Scholarship in urban sociology has pointed to the reliance of city governments on ever‐more market mechanisms for organizing social and economic policy. This form of governance involves prioritizing cities’ cultural and social assets for their value in a global competition of urban “brands,” each competing for new infusions of human and investment capital. At the same time, however, cities have been at the center of seemingly progressive policy efforts aimed at promoting innovation, sustainability, and creativity. These themes represent a newly dominant planning discourse in cities across the globe. While researchers have thoroughly examined how “creative classes” and “creative cities” may exclude everyday, working‐class, or poor residents, new urban imaginaries focused on sustainability potentially imply less stratified urban outcomes. Analyzing two high‐profile interventions in Buenos Aires, Argentina—a sustainable urban regeneration plan for the historic downtown, and the creation of an arts cluster in the impoverished south of the city—this paper argues that despite divergent narratives, creative and sustainable urban projects suggest similar policy agendas, planning assumptions, and relationships to market mechanisms. Increasingly, global policies, whose design and objectives may appear to contradict market logics, may have outcomes that further them.

Drawing upon an analysis of Flint’s 2012–2013 master planning process, this article explores a puzzling set of questions: Why would a city under emergency management with an abrogated democratic process explicitly encourage extensive citizen participation in one of its most important and strategic documents? How does the urge to involve the community in decision-making reflect new priorities of urban governance? The paper suggests that such a paradox can be conceived as a coherent strategy for addressing conflicting priorities. On the one hand, the exigencies of official claims to democratic engagement operate during a period in which public discourse on inequality has grown in prominence. On the other, harsh fiscal constraint compels local officials and stakeholders to create the conditions for new market-led investment as the singular remedy to urban decline. The result is a transformation of the normative boundaries of the public, lauded as democratic, yet narrowly defined as those participating in highly choreographed and non-binding civic rituals. Local stakeholders, outside consultants, and city administrators generated consensus on a set of urban planning best practices deemed conducive to novel forms of growth, suggesting a transferal of authority from elected office holders to non-elected experts. This process then established the conditions under which community participation was pursued. The intertwining of technical expertise and elite decision-making, however, predetermined community input by naturalizing technocratic logics in planning policy, while signaling the post-political bent of some participatory processes in U.S. cities.

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listening to it with a slight sense of confused amazement: alongside packing in a third of previously unaired performances-including some sudden bits of Bob Dylan in the midst of a hitherto unknown track-the album simply re-played, in partly different keys, some of the 'best of' I was expecting. In a way this was a treat, but it also stripped away R.E.M.'s work and recast some of their classics in different forms, even going against the group's original ethos to some extent. Without trying to draw too many parallels here, Neil Brenner's New Urban Spaces left me with something of the same feeling. While it reinterprets some well-established tenets of urban political writing, it does so with the author presenting a new version of familiar arguments alongside another, stronger argument-which, a little like Unplugged, proves that theory is never really fixed in time and is always subject to change.By that metric, Brenner's most recent monograph is a challenging, dense and surprising read that will likely reshape our understanding of the long-established scholarship of one of the world's finest contemporary urban theorists. Conveniently summarized in a table on page 10, the book is pretty much a 'Brenner Reader' put together by Brenner himself. It follows his 2016Critique of Urbanization-which already argued in part against 'locking in' scholarship-and moves towards a very explicit re-examination of his scholarship over the last two decades. This entails on the one hand collecting together a series of classic chapters from Neil Brenner's scholarship for re-publication-some of which are at the heart of previously published popular This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. This is the author manuscript accepted for publication and has undergone full peer review but has not been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process, which may lead to differences between this version and the Version of Record. Please cite this article as