Getting political in the neoliberal city: new book explores justice, resistance and the role of design

How did you come up with the idea of the book?

The concept for the book emerged during a period marked by significant urban uprisings in the early 2010s, including the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, the Gezi Park Movement and the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. These events were responses to systemic injustices, including inequality, corruption, political exclusion and the adverse effects of urban development driven by neoliberal policies.

These urban protests not only highlighted how public spaces could become arenas for challenging the status quo, but also revealed urban spatial and environmental injustices, sparking demands for change. 

Many planners, landscape architects and architects engaged with these urban social, spatial and environmental movements from different proximities: some witnessed and participated in the protests, documenting the ways in which protesters reclaimed urban spaces to express their grievances. They engaged with protest communities, listened to stories of injustice and observed how protesters explored new forms of collective action and alternative visions for urban life. 

Others traced and theorised the practices and documented them from a distance. Some developed entirely different research, teaching and professional agendas, influenced by their conceptual observations of the emerging debates regarding spatial and environmental injustices. Many wanted to learn more to influence positive transformation towards just cities. 

For many of us in the fields of planning and architecture, it was a moment of reality check and an emotional and societal epiphany regarding the deep gap between the expressed lived experiences of the socio-spatial and environmental injustices as consequences of urban development projects, and the socio-spatial theories and practices that we reproduce in academia and professional practice with good intentions, in relation to the production of a 'good' built environment. 

Over the following decade, these experiences prompted academics and professionals to critically re-examine their roles and the potential of their disciplines to address socio-spatial and environmental inequalities. 

As neoliberal urbanisation and, consequently, socio-spatial and environmental injustices are constantly evolving, so are alternative spatial practices and research. Understanding the complex discursive, cultural, material, social, economic and epistemological relationships between the disciplines involved in researching and producing built environments and neoliberalism remains an important challenge. 

In this context, getting political is about developing new theoretical and analytical lenses that expose ever-evolving injustices, understanding their historicity, reflecting on them, creating social mobilisation, establishing solidarity and formulating different ways of practising. 

What is the neoliberal city and how does it shape the urban and rural life?

Like neoliberalism, the neoliberal city is a multidimensional phenomenon. It is ideological, cultural, economic and political as well as spatial, material, visual and environmental. It is a place where the functions of the welfare state are dismantled and where attempts at privatisation interfere with and transform almost all areas of life, such as housing, leisure, education and health. Some of these functions are directly commodified, while others are positioned to increase the exchange value of the former. 

For example, the amount, quality and conservation of public green spaces are strategically tied to the regulation of housing prices. Consequently, neoliberal urban planning exacerbates racial, gendered and class divides by engineering the social groups living in different areas of cities. There are emerging segregated high quality urban and rural enclaves that are based on exploitative multiscalar territorial relations in terms of environment, material, and labor. Social hierarchies are constantly reproduced, perpetuating historical structures of injustice. The distribution of social, cultural, and environmental infrastructure follows these hierarchies, creating waves of disinvestment and investment to increase the exchange value of urban spaces, thereby benefiting developers and property owners while further disadvantaging the racialised and gendered working class, immigrants, and young people with little or no intergenerational wealth and denying them to access basic needs, and a dignified life. This is the process of accumulation by dispossession that Marxist geographer David Harvey conceptualizes. 

Neoliberal city-making has a particular post-political culture and counter cultures. It appropriates any popular progressive language as well as conservative to create mass consent and protect the status quo, masking the harmful effects of market oriented urban and environmental developments. These processes and effects are usually less visible to privileged groups. Disadvantaged groups are scapegoated as the root cause of the injustices they experience. Planning and design knowledge and language play a major role in this culture. The practitioners, or academics who center reflecting on environmental injustices might be framed as ‘being biased’, or ‘too political’ to marginalize. Many progressive-sounding concepts are appropriated and instrumentalised, e.g. placemaking, participation, urban acupuncture, sustainable urban development, or environmental restoration. However, as inequalities increase, both the city and the knowledge, imaginations and practices of city-making become arenas for struggle, in the form of protests, uprisings, political organisation and mobilisation around certain issues, such as affordable housing or accessible quality open public, or cultural spaces, as well as for planning and design scholars and practitioners, who can analyse injustices more effectively, mobilize knowledge and formulate interventions to counter them.

