reduction of municipal functions and responsibilities, including relegating to municipal agencies the truncated role of providing increasingly weak regulatory and coordinating roles for the private- and voluntary-sector delivery of services, and the transfer of the mandate for economic and social policy formulation to a mixture of quasi-autonomous, nongovernmental agencies and other nonstate, business-oriented, stakeholder coalitions.Footnote ¹⁰³ This entrepreneurial stance has led to cutbacks in the municipal provision of social welfare, primary services, and noncommodified objects of collective consumption. In contrast to the inclusive and universal support policies that characterized Keynesian and welfare-state interventionism, city builders now seek to achieve economic regeneration with place-bound and spatially targeted redevelopment schemes and projects.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

The neoliberal model for managing the city privileges the unitary logic of market-led entrepreneurial solutions to socioeconomic and environmental problems, where advocacy of supposedly universal cures and one-best-way strategic initiatives is benignly labeled “international best practices.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The adoption of entrepreneurial modes of urban governance has marked a shift from an emphasis on seeking ways of delivering public services and local resources fairly, efficiently, and effectively toward a focus on bringing together key stakeholders – particularly large-scale, property-owning elites assembled in pro-growth coalitions – to identify common concerns, develop strategic ideas, and generate the necessary momentum to attract the private investment required for urban revitalization. These new modes of urban governance have largely diminished the role and status of overarching, strategic-development frameworks within urban planning initiatives, at a time when the ideological commitment to the principles of entrepreneurialism and market-led growth has become dominant.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

The warm embrace of this kind of civic entrepreneurialism has tended to reinforce the hollowing out of hierarchical and functional governance, with the result that relationships between city government and private business have become increasingly horizontal and network-based, involving cooperative arrangements, compromises, and shifting alliances among stakeholders. Indeed, city government – once the key locus for managing public space, integrating service delivery, and choreographing urban relationships – has increasingly become just one of many influential social actors competing for the control of urban planning agendas and access to scarce resources, in an increasingly competitive world of shared power.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Boxed into this market-saturated ethos, urban planning practice has largely abandoned its historic role as the regulating agent that looked upon city building as a holistic exercise in rendering the whole greater than the sum of its parts. Instead of fostering the integration of various communities and the equalization of opportunities across the urban landscape, urban planners have assumed the responsibility for promoting the city's entrepreneurial credentials, managing selective developmental initiatives, and “enforcing distinction” between different parts of the city.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

A vast array of “in-between” administrative entities – such as public–private partnerships, nonstatutory regulatory bodies, not-for-profit corporate entities, semiautonomous agencies, stakeholder associations, non-govermental organization (NGOs), incorporated property-owner associations, and even religiously affiliated social-service organizations – have replaced branches of city administration, assuming the functions that public municipalities once monopolized as their exclusive preserve. These semiprivate organizations have assumed a great deal of control over the form, shape, culture, and atmosphere of the congregating spaces that they supply and oversee. They have metamorphosed into a kind of ephemeral shadow state, in which power over the management and use of urban space has become not only fragmented and dispersed, but also localized and horizontal.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Framed within the neoliberal paradigm that guides economic regeneration in the postindustrial metropolis, the creation of public–private partnerships has become the most recent magic elixir for fixing cities: promoting economic growth, providing jobs, expanding tax revenues, and creating a dynamic new image of a vibrant urban landscape. As semiautonomous agencies, these partnerships have enabled local municipalities to allegedly break free from the old, rigid hierarchies of embedded bureaucratic statism, and to adopt a pragmatic and coalition-based “practical politics” in order to address deep-rooted problems of economic underperformance, poor service delivery, social division and fragmentation, and environmental degradation.Footnote ¹¹⁰ As powerful tools for reshaping the urban landscape, public–private partnerships represent the collusion of business interests (which want to protect and even extend their profitable property investments in the city) and municipal authorities (which desire to improve the infrastructure and built environment so as to make the city more attractive to users). Generally speaking, public–private partnerships include a familiar repertoire of subsidies, concessions, and guarantees. These typically fall into four broad categories: land acquisition and condemnation, infrastructure upgrades and additions, financing and tax abatements, and incentive zoning (including relaxation of existing bylaws and building regulations).Footnote ¹¹¹

