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Urban Studies2017, Vol. 54(1) 4–30� Urban Studies Journal Limited 2016Reprints and permissions:sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.navDOI: 10.1177/0042098016679355usj.sagepub.com

Transatlantic city, part 1:Conjunctural urbanism

Jamie PeckUniversity of British Columbia, Canada

AbstractAs the first installment of a two-part article exploring contemporary transformations in metropolitangovernance in the wake of the entrepreneurial turns of the 1980s and subsequent waves of neoliberali-sation and financialisation, a case is outlined here for a ‘conjunctural’ approach to urban analysis. Thiscan be considered to be complementary to, but at the same time distinct from, some of the concur-rent approaches to comparative urbanism, in that it explicitly problematises the relative positioning ofcities in the context of uneven development and multiscalar relations, as well as the dialogic connec-tions between case studies, midlevel concepts and revisable theory claims. Taking as its point of depar-ture the current financial and political crisis in Atlantic City, the New Jersey casino capital, the articlehistoricises the concept of the entrepreneurial city, placing this in the context, successively, of the evol-ving ‘commonsense’ of neoliberal governance, the emergence of austerity urbanism and the intensifica-tion of financialised restructuring. In tracing an arc from more abstract theory claims through to thespecific circumstances of contemporary urban restructuring in the United States, the article sets thestage for the more granular and concrete analysis of ‘late-entrepreneurial’ Atlantic City to follow inPart 2. To the extent that it is necessary to construct some of this staging, this first part of the articlereflects on some of the methodological implications of a conjunctural approach to urban studies.

KeywordsAtlantic City, entrepreneurial urbanism, financialisation, neoliberalism, urban theory

Received September 2016; accepted October 2016

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Introduction: Not Detroit .

‘At least we are not Detroit’, was the linethat the perennially upbeat mayor ofAtlantic City, Don Guardian, chose torepeat, ostensibly for light relief, in his 2015State of the City address (quoted in Parry,2015: 1). Atlantic City had been on a partic-ularly bad run: property-market values and(with them) municipal tax revenues hadslumped by half since 2012, the mortgageforeclosure rate had risen to one of the high-est in the country and in this single-industrytown (where the hotels and gaming businessaccounts for three-quarters of the tax base)four of the city’s 12 casinos had closed in theyear since the mayor’s election, with a loss ofmore than 8000 jobs. But perhaps AtlanticCity could still consider itself more fortunatethan Detroit. A month earlier, what hadonce been a single-industry town of anentirely different kind had emerged from thelargest municipal bankruptcy in US history,preceded by a federally authorised ‘bailout’of two of the big three auto makers.Detroit’s twin-track process of structuraladjustment had been managed – from out oftown, one might say – by President Obama’s‘car tsar’, Steven Rattner, on the private-sector side, and on the public-sector side byMichigan Governor Rick Snyder’s ‘emer-gency manager’, Kevyn Orr. There had beensome talk in New Jersey’s state capital,Trenton, that a similar kind of ‘takeover’might be on the cards for Atlantic City,which since 2010 had been subjected to strictfiscal oversight measures, although localexperts were continuing to stress that thiswas ‘not Detroit’, because alternatives tobankruptcy were being actively sought, whileemergency-manager provisions were not for-mally present in state law.1 Desperate todefend what remained of its financial and

policymaking sovereignty, the municipality

of Atlantic City had been applying the

leeches to itself, moving ‘as a sign of good

faith’ to slash budgets, services and staff,

while hiking property taxes by 29 percent.Known for his ‘no-bullshit boosterism’,

Atlantic City’s genial mayor had grown

accustomed to the fact that ‘a typical day

included three crises before lunch’ (quoted in

Parry, 2015: 1). On the morning of his State

of the City address, Caesars Entertainment

(the gaming conglomerate that owns three of

the remaining casinos) filed for bankruptcy

protection, the mayor’s maxim once again

being confirmed when the elevators failed in

City Hall and an aging water main ruptured

at the public-works yard. It was not over.

The following week, New Jersey Governor

Chris Christie took the unprecedented step

of appointing not one but two emergency

managers, with a charge ‘to place the

finances of Atlantic City in stable condition

on a long-term basis by any and all lawful

means’ (Office of the Governor, New Jersey,

2015: 4). Governor Christie insisted that

these ‘aggressive actions’ were necessary to

‘make sure Atlantic City gets its act

together’, while conceding that Mayor

Guardian, a fellow Republican, had ‘inher-

ited an awful mess’ (quoted in Haddon and

Dawsey, 2015: A13; Hanna et al., 2015: 1)Christie tapped Kevin Lavin, a corporate-

restructuring specialist from New York, forthe full-time position of emergency manager,but it was his sidekick who grabbed theheadlines. The best-known ‘outside interve-ner’ in the country, Kevyn Orr, fresh fromhis assignment in Detroit, would workalongside Lavin to ‘fix’ Atlantic City.(Inevitably, the duo would become knownas the ‘two Kevins’.) The bond-rating agencyMoody’s greeted the news by slashing the

Corresponding author:

Jamie Peck, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, 1984 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z2, Canada.

Email: [email protected]

Peck 5

city’s credit rating into deep-junk territory,noting the ‘possibility of material impair-ment to bondholders from a debt restructur-ing’ (Russ, 2015: 1), Mr. Orr havingacquired a reputation on Wall Street as aman prepared to impose tough settlementson creditors (Eide, 2015; cf. Darragh, 2015;Peck and Whiteside, 2016). S&P promptlyfollowed suit, concerned about the risk of abondholder haircut should the city followDetroit into bankruptcy protection: ‘Theimplementation of an Emergency Managersignals to Standard & Poor’s that the state[of New Jersey] does not view the city ascapable of resolving its challenges withoutoutside intervention’ (quoted in Beckerman,2015: 1). For his part, the celebrity crisismanager from Detroit sought to tread theline between urgency and panic, since whilethe financial mess was clearly serious, abankruptcy declaration was not preor-dained: ‘Be very, very careful’, Orr counseledat his first Atlantic City press conference,‘trying to analogize what happened in anyother community with what may or may nothappen here’ (quoted Darragh, 2015: 1),seeking to avoid the obvious – but also obvi-ously complicating – comparisons by insist-ing that, ‘There is not a template’.

While it is sometimes (mis)taken as such,David Harvey’s (1989) influential account ofentrepreneurial urbanism did not take theform of a one-size-fits-all template either.Instead, it spoke to the selective impacts ofan incipient structural transformation in themacroeconomic environment confrontingcities in North America and WesternEurope, circumstances encapsulated in anopening vignette concerning an urban lead-ership conference in the French city ofOrleans in 1985. With representatives fromboth sides of the Atlantic, the conferencebrought into sharp relief the constellation offiscal risks and competitive threats that citieswere facing during these, the early stages ofan historic rollback in the Fordist economy

and the Keynesian-welfare state.2 For all theevident variation in their local particulari-ties, proactive plans and putative ‘assets’,cities on both sides of the Atlantic werebecoming exposed in quite new ways toa pervasive environment of beggar-thy-neighbour competition, mutual undercuttingand collectively counterproductive subsidisa-tion, with signs that they were being inducedto crowd onto the same ‘very narrow path’of market-friendly regulatory experimenta-tion, ‘festivalisation’ and corporate attrac-tion efforts (Harvey, 1989: 11). Threedecades later, routine measures of this kindhave become the rather banal face of neolib-eral urban governance, the result hardly ofmere coincidence or rational convergence onbest practices, but an outcome of the recur-sive and patterned interplay of local strategicchoices forged under conditions that few cit-ies would have chosen, circumstancesframed by the ‘dull compulsion’ of competi-tive exposure (Peck, 2014a).

Atlantic City, which in 1976 legalisedcasino gambling as a (then) ‘unique tool ofurban development’, has by any measurebeen amongst the most aggressive in itssingle-minded embrace of this kind of entre-preneurialism, leaping headlong from anobjective state of structural crisis into a fate-ful pact with casino capitalism, which forseveral decades delivered a bounty to corpo-rate investors, spurring a brash pattern ofgrowth and inflating the local tax base(Schwartz, 2016; Sternlieb and Hughes,1983: 2; Wolman et al., 1993). WhenAtlantic City’s luck ran out, however, it didso in equally dramatic fashion. After break-ing Las Vegas’ longstanding monopoly,Atlantic City had the East Coast gamblingmarket to itself for more than a decade anda half, before a swarm of revenue-starvedjurisdictions started to get in on the act (seeFigure 1). Practically as a demonstrationcase of the law of diminishing returns in thearena of interurban competition, those cites,

6 Urban Studies 54(1)

states and Native American communitiesthat have embraced casino gambling as adevelopment opportunity have discoveredthat that the ‘economic dynamics over time[have] become increasingly negative andzero-sum’ (Council on Casinos, 2013: 29;Lu, 2014). Yet the fact that legalised

gambling has now spread to most of the 50states can be read as an indicator of the pau-city of alternative (local) developmentopportunities. By 2018, there will be 65 lega-lised casinos on the East Coast alone, and itlooks increasingly like Atlantic City maybecome one of the first major casualties of

Figure 1. Legalised casino gambling in the United States, from mob monopoly to competitive saturation.Source: Author’s compilation from American Gaming Association, Arthur Anderson and Oxford Economics.

