ABSTRACT
A new spatial order of cities came into being in the post-1970 era, coinciding with the crises of the Fordist-Keynesian accumulation regime, and the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system. In the following decades, the global capitalist system became increasingly neoliberalized, crystallizing into a world-wide disciplinary regime of deregulation and privatization. With the passage of time, the process intensifi ed and took a dominant form, impacting the social and economic spaces of countries across the world, especially those of the Global South, and fi nally affecting their entire developmental system. It essentially invoked a new order refl ecting a multi-faceted, multi-scalar dynamic promoting inter-and intra-urban competition, and an intense interplay of global and local. The pattern varied substantially from country to country, depending on the country’s historical process of development, politico-economic structure, and respective status in the international economy. It was associated with a universal backtracking of the welfare state regime, a reduction in social sector budget, a shrinking of organized jobs and public sector employment, a downgrading of workers’ and other democratic rights earned through long, drawn-out struggles, and a tremendous increase in economic uncertainty. At the city level, it was characterized by limitations on planning and the political capacity of elected municipal governments, privatization of basic services, withdrawal of the state from urban development, escalating support for public-private partnerships, increasing gentrifi cation and urban restructuring to expand space for elitist consumptions, and a growing exposure to global economic forces and global competition refl ecting the power of a disciplinary fi nance regime and a hegemonistic cultural framework.
