Neoliberal Cities: The Remaking of Postwar Urban America

Published by New York University Press 2020

Neoliberal Cities

The Remaking of Postwar Urban America

Edited by: Andrew J. Diamond and Thomas J. Sugrue

Volume 9 in the series NYU Series in Social and Cultural Analysis

https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479827046.001.0001

Overview
Contents

About this book

Traces decades of troubled attempts to fund private answers to public urban problems

The American city has long been a laboratory for austerity, governmental decentralization, and market-based solutions to urgent public problems such as affordable housing, criminal justice, and education. Through richly told case studies from Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and New York, Neoliberal Cities provides the necessary context to understand the always intensifying racial and economic inequality in and around the city center.

In this original collection of essays, urban historians and sociologists trace the role that public policies have played in reshaping cities, with particular attention to labor, the privatization of public services, the collapse of welfare, the rise of gentrification, the expansion of the carceral state, and the politics of community control. In so doing, Neoliberal Cities offers a bottom-up approach to social scientific, theoretical, and historical accounts of urban America, exploring the ways that activists and grassroots organizations, as well as ordinary citizens, came to terms with new market-oriented public policies promoted by multinational corporations, financial institutions, and political parties. Neoliberal Cities offers new scaffolding for urban and metropolitan change, with attention to the interaction between policymaking, city planning, social movements, and the market.

Author / Editor information

Diamond Andrew J. :

Andrew J. Diamond is Professor of American History at the Sorbonne University in Paris, where he is the director of the research center Histoire et Dynamique des Espaces Anglophones (HDEA). He is the author of Chicago on the Make: Power and Inequality in a Modern City and Mean Streets: Chicago Youths and the Everyday Struggle for Empowerment in the Multiracial City, 1908-1969.Sugrue Thomas J. :

Thomas J. Sugrue is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University, where he directs the Metropolitan Studies Program, and author of The Origins of the Urban Crisis and Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North.

Andrew J. Diamond is Professor of American History at the Sorbonne University in Paris, where he is the director of the research center Histoire et Dynamique des Espaces Anglophones (HDEA). He is the author of Chicago on the Make: Power and Inequality in a Modern City and Mean Streets: Chicago Youths and the Everyday Struggle for Empowerment in the Multiracial City, 1908-1969

Thomas J. Sugrue is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University, where he directs the Metropolitan Studies Program, and author of The Origins of the Urban Crisis and Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North.

Reviews

This collection from urban historians Sugrue and Diamond invites readers to explore the legacy of neoliberalism associated with initiatives embraced by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The principal arguments put forward focus on the conscious role played by urban planners, financiers, and municipal and state governments to retreat from a sense of public space and benefits.

A timely and welcome appeal to urban historians to take neoliberalism seriously as an analytical category whose history demands to be written

Andrew W. Kahrl, University of Virginia:
The authors in this collection reveal the long, contentious, and often ironic history of neoliberalism’s ascendance, rooted in local struggles with broad implications for our lives today and for the world we want to build for tomorrow.

N. D. B. Connolly, author of A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida:
As one who has found little interpretive value in neoliberalism as a term, I am deeply persuaded by the indispensability of this book. Neoliberal Cities reminds historians of the importance of sharp conceptual language. It shows how sound historical research can often vex lazy deployments of one of our moment’s most weighted analytic terms. This is the kind of book one thinks with and grows smarter.

Caitlin Zaloom, author of Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost:
A necessary intervention. The book poses questions about the concept of neoliberalism that will resonate well beyond the field of history, provoking discussion in urban studies and geography, as well as the social sciences.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Introduction Historicizing the Neoliberal Metropolis Andrew J. Diamond and Thomas J. Sugrue Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1 Race, Poverty, and Neighborhood Planning in Chicago from the New Deal to Neoliberalism Mary Pattillo Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	13
2 “New Life, New Vigor, and New Values” Privatization, Service Work, and the Rise of Neoliberal Urbanism in Postwar Southern California Thomas Adams Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	49
3 The Politics of Austerity The Moral Economy in 1970s New York Kim Phillips-Fein Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	78
4 Doing Business New Orleans Style Racial Progressivism and the Politics of Uneven Development Megan French-Marcelin Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	98
5 The Color of War Race, Neoliberalism, and Punishment in Late Twentieth- Century Los Angeles Donna Murch Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	128
6 Is Gentrification the Result of Neoliberalism? The Cultural Making of the Real Estate Market in Boston’s South End, 1965– 2005 Sylvie Tissot Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	154
7 Race, Participation, and Institutional Transformation in the Neoliberal City Black Politics in Cleveland, 1965– 2010 Michael McQuarrie Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	173
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	207
About the Contributors Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	209
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	211

Language: English
Publisher: New York University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;

eBook

Published: August 25, 2020
ISBN: 9781479827046