ABSTRACT
Gabriel Metcalf, executive director of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR), recently suggested that as part of “an agenda for prosperity” San Francisco should “fully fund a public-private economic development entity”, “depoliticize the planning process . . . [and] restore the ideals of a professional planning department” (Metcalf 2009, 33). Metcalf’s proposals are growth-centred and market-oriented and imply that planning as an endeavour of the state should be rational.2 Such ideas fall within the gamut of neoliberal thought and ideology, if not practice. Indeed, the neoliberal approach to solving perceived urban problems is increasingly common, and one would not be surprised to encounter some version of it in most cities in the U.S. and the global north. That it is even being plied in progressive San Francisco, sometimes called the “left coast city”, is perhaps a sign that we are indeed living in an age of neoliberal urbanism.