As semiautonomous agencies operating outside the bureaucratic structures of local government, public–private partnerships are shielded from public scrutiny and direct electoral accountability. Their implementation enables municipal authorities to mobilize local resources and pool private investments, while at the same time reducing their own role in service delivery.Footnote ¹¹² As a particular kind of public–private partnership and “networked local governance,” Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) are emblematic of the spatial reorganization of urban governance on a global scale. Large-scale property owners – often in league with compliant municipal authorities – have adopted BIDs as a new model of submunicipal governance as a way of securing private capital for improving the attractiveness of central city spaces. Originating from North America (Canada and the United States), the BID model has become the cornerstone for entrepreneurial approaches to downtown revitalization in aspiring world-class cities around the world.Footnote ¹¹³ Unlike conventional public–private partnerships, in which urban redevelopment authorities or other coordinating bodies depend upon municipal funding, BIDs are financed exclusively through (legally mandated) internally generated levies. These semiautonomous bodies operate like updated versions of conventional neighborhood business associations. But they also enjoy a sanctioned legal status that entitles property owners, business enterprises, and merchants in designated precincts to voluntarily tax themselves in order to pay for an expanded repertoire of municipal services normally provided by public bodies.Footnote ¹¹⁴

The creation of such public–private partnerships as BIDs marks the gradual dilution and dispersal of public authority. Such semiautonomous, free-floating agencies effectively function as a surrogate “shadow state” administration, assuming responsibilities conventionally reserved for municipal governmental agencies and initiating urban renewal projects that amount to privatized planning of the cityscape. By carving up the urban landscape into what amounts to parcellized sovereignties, these special precincts are exemplary expressions of splintered street management and the stealthy privatization of the urban realm. These new modes of spatial governance have gone hand-in-hand with the erosion of any real semblance of centralized municipal rule. The creation of such corporate-sponsored entities as public–private partnerships, city improvement districts, and nonelected regulatory bodies, along with the privatization of service delivery, has resulted in the disaggregation of power into rival political rationalities, administrative techniques, and everyday practices in micro-settings.Footnote ¹¹⁵

The spread and diffusion of BIDs represents an important innovation in neoliberal urban governance. By allowing for the expanded involvement of local business and property owners in managing urban space, these quasi-independent, corporatized entities have significantly redrawn the boundaries between public and private spheres. Above all, BIDs signify the commodification of urban space. More than simply benign tools of urban revitalization, they illustrate how the balance of power in the “entrepreneurial city” has shifted away from public authorities and into the hands of corporate interests.Footnote ¹¹⁶ The formation of BIDs has provided a legal framework that empowers large-scale business enterprises and property owners to assume greater responsibility for refurbishment, maintenance, and security within designated areas. Taken at face value, BIDs are exemplary expressions of the turn toward entrepreneurial modes of urban governance in aspiring world-class cities everywhere. While they are decidedly plugged into local dynamics, the establishment of BIDs reflects the global trend toward using so-called enclave development projects as a way of fostering downtown revitalization.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Yet by separating themselves from the surrounding streetscape, BIDs accentuate processes of spatial polarization and social exclusion. This “privatization of urban governance” has resulted in the extension and consolidation of a fragmented urban landscape – a “patchwork city,” primarily cobbled together through elite place-making and imagineering.Footnote ¹¹⁸ As they have colonized more and more parts of the urban landscape, BIDs have produced what amounts to an archipelago of extraterritorial sovereign spaces where the ordinary functioning of civil protections under the rule of law is suspended and replaced by the discretionary powers of private ownership. It is their apparent banality and feigned innocence that makes the emergence of these kinds of postpublic space so powerful.Footnote ¹¹⁹

Entrepreneurial modes of urban governance have contributed to a kind of feudalized management of urban space, with separate jurisdictions, impermeable boundaries, and hierarchical divisions. The creation of such incorporated entities as public–private partnerships concentrates the authority to shape the urban environment in the hands of an invisible shadow government of special interests, called stakeholders in the neutral-sounding discourse of “good governance.” The division of the urban landscape into fortified encampments – managed by public–private partnerships under the guise of BIDs and other semi-autonomous regulatory regimes – marks the erosion of public authority. This new kind of urban management effectively fragments municipal government into territorial fiefdoms, thereby subordinating comprehensive land-use planning to a wide variety of place-bound private interests.Footnote ¹²⁰

