ABSTRACT
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, liberal politicians, public offi cials, planners, and activists in the United States spoke passionately and earnestly of the country’s growing ‘urban crisis,’ a crisis that was often infl ected with discourses of racial segregation, political alienation, and fi scal decline. By the 1980s, talk of the urban crisis was more closely associated with wider economic trends-globalisation, capital fl ight from the city, and the crisis of the American ‘Fordist’ model of mass production (Florida and Jonas 1991). Amidst these developments, there was a neo-conservative backlash against urban policy which paved the way for the New Federalism and, with it, federal urban budget cuts. Released from federal oversight and fi scal subsidy, cities and suburbs would be forced to compete for their fi scal futures under what some now characterise as a neo-liberal urban policy regime (Hackworth 2007). This neo-liberal solution to the nation’s urban crisis in turn paved the way for the emergence of a range of entrepreneurial approaches that have come to characterise what some have called the ‘postfederal’ era of urban development in the United States (Clarke and Gaile 1998; Brenner 2002).
