ABSTRACT
The rise of the entrepreneurial city or region in the geo-economic space of Atlantic Fordism clearly depends on quite specific narrative accounts of the crisis of its post-war mode of economic growth and its social mode of economic regulation. This chapter provides a general account of the discursive rise of the entrepreneurial city in two ways. The first involves expanding the account of the crisis of the national economy and national state; the second involves considering the possible competitive advantages of new forms of economic strategy or economic governance to the resolution of this crisis in the interests of capital. Rather than being competing accounts of what is happening in the contemporary city, the re-design of governance appears as an integral part of the re-imaging of the city as well as of the restructuring of capital. In seeking to contextualise the re-imaging of the city and the re-design of urban governance, the author have begun to prepare an alternative narrative.