As a general rule, BIDs display a spatial organization of power and a form of domination that escape the control and scrutiny of public administration. By cocooning themselves within regimes of extraterritorial sovereignty, these corporate-sponsored entities have shifted the powers of city building exclusively into the hands of property owners and real-estate developers, permitting these profit-seeking stakeholders to shape the cityscape in accordance with their particular interests. In carrying out the private appropriation of public space, these spatial enclosures suppress and marginalize those city dwellers who do not have the money or a specific reason to enter them. While their goal is to create cleaner and safer zones in the city, BIDs have often contributed to the partitioning of the urban landscape into boundary-hardened enclaves.Footnote ¹²¹ Even though they subscribe to the consoling myth of political innocence and even-handedness, they symbolize in microcosm the abandonment of the dream of an open, inclusive city animated by chance encounter. Rather than serving the neutral-sounding, technocratic ends of urban revitalization, the spread of BIDs has anchored a postpublic ideological agenda that values the comfort, safety, and security of well-to-do residents in their islands of prosperity over the extension of social safety nets for the truly disadvantaged.Footnote ¹²² Because of their enhanced role in making infrastructural improvements and in providing services (including security), BIDs have de facto converted publicly administered spaces into privately managed ones. As such, they exemplify a sociospatial strategy that values the regeneration of specific places over the needs of the urban poor who lack jobs and income.Footnote ¹²³

As the material and symbolic embodiments of a new species of disjointed urbanism, BIDs and their cloned offspring are the quintessential territorial nodes of a deterritorialized power. Like gated residential communities and enclosed office parks, they “thrive in the legal and juridical limbo of extraterritoriality and political quarantine, enjoying the privileges of isolation and declaring their immunity from municipal oversight.”Footnote ¹²⁴ On the one side, these spatial enclaves readily accommodate transnational flows of capital, commodities, ideas, and information. Without a real sense of place derived from their particular locality, they are nevertheless “tightly woven into global networks of cosmopolitan worldliness.” In order to facilitate uninterrupted connections catering to international business elites and tourist travelers, they offer flexibility and familiarity. On the other side, in order to function effectively, these extraterritorial spaces require immunity and exclusivity within their immediate geographic surroundings. “Because they operate behind a mask of political innocence and feigned neutrality, they are able to blithely carry out their strategy of carving the urban landscape into an assemblage” of self-contained enclaves.Footnote ¹²⁵

In this new urban geography of extraterritoriality, BIDs aspire to a condition of existence outside the conventional functioning of the law and its consequences, where their own rules and regulations trump municipal codes, bylaws, and enforcement procedures. In the embryonic “postpublic city,” the municipal administration no longer has the ultimate power to legislate, arbitrate, and rule in a bounded space over which it claims nominal sovereignty. Because they override the conventional rules of territoriality that are rooted in mainstream modernist models of public administration, BIDs exemplify the triumph of new postliberal modes of urban governance. They operate as voluntary associations or intentional communities, deliberately programmed to legitimate extralegal transactions that bypass the cumbersome regulations of municipal governance.Footnote ¹²⁶

Despatialization:Footnote ¹²⁷ The Declining Significance of Public Space

Urbanists have long held the view that the physical and social dynamics of public space play a central role in the formation of a robust civic culture, the forging of collective identities, and the animation of popular democracy. As a normative ideal, meaningful public space has long been associated with unencumbered social congregation, freedom of expression, and political liberty. Urban planners and policy experts have looked upon city streets, parks, squares, and other shared spaces of social congregation as symbolic markers of “collective well-being and possibility,” sites of chance encounter, and vibrant places of open political deliberation and debate.Footnote ¹²⁸ While urban scholars and planning practitioners have taken widely divergent views in their assessment of the quality of collective achievement across time and space, they have generally not questioned the assumption that a strong and positive relationship exists among urban public space, civic engagement, and participatory politics.Footnote ¹²⁹

The urban planning profession has long been motivated by “normative ideals about the city, how it should be planned and the necessity to regulate activities in order to meet desired goals, yet within a process that espoused to be in the ‘public interest’.”Footnote ¹³⁰ Planning experts have always stressed the management of public space in ways that build a vibrant sociality and civic engagement out of the chance encounter between strangers. Urban planning draws on a long lineage of thought, starting with the idealized notion of agora so central in classical Greek philosophy and including such theorists of urban modernity as Walter Benjamin, Georg Simmel, and Louis Mumford, and in later years, Henri Lefebvre and Jane Jacobs. Regardless of their differences, these urbanists all suggested a vital link between the vibrancy of urban public space and strength of civic engagement and the strong bonds of citizenship. This lineage is rooted in the claim that the free and unencumbered mingling of urban residents in open, accessible, and well-managed public space encourages tolerance toward difference, a heightened “pleasure in the urban experience, respect for the shared commons, and an interest in civic and political life.”Footnote ¹³¹