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what has become ‘a nationwide casino armsrace’ (Wolfson, 2014: 2).

An historical bookend to the Orleans con-ference – and an apt illustration of this‘autumnal’ moment of late-stage entrepre-neurial urbanism – was the no less anxiousgathering of gaming-industry executives andpublic officials at Harrah’s casino in AtlanticCity in May 2016, where an urgent topic ofdiscussion was the saturated state of regionalgambling markets. As the general manager ofthe SugarHouse casino in Philadelphia com-plained, ‘There’s not a [local] politician in theland who is going to choose a tax increasewhen gaming looks so good on paper’. (Herown operation, which had only opened itsdoors in 2010 in the face of concerted commu-nity opposition, was reckoned to have nettedthe cash-strapped State of Pennsylvania morethan US$1 billion in tax revenues.) But now,this industry incumbent complained, ‘Wehave to avoid the siren song’:

There’s not a zip code in the region thatdoesn’t have four or five (gambling) optionswithin an hour . Pennsylvania doesn’t carewhat happens to New Jersey, and New Yorkdoesn’t care what happens to Pennsylvania. Itjust can’t go on forever. There’s a finite amountof gaming revenue out there. We are in a veryvolatile time and we’re in a frenzy of gamingexpansion. It needs to stop. (Wendy Hamilton,

SugarHouse casino, quoted in Parry, 2016: 1)

It is, however, unlikely to stop. As if to illus-trate this point, the State of New Jersey isseeking to underwrite its so-called ‘bailout’of Atlantic City – the fiscal crisis of which isnothing less than an organic outcome ofa failed casino growth machine, largelydesigned in Trenton – with revenues gener-ated by the granting of new casino gamblinglicenses in the northern part of the state.Should New Jersey’s referendum on thequestion (scheduled for November 2016)pass, the state’s northern and southerncasino concessions will be separated by

nothing more than the gambler’s equivalentof a daily commute.

This contradictory tangle of local andextralocal political calculations, competitiveconditions (of existence) and increasingly‘bankrupt’ urban-growth strategies are theconcerns of this two-part article. An explora-tion of ‘late-entrepreneurialism’, in itsincreasingly financialised and crisis-proneforms, it sets out both to characterise and tocontextualise Atlantic City’s experiment incasino capitalism. The article does so as acontribution to an ongoing effort to map theshifting landscapes of devolved austeritygovernance and financialised urban rule inthe United States (see Davidson and Ward,2014, forthcoming; Kirkpatrick and Smith,2011; Lake, 2015; Peck, 2012, 2014b; Peckand Whiteside, 2016; Tabb, 2014; Weber,2010), in this case taking as a point of depar-ture a connection traced from one hotspot toanother – between post-bankruptcy Detroitand Atlantic City at the brink of default.While it is trivially true that Atlantic City isnot and will never be Detroit, there are bothpolitical and theoretical reasons to probe theconstitutive connections and family resem-blances across such contemporary manifes-tations of localised fiscal crisis. Situatedempirical investigations of this kind arguablyhave merit in their own terms. Yet the impli-cations are more than local ones, especially ifthese experiences are understood in relationto what appears to be a distinctive historicalmoment of late-entrepreneurialism, onemarked by the effective exhaustion of somany of the now-orthodox approaches tourban economic development, coupled witha reconfigured nexus of statutory interven-tions, technocratic experimentation, finan-cial discipline and moralising narratives.Quite apart from any specific conclusionsthat might be drawn concerning these finan-cialised modes of urban governance, a raft ofmethodological and interpretative issues israised as well.


The field of critical urban studies hasbeen moved in recent years by a series ofpoststructural and postcolonial interventionsthat have raised searching questions aboutthe explanatory status accorded to‘EuroAmerican’ cases, about the reach andrelevance of political-economic theoryclaims concerning entrepreneurial-cum-neoliberal modes of regulation and aboutthe respective utility of planetary, provincialand particularised formulations of the urban(see Brenner and Schmid, 2015; Leitner andSheppard, 2016; Parnell and Robinson,2012; Peck, 2015a; Roy, 2009; Storper andScott, 2016). A significant methodologicalresponse to these debates has been arenewed emphasis on comparative urbanism(see McFarlane, 2014; Robinson, 2011,2015; Ward, 2008), with an accent on thecosmopolitan proliferation of ‘more global’approaches to urban studies, on less hier-archical (or ‘top down’) modes of explana-tion, on theorising from ‘elsewhere andanywhere’ and on the exploration of hori-zontal or ‘lateral’ differences, divergencesand discrepancies between city-cases in theservice of novel interpretations and alterna-tive theory claims. These efforts have beenundeniably generative, but in their wake theyraise some vexing issues when it comes to therole and rationale of single-city cases, espe-cially if these are located in the very ‘heart-land’ of received urban-theory production,and right on the receiving end of some of themost severely asymmetrical and coerciveapplications of financially driven and techno-cratically managed restructuring. In the wakeof the experience of cities like Detroit (seeHackworth, 2016; Peck, 2015b), can it be saidthat we already know how these stories end?To the extent that this neoliberalised terrainhas become familiar territory, is it the casethat largely predictable empirical answersnow effectively precede and preempt the (the-oretical) questions? In other words, does theplight of Atlantic City represent just another,

business-as-usual case of North Atlantic neo-liberal urbanism, subject to its own kind ofdiminishing (explanatory) returns?

There is be no such thing, of course, asjust another case of neoliberal urbanism, atleast if the objective is to reconstruct (alwaysrevisable) theory claims in dialogue with(programmatically) situated empirical inqui-ries. Likewise, neoliberal urbanism shouldnot simply be invoked as an all-encompassing and all-explaining deductiveschema, or rigid theoretical template, even ifthis sometimes happens (see Le Gales, 2016;Peck, 2013b; Peck et al., 2013; Pickvance,2011). Rather than as a convenient source ofproxy, shorthand or short-circuited explana-tions, this conceptual frame should reallydefine a space for the construction of expla-nations. Cognizant of the dangers of resort-ing to what might be termed explanatory‘compression’, by pressing a pre-formed andunyielding theoretical framework down ontoa compliant or affirmative case – in effect‘reading off’ (or ‘down’) from abstract the-ory claims concerning tendential processesonto concrete and contextually specific con-ditions – there is an explicit attempt, acrossthe two parts of this article, to imagine,inhabit and explore the relational space of‘conjunctural’ urban analysis (cf. Brenneret al., 2010; Hall and Massey, 2010). This isa mode of analysis that works deliberatelyacross levels of abstraction in dialogue withevolving midlevel formulations and connec-tive concepts. At least relative to thoseapproaches to comparative urbanism thatdraw inspiration from flatter ontologies(and which rationalise horizontal contrastsand more inductive investigations in the con-text of an ambivalent or sceptical attitude toreceived, ‘covering’ concepts), this can bethought of as an orthogonal methodologicalmanoeuvre. It involves spiralling up anddown through cases and contexts as a differ-ent (but arguably complementary) strategyto that of working laterally, ‘between’ cases.

Peck 9

To appeal to ‘conjunctures’ is not just amatter of deferring, a priori, to some over-arching explanatory edifice, like a determi-nistic reading of financialised capitalism or ahierarchically rigid conception of neoliberalrule. Instead, it requires the recognition ofcontextual complexity ‘all the way down’,necessitating the production (and restlessrevision) of midlevel theoretical formula-tions appropriate for interrogation acrossmultiple cases and sites, along with reflexiveinterpretations of the interplay betweengrounded circumstances, mediating condi-tions and contingent effects on the one hand,and their enabling conditions of existence,operational parameters and connective cir-cuits on the other. While conjuncturalapproaches are always attentive to the roleof covering concepts, to allow them tobecome smothering concepts would be self-defeating. Sceptical both of universalismand particularism, these approaches call forclose and reflexive interpretations of themutual constitution of situated circum-stances and structuring conditions, movingin and out from immediate (or proximate)contexts to the (constitutive) contexts ofthose contexts.

Inevitably, even this extended accountcan only be indicative and illustrative, seek-ing as it does to situate a single-city casewithin some of its structuring contexts, but itdoes so in order to reflect on some of themethodological implications of a conjunc-tural approach to urban analysis. Thisinvolves looping from the transatlantic spaceinhabited by Harvey’s original theory claimsconcerning the ‘entrepreneurial turn’ (famil-iar territory of a different kind, one mightsay), through the commonplaces and com-monsenses of neoliberal urbanism (wherehegemony is realised not simply by way oftop-down imposition or ideological fiat, butthrough the cumulative and contested ‘gov-ernance of normalisation’), on to a provi-sional reading of the extended, degraded,

(d)evolved and constitutively financialisedform of late-entrepreneurialism, US-style.The final (geographical) qualifier here is notissued lightly, because a conjunctural analy-sis must – perhaps above all – be attentive toissues of contextual, positional and situa-tional specificity, resisting the temptationto read off global trends from particularcircumstances. So even if crisis-prone modesof late-entrepreneurial governance havebecome quite pervasive, they are hardly ubi-quitous or one-dimensionally generic. And,even if they are encountered in all corners ofthe transatlantic arena, they only findexpression in institutionally contingent andunevenly developed forms, varying in kindas well as by degree. In this respect, this partof the article seeks to do more than ‘set thestage’ for the extended case study of AtlanticCity in Part 2; it problematises the methodo-logical staging itself, in order to explorewhat a conjunctural approach to urban stud-ies might look like.