Your book is addressing academics and practitioners within planning and design. Why is it important for these audiences to get political, and why now? 

The case studies in the book demonstrate that it is impossible to be neutral or apolitical when it comes to the production of the built environment. Through our scholarly and professional work, we researchers, educators and practitioners become part of the reproduction of larger social and environmental political structures. Adopting a political stance involves acknowledging this situatedness and formulating strategic moves that reflect this awareness. The examples given in the chapters also demonstrate that scholars and practitioners can effect positive change in many different temporal moments and arenas; they can challenge the sense of helplessness or powerlessness that is also part of neoliberal culture and ideology in the fields of planning and design. Taking a political stance is an urgent task, particularly given the growing and deepening intersectional political, social, environmental and climate crises.

Could you give an example where you see a desirable political landscape unfold?

If I were to derive a synthesis from a few chapters in the book, it would be a moment or place where historical, multiscalar, and multidomain injustices and inequalities are deeply understood and openly expressed and discussed. It would also be a place where reparations are democratically imagined, centring historically marginalised groups and their experiences and demands. It is also a political, economic, institutional, cultural and organisational space in which academics and professionals can strategically position themselves to pursue the goal of contributing to social, spatial and environmental justice. 

In chapter 2, Alexandra Crosby and Ilaria Vanni discuss an exploratory experiment in the form of 'more-than-human' activism that challenges the neoliberal and colonial landscape narrative of Ultimo in Sydney. 

In chapter 4, Angela Gigliotti illustrates how the welfare architect's motto becomes a myth in the Danish context, within the reorganisation of professional practice and transformations in the labour market, and in situations where professionals reproduce or counter neoliberalisation. 

In chapter 6, Evelyn Kwok highlights the effects of Eurocentric, middle-class, masculine bias and Whiteness on the methods of spatial ethnography and socio-spatial analysis for understanding and describing urban social life. This is derived from her intersectional analysis, which reveals the socio-spatial narratives of migrant domestic workers. Such analysis from diligently reflexive ethnography is necessary for imagining a desirable political landscape. 

In chapter 7, Johan Pries tells us about the complex relationships between politics, planning and architecture in exclusive housing and seafront development in Malmö, and how subordinated groups from disadvantaged parts of the city appropriated the public seafront landscapes through everyday use; and how they also mobilised politically through protests organized by the tenants' unions to make their demands visible, and this agenda was then adopted in municipal planning through minor changes to the material design of public landscapes. 

What societal contributions do you wish to see with this book (and possibly, how do you wish it to be used)?

The chapter contributions illustrate how neoliberalisation unfolds in cities, creating and exacerbating historical socio-spatial and environmental injustices. They also demonstrate how different planning and design practices either reproduce these injustices or attempt to counter them. As the chapters focus on different geographical contexts, this diversity provides us with a global perspective from which to trace the connections and relational processes between the so-called 'Global North' and the 'Global South’ and gives us an opportunity to learn from each other. The introductory chapter provides an introduction to basic concepts and reflects on the links between neoliberal urbanisation and the fields of planning and design. It also reconceptualises what 'political' might mean for these fields and how they might become agents for just transformations, analysing and reflecting on the results drawn from different locations. 

Community activists, professionals, students, researchers, policymakers and many others can benefit from the book by making sense of the injustices they experience, observe or study, or by understanding the larger dynamics of the political, social, economic and cultural surroundings of planning and design fields. They can also learn from different case studies, whether similar to or contrasting with the cases they are familiar with, in order to experiment with new forms of research or practice. This will help to break the inertia maintained by a discourse of helplessness or powerlessness, and perhaps, more importantly, help them to gain hope.

Anything else you wish to add? 

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my wonderful co-editors, Melissa Cate Chris and Cristina Cerulli; all the chapter contributors, Alexandra Crosby, Ilaria Vanni, Catherine De Almeida, Angela Gigliotti, Doris Gstach, Evelyn Kwok, Johan Pries, Claudia Seldin, Caio César de Azevedo Barros, Socrates Stratis, Gerônimo Leitão and Almut Wolff. Their work made this book project realized during the times of and after the pandemic. Special thanks also go to Evelyn Kwok and Athena Cheng at the Academy of Visual Arts at Hong Kong Baptist University for their additional editorial assistance and support.