With the neoliberal turn in urban governance, the boundaries between what is private and what is public have become less clear.Footnote ¹³² The triumph of urban entrepreneurialism has meant that the conjoined logics of commodification and privatization have figured prominently as the main driving forces behind the spatial restructuring of urban landscapes. Under the relentless pressure of laissez-faire market liberalism, the simplistic certainties of the hard-and-fast binary dichotomies separating public and private have come apart.Footnote ¹³³ This blurring of boundaries – or hybridization of space – “makes it necessary to develop a flexible definition of public space.”Footnote ¹³⁴ As Ronan Paddison and Joanne Sharp have argued, “as neoliberal regeneration redefines more and more spaces as private, it becomes ever more important to attend to the public.”Footnote ¹³⁵

Under the conjoined pressures of globalization and neoliberal orthodoxy, city-building approaches to the future of public space have gravitated in opposite directions. On the one hand, city builders have treated public space as a valuable commercial commodity. In partnership with municipal authorities, corporate real-estate developers have tried to reorder the historic functions of public space through the production of new kinds of sanitized “designer space” that operate as sites of social congregation for appropriate users who can afford to consume. As a general rule, globalizing cities with world-class aspirations have found themselves trapped in intense competition to attract outside investment. Under these circumstances, city builders seek to create environments that are safe and attractive, and which offer the range of amenities and facilities that visitors have come to expect.Footnote ¹³⁶ On the other side, in distressed cities with depleted financial resources and limited capacity to effectively manage their own physical assets, public space often suffers from abandonment and neglect.Footnote ¹³⁷

A combination of social forces, including privatization, excessive policing, and outright neglect, has contributed to the erosion of public space in cities worldwide. As Setha Low, Don Mitchell, and others have argued, privatization of urban public space has accelerated through the closing and redesign of public parks and plazas, the creation of privatized governance bodies like business improvement districts that replace public authority with their own autocratic control over the monitoring of the surrounding streetscape, and the expansion of aggressive policing that has targeted the urban poor.Footnote ¹³⁸ Downsizing of municipal services, off-loading of physical assets, and the shrinking fiscal capacity of municipalities has led to the neglect and abandonment of open and accessible public spaces. These in-between, residual, underutilized, derelict, and deteriorating public spaces – what Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris has called “cracks in the city” – easily turn into “dead spaces” beyond repair.Footnote ¹³⁹ Often accompanied by fear, suspicion, tension, and even conflict between different social groups, these impoverished public spaces easily become “lost spaces,” “danger zones,” and “no-go” areas for anxious urban residents.Footnote ¹⁴⁰

At the same time, urban regeneration strategies under the sign of neoliberal governance have increasingly turned to such postpublic spatial typologies as enclosed shopping malls, privately managed corporate plazas, “invented” commercialized streetscapes (or what Tridib Banerjee has called “streets created as stage sets”), gated residential estates, and themed entertainment sites as key outposts in the reimagined city.Footnote ¹⁴¹ These privately managed “designer spaces” have become so commonplace that they can be considered de rigueur “naturalized” components of the tourist-entertainment city. With few other options, these pseudo-public places have become increasingly popular destinations for social congregation and chance encounter.Footnote ¹⁴² Constituting what Steven Flusty has called “interdictory spaces,” they create ordered environments in which conformity is an expectation and in which those deemed “unsuitable” or in some way “threatening” are excluded.Footnote ¹⁴³ But these privately managed commercial spaces appear to lead not to diversification but rather to an inward-looking uniformity and conformist consumption.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ In the name of safety and security, private real-estate developers – aided and abetted by public agencies – have often planned and built networks of underground tunnels, above-ground “sky bridges,” and pedestrian walkways to connect these insular corporate spaces. This web-like network of private connections has created what Trevor Boddy has called the “analogous city,” or a city of contrived urban spaces that keeps out the poor and undesirables.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