Atlantic urbanism, transforming

Beginning with some of the broader ques-tions of conceptual and methodologicalframing, this section of the article movesfrom an implicit to a more explicit mode ofconjunctural-urban analysis, and from thefamiliar ground of the entrepreneurial citythrough its almost numbingly familiar nor-malisation, up to the present moment offinancialised overextension, systemic stressand ‘site-shifting’ crisis, with particular ref-erence to the configuration of conditions in(and within) the United States. In historicalterms, the discussion approximately spansthe arc of neoliberal urbanism’s hegemony-in-motion, from the late-Keynesian ‘spring’of first-wave entrepreneurialism to the‘autumn’ of the financialised present. Bothof those political-economic seasons, ofcourse, have been moments of crisis in theirown ways, but since this is a non-repeating


historical process, crises too must be con-juncturally positioned.

The following discussion proceeds inthree steps. It begins by taking a trip back toDavid Harvey’s entrepreneurial city, thenow commonplace status of which is boththe challenge and the point, since the histori-cal drift from the vanguard moves and boldexperiments of the 1980s through to the run-of-the-mill ‘ordinary’ entrepreneurialisms oftoday is very much a story of (the govern-ance of) normalisation, or what otherwisemight be understood as the (re)shaping ofhegemony qua political commonsense.Following this tack, the nature of neoliberalnormalcy is (re)considered, first in moreabstract terms and then in the shape of its(over)extended American form, as financia-lising urban governance.

Ordinary entrepreneurialism

In an editorial commentary on the occasionof a reissue of his seminal essay on entrepre-neurial urbanism, David Harvey (2016: 157)reflected that ‘[a]nyone working in urbanstudies in the 1980s would [have been] famil-iar with the trends in urban governance’ thatwere the concern of that earlier paper. Partcross-case synthesis and part dialectical exeg-esis, the late 1980s paper captured a conjunc-tural moment of deep and wide significance,not as a simple transition story but as anaccount of ‘city making [understood as] bothproduct and condition of ongoing social pro-cesses of transformation in the most recentphase of capitalist development’ (Harvey,1989: 3, emphasis added). The analysis was aconjunctural one in an implicit, somewhatoblique manner, in that its empirical coordi-nates were post-Keynesian in a generic senseand transatlantic in a concretely geographicalsense (the paper referring to dozens of cities,including those represented at the Orleansconference, and some of their peers fromEurope and North America, a passing

metaphorical invocation of Papua NewGuinean cargo cults being the only gesturebeyond this space), just as the historical fram-ing recognised the real-time patterning of cir-cumstances that were ‘something to do withthe difficulties that have beset capitalisteconomies since the recession of 1973’(Harvey, 1989: 3). The emergent form of thisNorth Atlantic model of entrepreneurialurbanism had quite a lot to do, needless tosay, with the particular failings, limits andcontradictions of the patchwork of Fordisturbanisms that proceeded it, the rollout ofthese first-generation-neoliberal strategiesbeing coproduced with the retrenchment androllback of various Keynesian, welfarist, redis-tributive and social-statist structures (seeBrenner, 2004).

There were quasi-regulationist stylings inHarvey’s analysis, but that apparatus waskept at arm’s length in the exposition, whichinstead unfolded in a manner more macroe-conomic than macroinstitutional, and moretacitly late-Keynesian than overtly neoliberal(Harvey, 2016; Peck, 2014a). There wereallusions to hegemony too, although less asa signal of particular historical or ideologicalformations, more as a reference to the gener-alised play of capitalist relations, especiallythe disciplinary force of interurban competi-tion. This was a mode of dialectical inquirymostly executed above, across and amongst(rather than within, up from or through)concrete cases, one keyed into the sympto-matic responses and constrained manoeuvresof cities arrayed across a restructuring land-scape. A reading plainly shaped by Harvey’sown transatlantic movements during the1980s, it was positioned between an ascen-dant normalisation of Baltimore-like entre-preneurial strategies in the decade since theirlate-1970s debut and the suppression ofmunicipal socialism on the other side of theAtlantic (not least the moment of progres-sive closure signalled by the Thatcher gov-ernment’s abolition of the metropolitan

Peck 11

county tier of governance, followed by herthird general election victory in 1987). Thepaper was very much a situated product ofthis space-time, even as it drew exacting con-nections to deep-seated capitalist dynamics.

The analysis was predicated on actuallyexisting uneven development, in more than ametatheoretical or philosophical sense, inthat this was portrayed as an historical geo-graphy of the turbulent present; patchworkand ‘checkered’ in form and ‘pockmarkedwith as many failures as successes’ (Harvey,1989: 5), it was a landscape marked by ajumbled mosaic of leading- and bleeding-edge experiments, would-be models andreactive adaptations, and cross-cut by count-less relays, transfers, borrowings and imposi-tions. As Neil Brenner later summarised:

As of the early 1980s, experimental prototypesfor urban locational policies were being pio-neered by entrepreneurial local growth coali-tions within a relatively small vanguard ofEuropean city-regions. However, by the mid-1990s, the process of state rescaling . hadcontributed to the transnational generalizationof such competitiveness-oriented urban policyagendas. (Brenner, 2004: 253)

Harvey’s essay, contrary to some subsequentreadings, did not lay explicit claim to ‘global’application, and neither did it predict theimmanent stabilisation of a universal, post-transition operating model, since its conclu-sions were also to some degree conjunctu-rally framed. While this was never going tobe the kind of analysis that lingered on insti-tutional specificities or local particularities(cf. Harvey, 1987), there was nevertheless arecognition that the embryonic forms ofentrepreneurial urbanism in the sphere ofAtlantic Fordism were simultaneously rootedin, and reactions to, an inherited historicalgeography of state structures, scaled relationsand social settlements. These were reflected ina host of politically and institutionally contex-tualised efforts purposefully to separate ‘local

state activities from the welfare state and theKeynesian compromise’ (Harvey, 1989: 15).

Harvey insisted that the downstream out-comes of interurban competition were notrealised through some iron law of predeter-mination, but instead were regulated afterthe fact. The essay is awash with observa-tions concerning what would later becomeregularised features of ‘ordinary’ entrepre-neurial urbanism – early indications of theshape of a distinctively neoliberalised metro-politan landscape. First, the urban innova-tion process, just as it would spawn plenty ofnoise and ‘surface vigour’, was (already) gen-erating ‘leapfrogging’ dynamics, repetitiveemulation, ‘transmission effects’ and reactiveadaptation, the fallout of which would tendtowards competitively induced conditions ofconstrained institutional searching andexperimentality, yielding a narrowing ofdevelopment agendas, imaginaries and path-ways. Second, the serial underperformanceof mainstream policy measures, coupled witha tendency towards the overaccumulation of(ostensibly competitive) assets and infra-structures, was predicted to lead inexorablytowards saturation, devaluation and degra-dation. Third, the accompanying redevelop-ment scripts would (nevertheless) be ripe forpromotional campaigns and celebrations ofplace, mobilising an economy of signs predi-cated on self-propelled and locally willedrenewal, consonant with the paucity of fis-cally and organisationally feasible alterna-tives at the urban scale (under prevailingmacroregulatory conditions). And fourth,these structural circumstances were equatedwith a normalising interurban political econ-omy characterised, inter alia, by wideningsocial and spatial inequalities; by races to thebottom, concession bargaining and regula-tory undercutting in realms like taxation,matched with inflationary pressure on therate of corporate subsidisation; by mimicryand mimesis around nominally low-cost, off-the-shelf strategies, mostly producing little in


return; by Gresham’s law conditions inwhich ‘bad’ projects drive out (or under-mine) the ‘good’, marking an increasinglychallenging environment for the defense (letalone extension) of progressive local alterna-tives; and by the entrenched reproduction ofmarket-friendly and corporate-centric modesof governance, expressed in locally unevenways, across the panurban landscape.

The evidence is that the long-run opera-tion of these dynamics has produced a bar-ren terrain of mainstream urban-economicdevelopment programming animated (only?)on the surface by the churn of relativelyshallow ‘innovations’, by fast-policy incre-mentalism and regulatory undercutting andby competitive swarming around a limitedrepertoire of local strategies. This is associ-ated with an increasingly sparse matrix ofactually existing urban innovation, the ever-louder trumpeting of occasional successesmasking a climate of significantly dimin-ished results and expectations. Subsequently,the truck and trade in the artifacts, imagin-aries and routines of entrepreneurial urban-ism has come to (far) exceed the space ofAtlantic Fordism, reflecting as well as rein-forcing the ongoing debordering and dis-mantling of the Keynesian welfare state. Inanything but a simple pattern of global con-vergence or unilateral transfer, a meta-patchwork of conjuncturally particular butinterreferenced entrepreneurial urbanismshas been coevolving in Latin America, inIndia, in East Asia and elsewhere (see Halland Hubbard, 1998; Jessop and Sum, 2000;McCann, 2011; McFarlane, 2012; Murray,2011; Park et al., 2012; Portes and Roberts,2005). Some distance from the emergentconditions described by Harvey in the late1980s, this transnationalising terrain has allalong been characterised by multipolarity,by dialogic adaption rather than simple dif-fusion, by selective translation rather thanbald transfer and by complex interreferen-cing rather than crude imitation, even as the

dominant strategies have become ratherblandly ubiquitous in their cliched andrecurring form, if not always in inspirationor effect. There is evidence of a granular,contextual geography here, but this is not togainsay the specific and structuring condi-tions that were present, historically speak-ing, in the transatlantic incubator, or thelasting imprint of these first-generation man-oeuvres on subsequent adaptations.

