ABSTRACT
A bourgeoning literature on the effects of neoliberal policies on cities across the world has emerged in the last two decades. Urban scholars have chronicled the changes, particularly from a critical standpoint, which have accompanied the neoliberal, and what David Harvey (1989) famously termed the ‘entrepreneurial turn’ in urban governance in various contexts. From New York (Smith 2002) to Chicago (Wilson 2004), and from Glasgow (MacLeod 2002) to São Paulo and Johannesburg (Murray 2004), cities have undergone social-spatial transformations as a result of the emergent neoliberal order, characterized by “the loosening or dismantling of the various institutional constraints upon marketization, commodifi cation, the hyperexploitation of workers, and the discretionary power of private capital that had been established through popular struggles prior to and during the postwar period” (Brenner and Theodore 2002, 342). Note that Brenner and Theodore here are speaking in the North Atlantic context; in much of the post-colonial world, while neoliberalism does signify parallel structural shifts, these have not appeared at the cost of the so-called Fordist regime of accumulation. Neoliberal transformations here have served to undermine state-capitalist production, import substitution, and at least nominally redistributive regimes that were borne of post-colonial nationalism (cf. Saul 2005). Contributions to this volume and elsewhere have analyzed the political economy of these shifts in India; here I am interested in two related issues: fi rst, the imbrications of a certain kind of environmental activism with the neoliberal reordering of urban space; second, the alternative scales and institutions through which those marginalized by these processes stake their claims.