The ascendency of entrepreneurial urbanism, the growing popularity of inward-looking building typologies, and the retreat of the propertied classes into sequestered enclaves has gone hand-in-glove with the erosion of open (and readily accessible) public space. In aspiring world-class cities around the globe, urban landscapes have increasingly come to resemble a jumbled collage of “micro-states,” consisting of fortified enclaves and sequestered zones separated from the surrounding cityscape and kept under constant surveillance. Gated residential estates for the wealthy offer a full complement of services, ranging from exclusive private schools, golf courses, and leisure-and-entertainment facilities, protected by private police with around-the-clock securities patrols. It is often the case that these sequestered luxury-enclaves exist side-by-side with illegal settlements without proper sanitation or access to services and where infrastructure is rudimentary or broken down.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ These fragments of a disjointed urbanity function more or less autonomously, where urban residents across these great social divides have become entrenched in ongoing battles over efforts to maintain their privileged comfortable lives, on the one hand, and the everyday struggle to survive, on the other.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Under these circumstances, as David Harvey has put it, “ideals of urban identity, citizenship and belonging – already threatened by the spreading malaise of a neoliberal ethic” – become much more difficult to maintain and sustain.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

The proliferation of such post-public spaces as enclosed shopping malls, gated residential estates, and fortified office complexes together with the steady expansion of underground parking and shopping facilities with restricted entry, above-ground skywalks that bypass the streets, interior gardens, landscaped atriums, and other sequestered gathering places, has largely usurped the convention role (in the modernist imagination) of town squares, public parks, and downtown sidewalks as desired sites for everyday social interaction. Barriers, walls, and security perimeters are the visible signs of paranoid urbanism and the growing fortress mentality. The rapid spread of enclosed spaces signifies the expansion of postpublic space in the postliberal city.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

Because globalization has accelerated the spread of ideas and influences to cities around the world, real-estate developers, design experts, urban planners, and municipal authorities are no longer tied as they have been in the past to particular localities. Instead they operate with greater degrees of freedom across wider regional and global scales.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ As a consequence, design formulae are often repeated from place to place with little thought to context. This borrowing, mimicking, or even plagiarizing of generic “globalized” design principles has produced a kind of departicularized urbanism, which in turn has gone hand-in-hand with a form of homogenized public space.Footnote ¹⁵¹

Neoliberal policies and practices operate on the principle that private market mechanisms rather than public authorities can more effectively and efficiently manage urban space. The move toward neoliberal modes of urban governance does not necessarily mean a decrease in the amount of open and accessible places for social congregation and chance encounter, yet it does mean a shift in how these postpublic spaces are produced and regulated. A great deal of scholarly attention has been directed at understanding how municipalities enter into contracts – especially, the popular type of hybrid-joint management-ownership model called “public–private partnerships” – that provide opportunities for the private companies to assume greater authority and discretion over the management of public spaces.Footnote ¹⁵²

In the roseate imaginary of a world-class city, orderly public space represents a kind of proof of modernity. Yet the transformation of public space into “designer landscapes” that aim to sell the city in the image-conscious world of global neoliberalism has gone hand-in-hand with new mechanisms of social exclusion and marginalization of “unwanted” Others. While appearing to be open and inviting, these post-public spaces have often become sites of conflict, rivalry, and contestation over what is considered their “proper” and “appropriate” use.Footnote ¹⁵³

In relatively poor cities where high degrees of poverty and class stratification are the norm, mushrooming informal street economies have heightened tensions among various social groupings regarding who is entitled to use the public spaces of the city and for what purposes, pitting property owners, local retail establishments, upscale consumers, and municipal authorities, on the one side, against street vendors, itinerant traders, and ambulant work-seekers, on the other. In those aspiring world-class cities that struggle with high rates of unemployment and widespread impoverishment, affluent urban residents often subscribe to an aesthetic sensibility and an image of social congregating spaces that does not include itinerant street trading and other informal activities.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ In seeking to “appropriately develop” and to “modernize” the public spaces of their cities, municipal authorities have more often than not imposed strict rules and regulations that place limitations on the legitimate uses of city streets, parks, and other social gathering places.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Yet those who depend upon these ostensibly public spaces for their socioeconomic survival have found ways to circumvent deliberate efforts to remove and displace them.Footnote ¹⁵⁶