While of course it can be usefully readfor this difference, the revealed spectrum ofdifference in mainstream urban economic-development strategies and stratagems seemshardly to be a wide or a rich one, oscillatingas it tends to do around the hegemonic axisof market-friendly adaptation, with both thecutting edges of experimentation and theraw edges of crisis-led adjustment abutting aprosaic realm of everyday reproduction.(Actually existing alternative models forurban-economic development, operating ona sustained and citywide scale, remain rare.)One of the more telling expressions of thecentral (and normalising) tendencies in thetransnational regime of entrepreneurial urban-ism is the competitive cities programme of theOECD, an organisation with a mission toarticulate, consolidate and corral the effectivelyextant consensus, rather than one of unilateral‘leadership’ (see Theodore and Peck, 2012).The OECD’s narration of the ‘soft centre’ ofthe current policy consensus, or what other-wise can be read as a de facto expression ofcompetitive-cities hegemony, will now (appar-ently sans irony) actually defer to Harvey’scritical formulation – thereby affirming its sub-sequent colonisation, in a plethora of plainlyexisting forms, of the urban-governance main-stream. Characterised by the OECD as a ‘pro-found change in policy approach’, relative toits Keynesian-welfarist predecessor, the age ofredoubled urban competition:

has been described as a change ‘from manage-rialism to entrepreneurialism’ (Harvey, 1989).

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The adoption of such a totally different atti-tude has been accelerated by the growing rec-ognition among urban policy planners that theonly way that cities can compete in an increas-ingly unpredictable and globalised economy isby pursuing pro-active strategies designed tosecure competitive advantages over their per-ceived competitors. [What] is commonlyreferred to as urban entrepreneurialism[involves] positive and strategic measuresbased on a pro-active approach, rather than aproblem-solving one, together with new insti-

tutional structures of urban governance.(OECD, 2007: 18–19)

In the elapsed time between what was a pres-cient Marxian critique and this after-the-factconfirmation of the pragmatic consensus,hegemony happened. Correspondingly,hegemony also happened in the time betweenHarvey’s original, real-time sketch of theentrepreneurial turn, under conditions of his-torical emergence, and the retelling of thistransformative moment, with the benefit ofmore than a decade and a half of hindsight,one that he later ‘rewrote [as an account ofurban politics] under neoliberalism’ (Harvey,2005: 158; 2016). In the spaces in between,however – where the making and remakingof hegemony quite literally takes place –there are more than details and distractions.These are the spaces (and scales) where con-junctural urbanism needs to do its work,where it must fill out and account for (ratherthan skip over) the intermediating circum-stances of positionality, situation and con-text, both in concrete institutional terms andin dialogue with midlevel concepts.

These are also the spaces (and scales), itshould be noted, where in a substantive senseneoliberalisation has cut its zigzagging path,not as an arena for the the unmediatedenactment of eternal logics of capitalist com-petition, or as a manifestation of the undi-luted will of dominant class interests, but astemporally evolving, politically contested,geographically unruly, always composite

and less-than-determinate process of regula-tory restructuring. Tendentially, these arethe viral dynamics by and through which thepockmarked outbreak of entrepreneurialurbanism has spread, in its extended andeveryday form, into the tenacious rash thatis neoliberalised urbanism, shaping the con-ditions of existence – and the ideological,institutional and ideational operating envir-onments – for ordinary neoliberal cities.Hence the need to read (this kind of) hege-mony not as a unilateral or top-down imposi-tion, but as a (moving) process of ideologicalframing, institutional restructuring, politicalstruggle and social adaptation. Rather thanfocusing on how neoliberalism ‘went global’,this calls attention to the diverse and combi-natorial ways in which, over and over again,it ‘goes local’, subsequently to shape a recur-sive field of regulatory norms and dynamics(cf. Ban, 2016; Peck and Theodore, 2012).This speaks, as well, to the diverse ways inwhich neoliberal rationalities and routinesare reproduced through cumulative but con-tradictory forms of multisite and multiscalarrestructuring, as shape-shifting and site-shifting phenomena, realised across as well aswithin particular cities.

Placing hegemony

Renarrating the story of urban entrepre-neurialism in the theory-language of neoli-beralisation consequently amounts to morethan a presentational update or semanticmakeover. Rather, it speaks to the shiftingplace of cities in the conjunctural formationthat is neoliberalism, the acquired hegemo-nic status of which should not be confusedwith a state of vulgar-structuralist totalisa-tion (where difference is obliterated, contra-dictions are managed and resistance isfutile), but which instead represents an his-torical and geographical process always inthe making, always contested, always fis-sured, always incomplete and yet legiblystructured and patterned. Because


neoliberalism denotes a utopian if alwaysfrustrated project of market-cum-corporaterule, and (therefore) not an end-state but anadaptive paradigm of restructuring, it can-not describe an exhaustive social reality,even if it may sometimes look that way in itssaturated and everyday expressions. ‘It is aprocess, not a state of being’, Stuart Hallonce remarked, with reference to the vexingtask of accounting for the amorphous andalways morphing character of neoliberalhegemony in its after-Thatcherite form:

Hegemony has constantly to be ‘worked on’,maintained, renewed and revised. Excludedsocial forces, whose consent has not been won,whose interests have not been taken intoaccount, form the basis of counter-movements,resistance, alternative strategies and visions .and the struggle over a hegemonic systemstarts anew. They constitute what RaymondWilliams called ‘the emergent’—and the reasonwhy history is never closed but maintains anopen horizon towards the future . Neo-liber-alism is in crisis. But it keeps driving on.However, in ambition, depth, degree of breakwith the past, variety of sites being colonized,impact on common sense and everyday beha-viour, restructuring of the social architecture,neo-liberalism does constitute a hegemonicproject. (Hall, 2011: 727–728)3

So hegemony is not a byword for completestasis or incipient homogenisation, and nei-ther is it an antonym for diversity or change.It refers to the ongoing (re)construction ofwhat Raymond Williams called ‘normalreality’ or commonsense, indeed to the ‘gov-ernance of normalisation’ itself, which isnever a matter of the complete suppressionof difference or resistance but which insteadconcerns the positioning (and predisposition)of disputation and contestation on movingand yet structured terrains of struggle, whereideas and dispositions range from the natur-alised and (seemingly) inevitable to the unvi-able and barely even thinkable (see Apple,1990; Rojek, 2003). Likewise, working with

hegemony, analytically, cannot be a matterof some once-and-for-all recognition of acapital-G global formation, to which every-thing to be accounted for can then be neatlyand comprehensively subordinated; neither isit about the heavy handed use of blunt toolsof interpretation to hammer this case or thatsituation into a fixed categorical framework.Instead, conjunctural approaches to (theongoing production of) hegemony shouldembrace, inter alia, the iterative explora-tion of fields of construction-consolidationand contestation-dissolution; the relationalinvestigation of frontal projects and counter-projects; and the (always provisional) identi-fication of emergent patterns, rules of thegame and prevailing dispositions, alongwith consideration of their dynamics ofreproduction, their moments of failure andcrisis, their parameters and porosities andtheir contradictions and limits.

How might this inform conjunctural anal-yses of the urban? Well, a generous readingof the (also radically incomplete) project ofregulationist urbanism might be constructedin something like these terms. Guided inmore or less explicit ways by Harvey’s politi-cal economy of post-Keynesian urban devel-opment, animated to varying degrees byregulation-theoretic problematics4 and con-ditioned by an abiding scepticism of the1990s tropes of global market integrationand bootstrapping urban ‘leadership’, it wasthis line of work that propagated the analy-tic frame later known as neoliberal urbanism(see Brenner and Theodore, 2002; Jonas andWilson, 1997; Lauria, 1996; MacLeod,1997).5 Echoing the North Atlantic prov-inces of Harvey’s original analysis of urbanentrepreneurialism, much of this work waspredicated on a critical reading of the spatialand scalar dynamics of the late-Keynesianmoment.6 Subsequently, the projects of reg-ulationist urbanism (sprawling, exploratoryand uncoordinated as they have been) havefor the most part been concerned with

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varieties of form analysis, which in principlecan be understood to extend across at leastthree domains or moments. First, these anal-yses typically proceed from the recognition,at least implicitly, of the historical geogra-phy of relatively durable socioinstitutionalformations and their path-dependent lega-cies, across all scales of the urban. (Even ifanalyses are not themselves explicitly histori-cal in reach or character, they will tend tooperate with this ‘background’ understand-ing.) Second, regulationist analyses tend tobe especially sensitive to the unfolding tem-poralities and spatialities of regulatory trans-formation, mapping the always emergent or‘frontal’ features of projects, programmesand patterned interventions across urbanworlds and systems. (The focus here is onbreaking waves of regulatory change, some-times proactively prosecuted, sometimes cri-sis induced and often bitterly contested.)And third, these analyses take account,again at least implicitly, of the terraformingdynamics of uneven spatial development,relationality and variegation, with horizonsthat are both interurban and multiscalar.(The scope of these studies generally exceedsthat of the immediately local, reaching outto at least the meso scale, and often referen-cing variegated landscapes and topographiesof restructuring that extend beyond the citylimits.)7

This said, the potential of regulationisturban studies has only been partially rea-lised. In practice, it is probably fair to saythat the second of these analytical domains– the moving urban-regulatory front – hasbeen afforded the most attention, althoughrarely (if ever) in isolation. This emphasis onrolling, roiling and essentially frontal pro-cesses of neoliberalisation has highlightedthe perpetually (re)constructed and context-contingent character of actually existing pro-grammes of market rule (which cannot bereduced to a fixed policy repertoire, evolvingas they do through complex dynamics of

experimentation, failure, mimesis and muta-tion). In principle, ‘noisy’ moments of con-testation and the much quieter creep ofconsolidation ought both to be within theambit of such critical, relational modes ofanalysis, although in practice the roles ofactive resistance on the one hand and incre-mental normalisation on the other have notalways been accentuated (no doubt for ahost of interpretative and case-specific rea-sons). Contestation and consolidation canbe seen as different moments in the ongoingreproduction of neoliberal hegemony, withone demarcating the ‘visibly’ politicisedflank of opposition and resistance, the otherthe shadow lands and slippery slopes ofamelioration, adaptive implementation andaccommodation.

