One of the more surprising things about the 2008 financial crisis is how little it managed to dislodge the neoliberal orthodoxy that had emerged during the 1970s, the prior era of economic upheaval. Instead, what many have called the Great Recession seemed actually to accelerate the move towards neoliberalism characterized by financialization and ‘accumulation by dispossession’ identified by such theorists as David Harvey decades before. By 2016, politics seemed to have finally caught up with reality, though not in the way many progressives had hoped. For while the revolt against neoliberalism on the left largely failed to gain political traction, or even to articulate a coherent alternative to the failed economic order, the field was seized by the populist right, whose program signaled not so much the end of the neoliberal project as it did (to twist Brittan, who had twisted Dubček) the appearance of neoliberalism with an inhuman face, or perhaps just neoliberalism with its mask off.
Neoliberalism is very much still with us. Perhaps no better window on the past, present, and future of neoliberalism exists than that ideological and political project’s relationship to the city. In Cities and Global Capitalism, Ugo Rossi sets out to uncover this relationship. The depiction he provides reveals more regarding our current political moment, and its struggle to articulate a more just economic order, than perhaps even the author himself could have anticipated.
How does neoliberalism work, and what is the role of the city in its functioning? The outsized role of the city in capitalism (as opposed to merely its most recent neoliberal iteration) has been evident from the very beginning. According to Rossi, since capitalism’s emergence in European city states during the late middle ages, cities have provided three key functions: finance, institutional capacity, and knowledge. Contrary to earlier predictions that digital technology would end the tyranny of place, all three of these functions continue to be performed primarily by cities and especially by those few global cities with thick networks extending into every corner of the globe. Financial services are highly concentrated in just a few cities, especially London and New York, and the capacity to record, dispute, enforce, and execute contracts tends to be highly concentrated in major cities. So, does the ability to facilitate global trade and travel. The think tanks and academic institutions from which most of the policy innovation originates and spreads also tend to be located in or near a few major cities, as do the headquarters of the largest multinational corporations.
All of this might lead to the conclusion that the global expansion of neoliberalism is merely the consequence of imitation with policy elites in second- and third-tier cities in both the developed and developing world merely copying what seems to have worked in the world’s most dominant cities. What Rossi’s work makes clear is that the global spread of neoliberal policy projects is something very far from organic. Instead, neoliberalism as a set of strategies emerges in the context of a handful of global cities and intellectual centers and is then deliberately spread outward to pollinate (perhaps the better analog is contaminated) other locations across both the developed and developing worlds.
In the post-Fordist era, the logic of capitalist production has moved into every corner of life and has done so globally. Deeply marginalized spaces, such as Brazilian favelas, become spaces for capitalism, as does even the individual in developed economies who is urged to turn herself into a ‘brand’ whose primary purpose is to achieve a form of life sold to her by other entities engaged in the very same self-marketing. As Rossi puts it:
Financialization turns city residents simultaneously into exploited, over-indebted and into potentially entrepreneurial subjects (p.32)
Rossi shows how much of popular urban theory is itself just this sort of marketing – a political project disguising itself as a description. Predictions such as ‘sixty-five percent of human beings will live in cities by 2050’ are not so much natural trends as a likely outcome of currect political and economic policies. More market-oriented still are those pursuing the agenda of the city as a site for ‘cultural production’, who promote urban revival through the attraction of the so-called ‘creative classes’.
Again, the problem with this, which Rossi clearly identifies, is that this follows the same logic of ‘accumulation through dispossession’ first noticed by the early Marxists and then updated by David Harvey in our own time. The gentrification used to attract creative migrants to the city ends up driving out the working class and the poor. The very cities trying to raise their ‘cognitive capital’ leave their own educational systems in a state of financial starvation. The very cities that promote the organic markets and restaurants near and dear to the heart of hipster creatives allow ‘food deserts’ to persist in impoverished neighborhoods.
City revival is also promoted in the form of turning the city into a kind of Disneyland, a Mecca for the consumption of tourists and the wealthy. This is a global phenomenon: McDonaldization for the lower classes, Disneyfication for the middle classes and, for the upper classes, Guggenheim clones and the rise of so-called ‘starchitects’. Yet, the price of living in either a childish fantasyland, such as that run by Disney, or in a city where life has been eroticized is both a loss of real community and the imposition of an all-pervasive security sector meant – in the absence of real ties – to preserve both safety and the illusion of living social ties.
Even in an era of American decline and the cultural heterogeneity of neoliberal centers, Rossi still roots this form of neoliberal urbanism firmly in the United States. He sees neoliberalism as an extremely flexible system of relations adaptable to a wide range of cultural and geographic circumstances, a system that nevertheless continues to be shaped mainly by policy innovations originating in the neoliberal core and spread through the mechanism of think tanks and political consultants who have turned governance itself into a marketable product.
Still, nothing has shaped the development of post-crisis neoliberalism and its relationship to the city more than digital technology. The intersection of digital technology, especially mobile communications and social media, with the global convolutions unleashed by the 2008 financial crisis gave rise to a flurry of political movements emerging from cities, such as the Arab Spring, the Indignados Movement in Spain, and Occupy Wall Street. Often these digitally enabled movements were motivated by a desire to reassert a shared public domain free from the control of market forces.
Rossi appears to see (in the language of many of these new movements made possible by the ICT revolution) a yearning for a new form of political and economic life – the so-called ‘sharing economy’. Yet he also realizes just how quickly this liberating potential was undermined by and folded back into neoliberalism itself. Highly centralized platforms owned by the few were the vehicle on which the sharing economy became manifest, and their operation often merely compounded neoliberalism’s detrimental impacts on the lives of citizens. AirBnb has arguably made the housing crisis worse rather than better, while Uber has, again arguably, encouraged insufficient investment in the public transportation which would most benefit the poor.
At the same time as the ICT revolution has given rise to new forms of political and economic activity, it has also aided the move of neoliberalism even deeper into the self and has reinforced the powers of the carceral state; that is, it has enabled another response to the financial crisis in the form of surveillance capitalism. By transforming data into wealth, surveillance capitalism moves neoliberalism into the individual herself. Not only are her most intimate interactions, those with her friends and family, her thoughts and bodily processes (such as sleep) monetized, but she is also urged to use these tools against herself and others in the arena of the market. She can obsessively track and manage her productivity, create and curate her public image. Yet, what she would find perhaps impossible is imagining a public space where such metrics have been rendered meaningless.
Cities often use the militarized tools of surveillance capitalism against their own citizens: facial recognition, CCTV cameras, drones, and artificial intelligence. Such systems are now global, originating in one place, often the United States, and ported into far-off cities and cultures where their darker potential is more likely to be realized in the light of weaker institutions to preserve civil liberties. In the end, whether the citizens of the global city are likely to leverage technology to liberate themselves from capitalism’s logic and engender new political and economic forms, or such technology will instead be used to create a hardened and unmasked version of neoliberalism is not a question Rossi answers.
One way forward, though not fully developed in Rossi’s analysis, is that the progressive left share its successful policy initiatives globally much as neoliberalism managed to spread and replicate itself. Policy innovation seems likely to originate not in the world’s dominant cities, but in struggling urban areas, in the global economy’s periphery, and among marginalized and oppressed groups who now bear the brunt of neoliberalism’s injustice. What this century ultimately looks like will depend on what those who live in its cities now, and in the near future, choose – or do not choose.