Generally speaking, people who conduct trade on sidewalks and other public gathering places have been subjected to a tightly regulated world of spatial restrictions, bureaucratic challenges, and legal impediments. Because their efforts to eke out a living often fall outside the framework of legal protections, street vendors are vulnerable to harassment and intimidation, and subjected to fines, prosecution, and confiscation of their trading goods.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Yet for the most part, these draconian measures have not produced the intended results. The regulation of street-vending activities has contributed to the construction of “an ideal hierarchy of would-be social agents in public spaces by consecrating the distinction between authorized and unauthorized street users.” These regulatory strategies seem to condemn them to work at the margins of the places where they are not welcome. However, neither their daily mobility nor their spatial location is restricted to the letter of the law. Yet street traders who have been defined as out of place in the urban realm often manage to circumvent regulatory restrictions, finding ways to reconstitute themselves as “‘mobile’ actors in order to ‘stay’ in the spaces from which they were originally displaced.”Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Despite the vigilance of municipal authorities, the filtered spaces of the neoliberal city are porous, permeable, malleable, and pliable.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Street vendors in cities as distinct and different as Mexico City and Baguio City (Philippines) have developed strategies to evade, circumvent, or negotiate restrictions on their trade, thereby challenging municipal regulations that privilege the kinds of regular wage-paying work that fits with the boosterist image of progress and development.Footnote ¹⁶⁰

In Buenos Aires, for example, shifting modes of municipal governance have converted public space into a sort of visual spectacle, an ethereal space that provides the illusion of genuine social mixing, thereby masking the reality of the space itself as accessible to only a privileged few.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Similarly, municipal authorities in Bogota (Columbia) have engaged in concerted efforts to reclaim valued public spaces from ambulant street vendors in order to preserve them as privileged sites for citizen participation. These strategies of urban governance depend upon defining the problem of social congregating space as one of uncertainty and unruliness caused by the “invasion” of unwanted street vendors who bring their disorderly “culture of informality” into places of respectable social interaction and exchange. The use of particular spatial technologies of governance – what Stacey Hunt has called “recuperation-relocation” – has sought to minimize the threat that street vendors present to upstanding citizens by relocating these unwanted “space invaders” to state-controlled markets in marginal and spatially segregated settings where they are inculcated with the kinds of formalized market discipline necessary to disabuse them of their backward “culture of informality.” These technologies, in turn, have created new kinds of urban segregation in which citizens and street vendors are slotted into “differentiated places and rights to mobility.”Footnote ¹⁶² These efforts to maximize the privileged access for socially responsible users to these social gathering places – while simultaneously eliminating the mobility of street vendors – creates a binary conception of citizenship where the rights of the respectable users trump the rights of the unwanted.Footnote ¹⁶³ Invisibility is a crucial feature of modern inequality.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Framed as improving the quality of public space in order to make it safe and desirable for citizen participation, this concerted effort to create sanitized places has become a key component in the strategy of selling the city as world class.Footnote ¹⁶⁵

In globalizing cities with world-class aspirations, the maintenance of order in post-public spaces of social congregation oscillates between physical force and quiet persuasion. The mechanics of exclusion of the unwanted urban poor from upscale sites of privilege reveal the complicated nature of civic belonging in poor cities with high degrees of class stratification.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ By using available public space as a site for informal trading and petty entrepreneurship, poor and the marginalized groups encroach upon the aesthetic expectations of respectable and proper urban citizens. Informality and its shadow legality undermine the proper use of public space, and thereby trigger the reaction of middle-class citizens who have tried to claim these open places of social congregation as their own.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ In globalizing cities with world-class aspirations, newly minted “designer landscapes” have become battlegrounds for enacting new dramas of competition between the urban poor who seek a tenuous place in the city as informal street vendors and middle-class groups aspiring to comfortable lifestyles in the newly refurbished public spaces of the city.Footnote ¹⁶⁸