Across the domain of entrepreneurialurbanism, in the wake of Harvey’s real-timereading of the ‘first front’ of emergent (butultimately transformative) change, the lon-ger story certainly seems to have been one ofconsolidation (even if this has only beenrevealed in a piecemeal and incremental,case-by-case manner), the lowest commondenominators of mainstream urban-economic development strategies havingbeen successively lowered, in the processlargely eclipsing – at least so far – the trac-tion and scope of actually existing alterna-tive models (both reformist and moreradical). A telling measure of neoliberalhegemony in the urban realm is the degradedstate of municipal economic programming(and imaginaries), where a battery of weakpolicy tools is now deployed in a predomi-nantly low-expectations environment, themainstream consensus managing to appearboth saturated and washed out at the sametime. The hyping of successive wavesof weak-tea interventions – from clusterinitiatives to casino concessions, from con-sumption festivals and creativity districts –typically runs far ahead of their modestresults (rarely subject to rigorous evaluation,


perhaps not surprisingly), while the fleetingachievements of innovators and first moversmay just do enough to inspire emulation,but not nearly enough to overturn the effectsof diminished local capacities and the persis-tent drag of interurban competition. (In theprocess, those weak policy tools are furtherblunted, through promiscuous overuse.) Thegeneralised if uneven historical retreat, acrosssenior tiers of government in many countries,from strategic planning and redistributivespending has exacerbated these conditions,which are panurban in scope if locallyuneven in effect, marrying as they do pro-gramme rollbacks, local responsibilisation,un(der)funded mandates and devolutionwith risk displacement and municipal-stateincapacitation. In turn, this has created a reg-ulatory vacuum into which a small army ofconsultants, solutions peddlers and gurushave stepped with their seductive (re)formula-tions, recycled projects and fast-policy fixes. Inthis context, subsidising and eventising urbaninvestment flows has led, quite predictably andindeed as predicted, to a widespread conditionof low-returns equilibrium, policy recyclingand serial underperformance.

Going-through-the-motions cultures ofshallow entrepreneurialism are consequentlycoproduced with a symptomatic speedup inthe marketing-enabled trade in would-besolutions. (That these are routinely pro-moted as authentic, innovative, homegrownand indeed creative must register as some-thing between garden-variety irony andOrwell-strength doublespeak.) This degradedterrain of urban innovation and experimen-tation is not entirely flat, of course; closeobservers will properly point to certain grid-lines, gradations and geographies, but the‘weighing’ of conjunctural, contextual andcontingent effects can only be an interpreta-tive judgment call, since there will always behotspots and hyped-up models, and noshortage of a few abject failures, with a largeswathe of pragmatic muddling along in

between. In principle then, the horizon of aconjunctural analysis ought to exceed seaso-nal observations of the (leafier) trees, totake into account the degraded (or other-wise) state of the forest as a whole. Callingattention to such species-wide conditions,patterns and regularities is not the same assaying that these are tendentially uniform,universal or unchanging. In the case ofurban entrepreneurialism, conditions of ‘sur-face vigour’ are still very much in evidence(Harvey, 1989; Peck, 2014a), the ongoingaccentuation of which is apparently neces-sary for legitimation purposes. But how toaccount for underlying conditions andrepeating patterns in the face of continuingchurn and experimentation? Can it beenough to characterise this as business-as-usual neoliberalism urbanism, in a blanketsense?

These volatile, normalising, but perhapsabove all deadeningly familiar conditionsgive rise to questions – perennial ones forcritical urban studies – of appropriate modesof analysis and the selection and positioningof cases, not least in relation to (evolving)theoretical formulations and conceptual fra-meworks. Here it is necessary to confrontthe concern that in ‘a large part of the urbanstudies world, neoliberalism has beenreferred to as a great deus ex machina with-out much qualification’ (Le Gales, 2016:155). One strategy, and the one favoured byLe Gales, is that of complexity reduction:eschewing the notion of hegemony andinstead invoking a sharper, less abstract andmore specific conception of neoliberalism(for instance, as a definitive policy pro-gramme), in conjunction with the analysis ofconcrete cases that are relatively congruentwith this more particularised or perhaps‘essential’ form. This would effectivelydomesticate neoliberalism, in its (most)familiar Anglo-American guise, as an endo-genous mode of Washington-consensusgovernance. It would also implicitly invoke

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a (supposedly) ‘pure’ or ‘original’ form ofneoliberalism against which (ostensibly) less-neoliberal or non-neoliberal others would becontrasted. Yet to reduce neoliberalism to asingle (domesticated) form, to effectively‘centralise’ it, would be to radically underes-timate the constitutive relations across its(many) hybrid and mongrel forms, familyresemblances being in this sense familyresemblances of both near and far relations.Similarly, to reduce it to a relatively fixedpolicy paradigm is to underestimate theextent to which rotational churn and experi-mental adaptation, often prompted by ende-mic policy failure, are themselves necessaryfeatures of ongoing processes of neoliberali-sation (in contrast to the static policyregimes conventionally associated with neo-liberalism). A conjunctural strategy wouldtherefore recognise that the reproduction ofneoliberal hegemony is transnational andmultiscalar in scope, if far from uniform inorigin or effect, and that its emergent capaci-ties, tendencies and dynamics polycentricallyexceed the sum of the local (and moving)parts, such that the challenge is to theorisewith and across difference, rather than toreduce or foreclose it. This entails movingup and down levels of abstraction, as well as(in a relational sense) along constitutivelyconnecting chains and between actuallyexisting hybrids.

Once again, this resonates with theapproach developed by Stuart Hall, whichheld tenaciously to the ‘rascal concept’ andawkward abstraction that is neoliberalism,wrestling with its ‘complex unity’, whilenever resorting to its complacent use or, forthat matter, to its ham-fisted ‘insert[ion] intothe here and now’ (Grossberg, 1996: 148:Peck et al., 2010). Instead, an open-endedmethod of theorisation would work backand forth between concrete instances, emer-gent patterns, relational connections andabstract formulations, acknowledging andrefining midlevel concepts and provisional

categories along the way, while rigorouslyattending to ‘context and complexity, all theway down’ (Grossberg, in Roman, 2015:192). Hall struggled with the unloved con-cept of neoliberalism for decades, nevermaking an interpretive peace with it, neverresolving the challenging issues around itsdefinitional closure and changing prove-nance, but never settling on an acceptablesubstitute either. In his work on Thatcherismand its extended aftermath, for example, theconjunctural arc of neoliberalisation as anhistorical process was called upon explicitlyto span the long-run assault on the institu-tions of the postwar (welfare) settlement inits various guises (from monetarism throughBlairite accommodations to subsequentrounds of crisis-driven austerity) and thesubsequent proliferation of new governingprojects, cultures and rationales forged inthe context of deepening financialisation andglobalisation: this messily constructed andmaintained ‘market-forces conjuncture’could be read as a ‘triumph of neo-liberal-ism’, he observed; still ‘an inadequate word,but . the only one we have for characteris-ing what defines the whole arc’ (Hall andMassey, 2010: 66). Crucially, this is an arcthat reaches across (while calling into ques-tion the relations between) moments of socialrollback and institutional rollout, across roilingcrises and phases of incremental consolidation,and across different local formations articulatedin complex connection – one that both invokesand problematises an unruly whole greater thanthe sum of the many articulated parts, a combi-natorial phenomenon that is never photographi-cally replicated in any of those parts.

