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.
