ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the complexity of market logics and to discuss the dominant neoliberal narrative by analyzing the role of market actors. It deals with a short literature review on urban research dealing with the neoliberal city narrative and presents the proposed approach in more detail. The chapter provides a brief literature review about cities–market relationships in the context of the “neoliberal city” debate. It discusses the methodological challenges it involves and suggests that using market actors as a heuristic analytic category in order to explain the transformative role of market logics for urban governance and policies. Most contemporary research explores the disparate character of the neoliberal paradigm, pointing instead to the path-dependency of neoliberal dynamics and to their varied outcomes depending on the context, on a given place and time. The market actors approach also sheds new light on the rescaling of regulation in a context of multi-level governance and evolving central-local relations.