Rather than some fully prefabricated,fixed and closed explanatory signifier, this iswhat neoliberalisation really ought to index.Furthermore, rather than an article of expla-natory faith, or an all-purpose source of ulti-mate causation, it should designate aheterogeneous terrain for critical investiga-tion, where theory claims are both revisable


and rejectable. A ‘whole arc’ analytical hori-zon necessitates more than periodisation,but empirically informed theorisation acrossthe creative and destructive moments ofwhat is evidently an extended and distendedprocess, across its ebbs and flows and acrosscycles of resistance and slopes of normalisa-tion. Invoking neoliberalism at the city scaleduly presupposes some kind of take on thesemore-than-urban dynamics. Consequently, aconjunctural-urban analysis must problema-tise – in an ongoing and reflexive manner –the positioning of cases, sites and situationson the wider landscape of transformativechange (rather than ring-fencing processesspatially, or drawing lateral contrasts basedon some prior assumption of presence/absence, heartland/hinterland or domi-nance/exception). Methodologically, thismeans that neoliberal urbanism has to bediagnosed and documented across (urban)cases as well as within them. It follows thatit cannot be some one-size-fits-all explana-tory ‘shell’, superimposed upon or wrappedaround each and every case, like some criti-cal version of Thomas Friedman’s (2000)‘golden straitjacket’, but ought instead todefine a space for midlevel theorisation indialogue with case-specific and cross-caseanalyses. Here, abstraction and contextuali-sation would be simultaneous practices.Context, in this sense, represents more thanthe immediate background scenery to theplay of local events, and also more than ajumbo-scale atmospheric metageography,some distant and impervious context of thatcontext; it is about finding and accountingfor contextual effects ‘all the way down’, aswell as ‘all the way across’ unevenly devel-oped terrains.

Austerity central?

If the analysis of neoliberalism is to amountto more than a crude act of enrolling eachand every case into some steamroller

framework of pseudo-hegemonic singularity,if there is indeed scope to theorise with andacross difference, then a premium will beplaced on those midlevel concepts and med-iating formulations that facilitate non-reductionist readings of the complex present.From an analytical perspective this can onlybe, by definition, a work in progress; it rep-resents an ongoing attempt to capture (atleast provisionally) the moving articulationsbetween discursive fixes, operating environ-ments, experimental strategies, normalisingpractices, ambient conditions and so forth –in a sense providing a bridge, or hinge,between case-specific circumstances andmore abstract and conjuncturally positionedtheory claims. The working concept of ‘aus-terity urbanism’ emerged in just such a con-text, as an exploration of the sharedcondition of fiscal stress across a range ofcities in the wake of the Wall Street crash of2008. The crash itself had been the occasionof a short-lived (although still palpably lin-gering) legitimation crisis, which was inter-national in scope and coupled with extensivefinancial dislocation, and which in parts ofEurope and North America quicklymorphed into a renewed offensive againstthe social state, its financing circuits, its ser-vices, its institutional foundations, its work-forces (see Blyth, 2013; Fraser, 2015; Peck,2013a). In Europe, the ascendancy of aproactive politics of austerity was especiallyrapid, and there were strong – if rather moretacit – echoes of similar conditions acrossthe Atlantic.8 But could the urban fallout be‘read off’ from these macropolitical condi-tions? Or was there action across the sitesand scales of the urban that amounted tomore than a subsidiary issue or side story?

Developed on the hoof, early sketches ofausterity urbanism did not take the form ofgeneralisations from supposedly ‘epicentral’or paradigmatic cases. Instead, austerityurbanism emerged as a provisional, midlevelformulation, positioned between more

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abstract accounts of post-crisis neoliberalisa-tion, patterned political dynamics and awide array of cases. In the United States, forexample, while the cities seemed to be thesites were austerity measures were conspicu-ously ‘biting’, this was clearly far from uni-formly the case. From the outset, statepolitics were clearly making a significant dif-ference – whether in the form of fightspicked with the public-sector unions inWisconsin, moves to drive through struc-tural changes to pension entitlements andrevenue-sharing arrangements in California,the extension and toughening of emergency-management powers in Michigan or the con-tinued working out of the long-run effectsof TABOR (taxpayers bill of rights) amend-ments in Colorado, not to mention the evol-ving relays between the state capitals – whileat the urban scale there were marked differ-ences in both the manifestations and themanagement of austerity between cities likeChicago, San Jose, New York, ColoradoSprings, Detroit, Stockton, San Diego,Benton Harbor and Sandy Springs (seePeck, 2012, 2014b). Never understood as (orreduced to) a blanket condition, austerityurbanism offered a way to explore, simulta-neously, particular experiences and pat-terned responses to the unfolding financialcrisis. And it was ‘urban’ in a multiscalarsense as well, given the relational connec-tions evident in the US context between dif-ferentiated experiences at the local level,political and fiscal manoeuvring in the statecapitals and the simultaneous effects of fed-eral budget cuts together with temporaryoutlays of stimulus funds.

From early on, too, investigations of aus-terity urbanism involved transatlantic com-parisons and connections. As such, theworking notion of austerity urbanism calledattention to a cluster of purposeful (andmore-than-local) renarrations of what beganas a banking crisis into a metastasising crisisof and for the social state, and the selective

deployment of new technologies of devolvedfinancial discipline in this context – whichwas not to suppress important differencesbetween European and North Americanexperiences of austerity, but to situate them,and theorise through and across these differ-ences (see Davidson and Ward, forthcom-ing; Donald et al., 2014; Kitson et al., 2011;Peck, 2012, 2014b; Schonig and Schipper,2016; Tabb, 2014; Thompson, 2012).Cumulatively, these investigations haveexplored the embedded power relations ofausterity programmes (which not only tooka characteristically hierarchical form, but insome cases amounted to blatantly top-downimpositions) and the variegated geographiesof austerity measures and resistance politicsat the city scale, in ways that have beenmutually referential and informing withoutbeing derivative or reductive. As an enablingbut plastic midlevel formulation, austerityurbanism helped to open up and shape aconceptual space to examine these complexand iterative connections, in effect acrosscontours of political, institutional and spa-tial difference, working between explicitlynamed and outwardly politicised construc-tions of austerity politics in Europe and theirsimultaneously more implicit but institutio-nalised manifestations in the United States(austerity in all but name).

This being said, real-time and revisableformulations like austerity urbanism mustbe interrogated in the context of their own(historical and geographical) conditions ofexistence. If they are claimed to belong tothe (shifting) repertoire of neoliberal modesof governance, then they must be rigorouslylocated in such terms. While there is nothingespecially new in the selective and cyclicalpurging of the social state, expressly neolib-eral manifestations of austerity have beenhistorically specific, being positioned afterand against an embedded array of antitheti-cal state and social forms, while no tworounds of neoliberal purging have been


identical: ‘cutting’ Keynesian-welfarist pro-grammes in the early 1980s, for example,was qualitatively different to the episodes offiscal restraint and retrenchment that wouldlater follow, while the urban politics of aus-terity have been worked out in a host of con-textually specific ways, where they havebeen shown to be contingent upon the fiscaloperating frameworks of national and sub-national states, circulating narratives ofsocial culpability and state failure, local eco-nomic conditions, the geographies of elec-toral control and social-movementmobilisation and more (see Blyth, 2013;Lobao and Adua, 2011; Peck, 2013a). Theextent to which there is analytical (and polit-ical) value in encoding these variousmoments of crisis, crisis management andcontested consolidation with reference to thepatched-together political-economic ‘unset-tlement’ that is neoliberalism, or intermedi-ate concepts like austerity urbanism, have toremain open questions – not means for fore-closing the answer. But in the absence ofmore fitting formulations, these frameworksproblematise conjunctural fields that arecrosscut by ‘complex unities’, in Hall’sterms,9 courtesy of a web of organic connec-tions, patterned practices, reused rationales,mutual referencing, constrained adaptationsand so on. They are (deliberately) deployed,in other words, across heterogenous andvariegated fields.

The phenomenon of austerity urbanismmust also be positioned in relation to the‘whole arc’ of neoliberal transformation.The initial ascendancy of entrepreneurialurbanism was substantially predicated on(as well as framed within) the infrastruc-tural, institutional and ideological legaciesof Keynesian welfarism (see Kirkpatrick andSmith, 2011). This was the (inherited) con-text in which the first generation of post-Keynesian growth elites did their work, inparallel with the earliest rounds of strategi-cally targeted ‘cuts’. Subsequently, and after

decades of competitive disciplining, infra-structural degradation, fiscal leeching andmunicipal privatisation, the panurban ter-rain has been not only neoliberalised butfinancialised as well, calling for the historici-sation and reconceptualisation of the notionof entrepreneurial urbanism itself. In hismonumental analysis of the longue duree ofcapitalist development, Braudel (1992: 246)memorably referred to moments of financia-lisation as ‘signs of autumn’. In a more spe-cific sense, the post-Keynesian variety ofentrepreneurial urbanism might now beencountering autumnal conditions of its own,in the shape of a sustained intensification ofausterity pressures, new applications of tech-nocratic management and systemic formsof bondholder governance. Second- andthird-generation, or late-entrepreneurial,urban strategies are now being pursued inthe context of slow(er), more unequal anduneven growth, elusive and diminishingreturns to conventional policy measuresand growing evidence of strategic exhaus-tion. This is a context, moreover, increas-ingly conditioned by a deeply financialisedoperating environment, enveloping condi-tions variously market by competitivelogics and rationalities ‘ingested’ by states,by the institutionalisation of bond-marketinterests, by a host of reengineered fiscalpressures and incentives, by new technolo-gies of credit (and risk) assessment, creativeaccounting and debt management and soforth (see Kirkpatrick and Smith, 2011;Lake, 2015; Peck and Whiteside, 2016;Weber, 2010). While analytical (and politi-cal) attention was properly focused, duringthe late 20th century moment of entrepre-neurial urbanism, on the realm of (local)elite governance and regime dynamics,urban growth machines themselves do notappear to be anything like the locus of deci-sive, strategic action that they once were.Instead, in circumstances that are especiallypronounced in the United States but which

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do not seem to be restricted to this context,the nexus of regulatory stress and (re)inven-tion seems to have been shifting, quite decisi-vely, in the direction of the ‘hidden abodes’of financialisation, bond-market governanceand the state/finance nexus.

