ABSTRACT
Explorations into the urbanization of neoliberalism reveal what may be referred to collectively as the “new” fragmentations of the post-Fordist, entrepreneurial city. Here, patterns and processes of political devolution, the rescaling of social relations of power, and the “retreat of the state” are reflected within, inter alia, the emergence and structures of urban regimes and public-private structures of governance, and the expanding influences of and emphases on place, community, and “the local” to urban political economies (Swyngedouw 1989; Harvey 1996; Amin 1994; Zukin 1995; Lauria 1997; Brenner and Theodore 2002). As Brenner and Theodore (2002b) argue, however, how (and if) these new fragmentations emerge and develop in any given city is contingent and context-specific, conditioned as much by inherited geographies, institutions, structural and physical conditions of “past” (i.e., Fordist, industrial) urban development regimes as they are by any sort of topdown ideological project of neoliberal change (see also Peck and Tickell 2002). The articulation between the past and the present is commonly one of creative destruction, whereby inherited structures, institutions, and geographies are physically reclaimed and refurbished and discursively reshaped and repackaged under locally specific and historically contingent circumstances to satisfy the ever-changing, ever-expanding political and economic demands of global, mobile capital (Harvey 1989; Brenner and Theodore 2002b).