The Right to the City: Urban Space and Social Justice

Recent research and writing on cities around the world has substantially unsettled conventional notions of urban space/place, belonging, and citizenship.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Once thought of as relatively fixed, stable, and durable, these concepts have been subjected to a significant degree of bending, blending, and stretching. While they may be helpful as convenient points of departure, such binary categorizations as “inclusion” versus “exclusion,” “private space” versus “public space,” and “citizen” versus “subject” takes us only so far in understanding the complex dynamics that produce everyday precariousness in relatively poor cities around the globe. For instance, the theorization of such fuzzy relationships as “insurgent citizenship,”Footnote ¹⁷⁰ “flexible citizenship,”Footnote ¹⁷¹ “active citizenship,” Footnote ¹⁷² “differential citizenship,”Footnote ¹⁷³ and “microcitizenship”Footnote ¹⁷⁴ has drawn attention to the malleability of rights and entitlements in the use of urban space. With the shift from (managerial) government to (neoliberal) governance, many of the functions once reserved for public authorities have been absorbed by a burgeoning nonstate sector that largely consists of NGOs and other not-for-profit entities. Taken together, these organized groups form what amounts to a “shadow state” increasingly responsible for social service delivery and community development. The “shadow state” consists of a wide constellation of NGOs that have assumed duties, responsibilities, and tasks that the retreating state administration has jettisoned under pressure to downsize and offload service provision.Footnote ¹⁷⁵

Under circumstances where city officials are really not much more than accomplices of private enterprise, and where urban planning in the public interest is inextricably interlocked with private interests, NGOs have become important tertiary stakeholders in soft planning and service provision. The failure of the market to deliver affordable services and the inability of public authorities to provide for basic needs makes NGOs important secondary agents of caregiving and social development. In this scenario, civil society has become an important third sector outside the realm of private enterprise and the state administration. The “Civil Society Empowerment” initiatives have focused almost entirely on NGOs.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ By virtue of their relatively independent stance and non-for-profit status (along with and their links to poor communities), NGOs have become key points of entry into civil society.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ Where downsizing and offloading have effectively reduced the room for maneuver of municipal authorities, non-for-profit organizations have often taken up the slack, engaged in a wide range of activities once reserved for the public administration of the city. The transfer of responsibilities to nonprofit organizations has resulted in uneven accessibility to services and an outright reduction in access to some individuals. The rise of the “shadow state” has produced gaps in the spatial coverage of social services as well as uneven access of citizens to service providers and thus to citizenship.Footnote ¹⁷⁸

The dependence of urban residents on the “shadow state” results in differential citizenship or selective disenfranchisement.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ In theorizing the rupture of various forms of social belonging, Robert Castel has developed the concept of “disaffiliation” to unpack the “cumulative logic of deprivation” where “economic insecurity becomes destitution and fragility of relationships becomes isolation.”Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Working with this concept of “disaffiliation” – or the dissociation of the conventional social bonds that tie urban residents to the social worlds around them – enables us to theorize the differential inclusion of the urban poor into the mainstream of urban life along the dimensions of access to regular work, to decent housing, and to the protective shield of state assistance.Footnote ¹⁸¹

The assertive claim of a “right to the city” provides a powerful normative framework to support extralegal occupation of land, unauthorized trading in public streets and thoroughfares, squatting in abandoned buildings, infringement of property rights, idling in public places, and self-built housing outside existing formal building codes by poor urban dwellers.Footnote ¹⁸² Assertions of a “right to the city” are entangled with questions of citizenship, belonging, and social justice. As David Harvey has argued, “The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city.”Footnote ¹⁸³

A great deal of urban scholarship has focused attention on how otherwise marginalized and deprived urban residents carve out spaces for themselves in the city through improvisation, stealth and subterfuge, and sheer persistence.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ James Holston, for example, uses the framework of “insurgent citizenship” to underscore how the urban poor of São Paulo and Brasília engage in a wide variety of clandestine or semiclandestine tactics that place them outside the protections of the law.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ Along with others, Holston draws on the path-breaking work of Henri Lefebvre who developed the notion of the “the right to the city.”Footnote ¹⁸⁶ The shaping of insurgent public space suggests a mode of city making that is different from institutionalized approaches to city building and their association with master planning and official policymaking. Unlike the conventional practice of urban planning, the making of insurgent public space implies that social groups and individuals can play a distinct role in shaping urban landscapes in defiance of official rules and regulations.Footnote ¹⁸⁷