This process of financial deepening, in itsextended, stressed and credit-dependentform, need not be read as some clearlydemarcated ‘next stage’, but instead can beseen as an intensification of longstandingtendencies in the marketisation of interurbanrelations, in the evolution of financial tech-niques and technologies, in devolution as adisciplinary and incentivising project and inpost-Keynesian state restructuring (seeLeitner, 1990; Peck and Whiteside, 2016).Nevertheless, the more recent manifestationsof financialisation are growing out of thedegraded soil of late-entrepreneurialism.Conjunctural analyses must be sensitive tosuch processes of historical evolution andtransformation, to the consolidation anddissolution of their emergent forms and alsoto their shifting and variably embedded geo-graphies. Working (all the way) up anddown, analytically speaking, means navigat-ing through mediating institutional andpolitical-economic conditions often beyondthe scale of the city per se. Conjuncturalanalyses really only gain traction amongstsuch specificities, where they seek to deline-ate patterned conditions and recurrent con-figurations amid the (inevitable) churn andcomplexity of contingent circumstances.

Consider some of the constitutive particu-larities of the American case (again, quacase, not universal model). Once a safehaven, if not something of a backwater, thenation’s municipal bond market has beenregistering exponential growth since the1970s, while extending its tentacles deep intothe domains of municipal management andurban governance, perhaps most tangiblythrough practices like credit rating (seeHackworth, 2007). In parallel with (and

coproduced with) this expansion and privati-sation of municipal credit markets, the tigh-tening grip of ‘fiscal federalism’ (theregulatory doctrine that has it that jurisdic-tions should operate within their ownmeans, minimising intergovernmental trans-fers) has normalised conditions of devolvedbudgetary discipline and lean administra-tion, unevenly realised of course (Peck,2014b). These are but some of the facets ofwhat amounts to a web of financialisedstructures, practices, narratives, techniquesand procedures that has progressively colo-nised the (inter)urban system. Summarisingthese conditions, some of the proximate fea-tures and nascent dynamics of the Americanmodel of financialised urban governance areillustrated in Table 1, with the nontrivialcaveat that this is but one variety of the spe-cies. Financialising disciplines and dynamicsmay be relatively generalised, not leastacross the territories impacted by the turn toausterity urbanism, but they clearly do notexhibit a singular form ‘all the way down’.Not least, they are quite systematically con-tingent on inherited structures of public andprivate finance, on the configuration of legaland constitutional regimes and on the pat-terning of federal and central-local relations.Furthermore, ‘within’ the American case,marked differences are evident from city tocity (for instance, between those municipali-ties at the cusp of insolvency, countless placesmanaging the everyday consequences of reve-nue reductions and budgetary stress and thebastions of libertarian local governmentwhere lean administration has long been theoperating model), from state to state (forinstance, in accordance with the geographiesof governmental indebtedness and credit-worthiness, as well as those of partisan poli-tics) and with the distributive consequences ofthe ceaseless battle over spending, taxationand programming at the federal level.

Joseph Schumpeter (1918: 100) oncedescribed public budgets as ‘the skeleton of


Table 1. Late-entrepreneurial urbanism as financialised urban governance, US-style.

Entrepreneurial exhaustion Diminishing returns to entrepreneurial initiatives, in wake ofcompetitive crowding, market saturation and (cost) constrainedinnovation; accelerating churn of repackaged policy measures in thecontext of serial underperformance; persistent competitive insecurity;increased rates of subsidisation with negative-sum outcomes; migrationtowards low cost/high visibility and symbolic interventions

Slow growth Geographically uneven, fragile and volatile economic growth; uneveninflation/deflation of residential and commercial property markets (andattendant tax revenues); continuing deindustrialisation coupled withselective growth in services, particularly ‘eds and meds’; deepeninginfrastructure deficits and investment shortfalls

Lean government Systemic orientation to ‘smaller’ government, coupling restrained publicfinancing and programming with privatised and outsourced modelsservice delivery; ideological attacks on public-sector values, institutionsand workforces; cultivation of tax aversion; deunionisation of localpublic sector

Fiscal federalism Predisposition to ‘downward’ devolution, against logics of (progressive)sociospatial redistribution; local jurisdictions must stand on their ownand live within their means, decoupled from Keynesian transfers andredistributive circuits; heightened reliance on local tax base (propertytaxes; fees and charges)

Austerity urbanism Existential conditions of budgetary restraint, cutbacks andrationalisation; scalar dumping of risk and responsibility; narratives oflocal- and social-state culpability-cum-failure; increased cyclicality inbudgets and revenue flows, compounded by rollback ofintergovernmental transfers and dismantling of automatic stabilisers;balkanisation of financially stressed cities, coupled with fiscal gating ofsuburbs, with marked racial and class correlates

Bondholder value Wall Street discipline; increased reliance on municipal bond market;amplified gatekeeping, surveillance and monitoring roles of credit-ratingagencies, governing borrowing costs, investor assessments and accessto finance; turn towards creative accounting, risk management andfinancial engineering; deeply financialised operating environments

Debt machinery ‘Debt-machine’ disciplines and dynamics eclipse those of growth-machine strategies; ascendancy of financial actors and institutions overthose of (local) growth elites; melding of technocratic and financialmodes of governance; monetisation and marketisation of assets,infrastructure and revenue streams

Technocratic rule Empowerment of technocratic cadres, including emergency managers,restructuring specialists and financial operatives; management by auditand budgetary fiat; normalisation of fiscal stress; crisis management

Municipal Calvinism Pious and unforgiving narratives justifying that cities must expect to‘reap what they sow’; moralising responsibilisation of local financial self-sufficiency; scapegoating of ‘dependency’ and local political dysfunction,often racially coded; delegitimising redistribution and transfers as‘bailouts’

Metropolitan Caesarism Selective utilisation (from above/outside) of state takeovers of municipalaffairs; development and rationalisation of new measures for temporary‘democratic dissolution’ at the local scale; targeting of poor andminority-majority cities; amplified by partisan differences

Peck 23

the state stripped of all misleading ideolo-gies’. By the same token, the fiscal geogra-phies of the state can perhaps be used asmapping technologies of a sort, and a wayto place localised fiscal crises in relation tothe wider topologies of financial and institu-tional transformation, although in practicethis means wading through a swamp of mis-leading ideologies. As a sketch of currentconditions in the United States, Table 1describes a pattern in which fiscal stress hasbeen purposefully localised and urbanisedthrough a host of discursive framings, insti-tutional reforms and political manoeuvres.Notable here, to highlight some of thesechanging circumstances, have been thecumulative effects of the lean restructuringand ongoing rationalisation of municipalservices and delivery systems; an increasedreliance on local property markets andattendant tax revenues; the privatisation ofmunicipal borrowing and the concomitantascendancy of bondholder-value modes ofsurveillance, risk assessment and debt pric-ing; the imposition of hands-on methods oftechnocratic governance as well as arm’slength methods of financialised control anddiscipline; and the intensification of moralis-ing, scapegoating and Calvinistic narrativesthat seek to justify the adoption of invasivemeasures on the grounds that failing citieshave forfeited the right to self-governance(due to past sins like corruption and profli-gacy) and are now getting what they deserve.At the sharp end of these restructuring pro-cesses, municipal bankruptcies (statisticallyrare occurrences that they continue to be)represent crude indicators of some of themost fiscally stressed hotspots in the urbansystem, but their incidence is also a functionof the vagaries of federal regulation (whichmakes court-administered debt restructuringavailable only as a painful last resort),mediated through a labyrinth of state laws,constitutions, institutions and political rela-tions. A much wider net is cast by the web of

emergency management, fiscal supervision andstate takeover provisions, many of which havebeen extended and augmented since the crashof 2008. These and other forms of geographi-cally variegated reregulation have been integralto the ways in which the financial crisis hasmetastasised into a social crisis and (local)state crisis, the shape-shifting character ofneoliberalisation finding an echo in the site-shifting dynamics of transformative restructur-ing at the urban scale, as the ‘crisis shifts fromsite to site, bursting out here and there accord-ing to the flashpoint du jour’ (Fraser, 2015:187; Peck, 2012; Thompson, 2012).

