Transatlantic city, part 1: Conjunctural urbanism

Abstract

As the first installment of a two-part article exploring contemporary transformations in metropolitan governance in the wake of the entrepreneurial turns of the 1980s and subsequent waves of neoliberalisation and financialisation, a case is outlined here for a 'conjunctural' approach to urban analysis. This can be considered to be complementary to, but at the same time distinct from, some of the concurrent approaches to comparative urbanism, in that it explicitly problematises the relative positioning of cities in the context of uneven development and multiscalar relations, as well as the dialogic connections between case studies, midlevel concepts and revisable theory claims. Taking as its point of departure the current financial and political crisis in Atlantic City, the New Jersey casino capital, the article historicises the concept of the entrepreneurial city, placing this in the context, successively, of the evolving 'commonsense' of neoliberal governance, the emergence of austerity urbanism and the intensification of financialised restructuring. In tracing an arc from more abstract theory claims through to the specific circumstances of contemporary urban restructuring in the United States, the article sets the stage for the more granular and concrete analysis of 'late-entrepreneurial' Atlantic City to follow in Part 2. To the extent that it is necessary to construct some of this staging, this first part of the article reflects on some of the methodological implications of a conjunctural approach to urban studies.

Transatlantic city, part 2: Late entrepreneurialism

“…The first part of the paper sketched out an approach to this moment of lateentrepreneurial fiscal crisis under the methodological rubric of conjunctural urbanism (Peck, 2017). Understood as a manoeuver orthogonal to those lateral or 'horizontal' modes of analysis associated with ontologically flatter readings of comparative urbanism (cf.…”

“…Returning to the arc described in Part 1 of this paper, from entrepreneurial urbanism as an emergent form, through an extended period of regulatory normalisation, to the crisis-assisted ascendancy of constitutively financialised and imperative modes of urban governance (Peck, 2017;Peck and Whiteside, 2016), Detroit and Atlantic City are clearly cutting their own paths along this variegated terrain. An instance of simple convergence this is not, even though there is ample evidence of constitutive connections and processual continuities.…”

From Big to Small Cities: A Qualitative Analysis of the Causes and Outcomes of Post–Recession Municipal Bankruptcies

“…However, much work remains to develop urban theories that are informed the kinds of empirical study that identify how cities interact with, and shape, institutional structures. As this work proceeds (see Peck , ), it will likely benefit from the continued study of extreme and/or rare urban phenomenon, such as municipal bankruptcies, since these moments often serve to demonstrate those points of connection that are less visible during more stable times.…”

“…Robinson's () “ordinary city” thesis calls for a move away from this approach, arguing that “in a world of ordinary cities, ways of being urban and ways of making new kinds of urban futures are diverse and are the product of the inventiveness of people in cities everywhere” (1). Critics of this postcolonial perspective have recognized the need to study the diversity of cities (Peck ), but argued we must still be able to explain the politico‐economic processes that structure cities (Brenner and Schmid ; Peck ; Storper and Scott ). Storper and Scott (:12) claim that an emphasis on diversity in postcolonial urban studies has the potential to strip urban theory's ability to see the city as a distinctive social phenomenon:

“… the willful advocacy of the ‘messiness’ of urban life in some of these approaches—as in Simone's (:408) description of urban conditions as emerging from the interweaving of ‘complex combinations of objects, spaces, persons, and practices’—is superficially correct, but radically incomplete because, as we have argued, there are systematic regularities in urban life that are susceptible to high levels of theoretical generalization”

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Demolishing the Present to Sell off the Future? The Emergence of ‘Financialized Municipal Entrepreneurialism’ in London

“…While not entirely novel, these municipal entanglements with global financial actors and practices seem to be intensifying as ‘the dependency of political institutions on financial markets for securing investment capital’ (Gotham, : 1363) has increased. Indeed, employing an explicitly conjunctural optic, Peck and Whiteside () and Peck () identify a general logic of financialized urban governance across cities, suggesting that the municipal state in the US has become a critical terrain, target and agent of financialization, amounting to the constitutive financialization of late‐entrepreneurial metropolitan governance, about which we currently know little (Peck and Whiteside, : 237).…”