Partha Chatterjee distinguishes between claims for a rightful place in the city that arise from two distinct groups of persons: on the one side, between citizens (i.e., urban residents who operate within the domain of what liberal political theorists call “civil society”), and on the other side, subaltern populations (or urban dwellers whose demands fall outside the realm of legal subjectivity). Well-to-do urban residents who enjoy the full rights and benefits of citizenship have a range of state-legitimated, institutionalized channels open to them through which they are able to pursue their material and symbolic interests. In contrast, subaltern populations have little choice but to transgress the strict lines of legality in their everyday struggles to live and work.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ Chatterjee argues that this vast domain of political practices that fall outside the hegemonic Western notions of state authority and civil society need to be theorized as a separate category – an arena of contestation which he calls “political society.”Footnote ¹⁸⁹ This sphere of activities, which often take place outside of official legal sanction, nevertheless contribute to popular contestation and hence exert a significant degree of influence over everyday life in ways that fundamentally compromise the goals of modernist rational planning.Footnote ¹⁹⁰

While Chatterjee may not have suggested this formulation, making a distinction between citizens (as privileged insiders) and populations (as excluded outsiders) enables us to unpack the hierarchical modalities of urban governmentality, that is, to distinguish between those who have a legitimate right to claim rights and, conversely, those who are suspended in a lawless, extralegal limbo, unable to call upon the law for support yet simultaneously subjected to its rules and regulations.Footnote ¹⁹¹ In post-apartheid South Africa, neoliberal reforms in service delivery have employed the rational calculus of marketability in the distribution of prepaid water meters in order to create “calculative citizens” enlisted in their own self-governance.Footnote ¹⁹² In rapidly growing cities like Yixing (China), city officials have introduced neoliberal policies under the banner of “ecological harmony” as a way of promoting the idea of “green development” and sustainable urbanism. Yet these interventions have worked to entrench socioeconomic inequalities.Footnote ¹⁹³ Working through the wide-angle lens of governmentality, Rachel Berney charts the emergent geographies of spatial governance in Bogota (Columbia), within which poor and marginalized groups seek to make claims upon the municipality. For Berney, these assertions of a “right to the city” assume a fundamentally different tenor than the claims of “citizens,” whose bundle of rights and entitlements is affirmed and empowered through constitutional guarantees.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ In contrast, poor and marginalized groups assert their “right to the city” through their engagement and active participation in extralegal activities outside of official sanction, violating the rules that govern civil society and transgressing the laws of private property.Footnote ¹⁹⁵

Acts of insurgency in public space are so complicated that they do not easily fall into the binary oppositions of “top-down” versus “bottom-up.” Unconventional efforts to reclaim and remake public space are not always spontaneous, participatory, and inclusive. For example, Ryan Centner contrasts the “right to the city” – which Henri Lefebvre defined as an ontological “right to urban life”Footnote ¹⁹⁶ – with “the right kind of city,” or an imaginary space that reflects a middle-class preoccupation with aesthetically pleasing and safe-and-secure places. In drawing on examples from Istanbul, Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires, he reveals how middle-class urban residents assert exclusionary visions of the right kind of city that, by definition, exclude marginalized groups that threaten their narrow sense of the proper and appropriate use of public space.Footnote ¹⁹⁷

To a large extent, debates around the “right to the city” have taken for granted the conventional distinction between public space and private space that characterized the birth of the modern capitalist city in the core areas of the world economy. On the one hand, the rights of proprietorship enable the owners of private property to restrict and monitor access to urban spaces to those deemed worthy of admission. In contrast, public space was inextricably linked to the imagined ideal of the public sphere: the arena of modern urban life defined by lively civic engagement, open democratic debate, and popular assembly. The public administration of accessible spaces of the city acted as a counterweight to the powers of private property owners to restrict access and define the use of space. Seen as a shared asset and common resource, public space was governed not by the logic of private property but by the communitarian values of sociability, social interaction, and chance encounter.Footnote ¹⁹⁸

The proliferation of all sorts of postpublic spaces has undermined the power of this kind of analytic framework for making claims around “the right to the city.” As Aihwa Ong has argued, the emergence of new modes of urban governance adopted in globalizing cities with world-class aspirations have produced new patchwork patterns of “noncontiguous, differentially administered spaces of graduated or variegated sovereignty.”Footnote ¹⁹⁹ The introduction of new zoning practices has created a withering array of regulatory regimes that have undermined the once sovereign power of public authority over the social congregating spaces of the city. Spatial configurations like securitized office parks, gated residential communities, and shopping malls are neither “public” nor “private” in the conventional sense of this distinction. Thus, claiming a “right to the city” through demands for access to public space and the public domain is undermined by the spread of postpublic space where the right to participation and the right to appropriation – the twin pillars of Lefebvre's classical formulation – are increasingly curtailed.Footnote ²⁰⁰