As legal scholar Michelle Wilde Andersonhas argued, the ‘clear message’ of the expand-ing family of emergency-governance provi-sions is that fiscal (in)solvency is increasinglyconstrued as a function of city-level (mis)-management, thereby legitimating techno-cratic interventions, often by way of a statetakeover of municipal operations and the sus-pension or ‘dissolution’ of local democraticarrangements. In this respect, emergency-management laws, coupled with the persistentthreat (and occasional use) of court-administered restructuring under the bank-ruptcy code, speak to the construction of anew regulatory order and moral economyaround post-2008 adaptations of fiscal feder-alism. Under this regime, financial control isbeing centralised (and scaled up), as many ofthe costs and risks associated with socioeco-nomic adjustment are being devolved (andscaled down). Correspondingly, state-cityrelations have become a significant arena ofstruggle, with potentially far-reaching conse-quences for local democracy and for the con-ditions of policymaking existence for cities.As Anderson explains:

Centralization of power by the state on theseterms does not ameliorate structural causes offinancial distress, like concentrated poverty,the loss of middle-class jobs across a region,or local borders that fragment a single metro-politan area into socioeconomically segregated


cities. Indeed, local democratic dissolutionmay only exacerbate fiscal malaise over thelonger term by facilitating changes (like theabrupt sale of public assets) that producequick returns at the cost of permanent sustain-ability. Along the way, radical state takeoverscan enflame antagonism between state andlocal actors, further disempower a beleagueredlocal electorate, and dramatically underminethe transparency and accountability of localgovernance. (Anderson, 2012: 582)

In the last decade of financial intensification,increasingly widespread but still localisedconditions of urban fiscal stress haveprompted the improvised (re)formulation ofthe repertoire of techniques for urban crisismanagement, enacted by state-level authori-ties. These have been realised and rationa-lised in no small part through theresuscitation and repurposing of accusatorynarratives of local ‘dependency’, corruptpolitical leadership and dysfunctionalmunicipal management, heavily freightedwith class and racial connotations (since somany of the sites targeted for interventionare poor, ‘majority minority’ cities), allied toever-more baroque justifications for emer-gency rule, postdemocratic governance,technocratic management and state take-overs. These have a strong partisan streaktoo, since they frequently involve the actionsof Republican-controlled states againstDemocratically controlled cities.

New rubrics and rationales for top-downintervention – often on the part of nominallyanti-interventionist state administrations,ostensibly committed to the axioms of smallgovernment and free markets – are nowbeing concocted, trialled and imposed. Someconservative legal theorists will now ventureas far as Ancient Rome in their search forjustificatory narratives. It is in this contextthat an array of supposed ‘advantages ofdictatorship’ are now being publicly contem-plated, especially in cases where long-run fis-cal insolvency has led to the ‘incapacit[ation]

of the normal institutional structures of[local] government’, the barrage of legiti-mately ‘invasive’ measures against failedmunicipalities being now held to include ‘theimposition of . dictatorial takeover boardsthat displace democratically elected localofficials’ (Gillette, 2014: 1375, 1385). Inemergency conditions, apparently, theremay be an argument for suspending not onlythe machinery of electoral democracy inselected cities, but also for placing in abeyancethe classically neoliberal ‘principles’ of staterestraint and local autonomy – all in the inter-est of fiscal and political expedience. Toeinghis way along this tortuous path, StephenEide of the Manhattan Institute, one of themost prominent of the conservative thinktanks, is now making the case for the selectivedeployment of ‘Caesarist’ measures in situa-tions of municipal insolvency. Where citiesare adjudged to have failed in ‘us[ing] theirindependence wisely’, state governors are nowurged to step in, ‘Caesar-like, earlier and morevigorously’ than ever before (Eide, 2016: 75).More than a few have been heeding the call.New varieties of structural adjustment arebeing improvised in this conjunctural context.

Conclusion: Open horizons .

In the first installment of a two-part explora-tion of contemporary transformations inmetropolitan governance, a case has beenmade in this article for the development of‘conjunctural’ approaches to urban analysis.These seek explicitly to problematise thepolitical-economic positionality of cities,both in (inter)scalar terms and on movinglandscapes of regulatory transformation.Beyond this, they are also attentive to thedialogic interplay between situated case stud-ies, reflexively defined midlevel concepts andrevisable theory claims. Taking as its pointof departure the current financial and politi-cal crisis in Atlantic City, the New Jerseycasino capital, this first part of the article has

Peck 25

sought to historicise the concept of the entre-preneurial city, locating this in the context ofthe deepening hegemony of neoliberal rule,the emergence of austerity urbanism and theintensification of financialised restructuring.Pursuant to a reading of hegemony as thegovernance of normalisation – and not assome synonym for unilateral domination,plenary coherence or incipient uniformity –the article has consciously revisited somefamiliar territory in order to navigate a pathbetween an emergent moment of immedi-ately post-Keynesian entrepreneurial urban-ism and successive waves of neoliberalisationand financialisation, suggesting that today’scrisis-prone conditions of financialised urbangovernance can be understood as a distinc-tively late-entrepreneurial conjuncture.

These, it should be underscored, are nei-ther conceived nor offered as ‘global’ claims,but attend in the first instance to the contex-tual circumstances of extended austeritygovernance in the United States. Situated insuch a way, they can be seen as a contribu-tion to the ongoing effort to survey andinterrogate the moving map of neoliberalisa-tion across the scales and sites of the urban.One of the contributions of conjuncturalanalysis, in this context, is to provide analternative to the habit of ‘centric’ or diffu-sionist theorising, where template-like gener-alisations are derived from supposedlyparadigmatic cases and sites. In contrast,conjunctural analysis calls attention to rela-tionality and positionality, contextual andcontingent effects being traced ‘all the waydown’, while the location of cases themselves(both individually and collectively) is a mat-ter not of cores and peripheries, or heart-lands and hinterlands, but of uneven spatialdevelopment, heterogeneous fields, multisca-lar restructuring and site-shifting dynamics.In this respect, the horizons of conjuncturaltheorising must reach across patterned differ-ences and variegated landscapes, for instanceacross moments of regulatory retrenchment

and rollout and across leading- and bleeding-edge cases. Against ‘template’ applications ofthe concept of neoliberal urbanism, renderedat the city scale, which run the risk of pre-emption and foreclosure, the horizons ofsuch critical theorising must remain open,but by the same token they must attend tothe drift of normalisation as well as theactive fronts of innovation and contestation.

Seeking to work with some of these meth-odological cues, Part 2 of the article willpresent an extended case study of one of thepathways to local (and localised) financialcrisis in the United States, focused on theincreasingly stressed circumstances ofAtlantic City, where entrepreneurial man-oeuvres of various kinds have a long andnotably checkered history. Broadly follow-ing the arc described in this first installmentof the article, what has been called ‘theAtlantic City gamble’ stands as one of themore audacious experiments in the firstwave of post-Keynesian urban policymak-ing, the rapid rise and protracted exhaustionof which speaks not only to the internal con-tradictions of this model of casino-led regen-eration but also to constitutive conditions ofexistence that have proved to be increasinglydebilitating. Prompting an unprecedented,escalating and ongoing series of interven-tions on the part of the state authorities, thefiscal and political options of which areproving to be remarkably truncated, the cri-sis in Atlantic City threatens to become anexistential one.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the editors of Urban Studies forthe invitation to present the annual lecture, andfor the opportunity to develop some of the argu-ments outlined there in this extended form. Forcomments, conversation and suggestions, I thankAndrew Cumbers, Mikael Omstedt, AnthonyO’Sullivan, Leslie Roman and Heather Whiteside.Eric Leinberger provided cartographic assistance.For making this work possible, I am grateful tothe Canada Research Chairs programme.


Responsibility for these arguments is entirely myown, however.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from anyfunding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

1. Marc Pfeiffer, Bloustein Local GovernmentResearch Center, Rutgers University, quotedin Haddon and MacMillan (2015: A20).

2. Represented at the conference were the citiesof Brussels, Lausanne, Montreal, Munster,New Orleans, Orleans, St. Louis, andSheffield (Bouinot with Lovi, 1987).

3. Here, Hall is also following Raymond

Williams in his reading of hegemony as a‘lived process’, not as a synonym for simpledomination, and ‘not, except analytically, [as]a system or structure’, but as a ‘realized com-plex of experiences, relationships, and activi-ties’ (Williams, 1977: 112).

4. Including: the contextual presence and episo-dic development of macroinstitutional forma-tions and social settlements; the movement ofhistorically and geographically discontinuousdynamics of accumulation; the ruptural butgenerative roles of crises, as moments ofintensified political struggle and institutionalexperimentation; and the institutionalisation(or otherwise) of rules of the game andregimes of metagovernance, with theiringrained logics of strategic selectivity andindeterminate processes of ‘chance discovery’.

5. For a sample of critiques of, and reflectionson, this body of work, see Hackworth (2016),Le Gales (2016), Peck et al. (2013), Pinsonand Morel Journel (2016) and Robinson(2010).

6. In this respect, the subtitle of Brenner andTheodore’s (2002) collection, Spaces of

Neoliberalism: Urban Restructuring in North

America and Western Europe, was anythingbut casually chosen. The context-specificityof regulationist theory-claims was, of course,problematised from the beginning, since thetheory itself was overtly concerned with

constitutive context, with the path-dependentlegacies of Fordist-Keynesian formations,with relational forms of uneven developmentand with the non-diffusionist migration ofregulatory models and rationalities, especiallybut not exclusively in the spaces of after-Keynesian restructuring (see Peck, 2004).

7. For further discussions of such formations,transformations and terraforming dynamicsin relation to processes and practices of neoli-beralisation, see Brenner et al. (2010) andPeck (2013b).

8. It is worth recalling, however, that the key-word austerity had very little political or pop-ular currency in the United States at the onsetof the crisis (where it was commonly consid-ered to be a distinctively European affliction),while in Europe explicit and named austerityprogrammes were simultaneously the locus forconcerted governmental action and for exten-sive countermobilisations.

9. On Hall’s approach to the method of articula-tion, and thinking ‘unity and difference’ and‘difference in complex unity’, see Grossberg(1996), Hall and Massey (2010) and Slack(1996: 122).

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