The road to the neoliberal city has been paved with liberal intentions. That's not a bad summary of the two books under consideration here and it represents a historical consensus about how we got to our urban present. In The Long Crisis: New York and the Path to Neoliberalism Benjamin Holtzman gives us a fine-grained, sidewalk-level view of New York City from the 1960s forward, while Thomas Sugrue and Andrew Diamond, in their edited collection Neoliberal Cities, have brought together seven scholars to discuss five different cities.
As much as anyone, geographer David Harvey can be credited with putting the term “neoliberalism” into academic circulation, and by 2005 he was prepared to write a “brief history” of it. For many historians, however, the term has proved frustrating: a totalizing, top-down set of shifts in the world's political economy, driven either by a conspiracy of economically (and ideologically) vested interests or by the inexorable logic of capitalism itself, or both. As the term has often been bandied about it is as much an epithet as an analysis.
Tendentious or not, the term is slippery. It lacks definitional precision. Is it an economic prescription? An ideology? A set of policy objectives? Each of us may know it when we see it, but are we all looking at the same thing? And given all that ambiguity, what, exactly, is a “neoliberal city?”
For Holtzman, the answer is a New York shaped by “marketization,” by which he means the use of the private sector – and the much-vaunted “public–private partnership” – to supplement or replace the public sector. Holtzman examines six broad areas of New York life to trace how this happened: the crisis of affordable housing, the transformation of middle-class housing, the dilapidation of public parks, the response to rising crime rates, strategies for economic development in an economically stagnating city, and the response to the rise of the homeless in public space. Cross-cut into these six areas are three sets of actors: ordinary New Yorkers “from a variety of social positions,” New York City's mayors, and “New Yorkers who had a greater proclivity for private sector and market-based solutions,” especially real-estate interests (p. 3).
The story begins in the late 1960s when liberalism was still at its high tide and it unfolds against the backdrop of changing federal policy, an economy that was already showing signs of distress and would only get worse in the 1970s, and what Holtzman calls “shifting race relations.” In essence, these created the problems that New Yorkers confronted and hemmed in the solutions to them. And the problems were real enough. Unlike some other historians who have dismissed tales of New York's deterioration in the postwar decades as exaggerated for the purposes of imposing neoliberal policies on the city, Holtzman does a useful job of reminding us that the parks really were unsafe and the city really couldn't borrow any more money. In just two years, 1966–68, New York landlords abandoned 100,000 rental apartments – more units, Holtzman reports, than had been torn down through “slum clearance” in the previous twenty years (20).
Over and over, as Holtzman describes it, New Yorkers responded to these problems in ways that were decidedly pragmatic rather than ideological. For example, in the face of all that abandonment, low-income New Yorkers turned to homesteading in the face of city government's failure to deal with the crisis. By 1973, according to a Columbia University study, 136 buildings abandoned by landlords had been taken over by low-income residents who were attempting to become owners. Homesteading, as Holtzman observes, “articulated a politics that seemed to bring together positions from the left and the right” – the self-determination advocated by black power groups and the “ownership society” ethos of market conservatives (22). As the avowedly liberal Mayor John Lindsay put it, “each tenant has a stake in his building and his apartment” (quoted at 27).
Perhaps nothing embodied the city's struggles in the rough 1970s more than its parks. They encapsulated the city's inability to maintain its own infrastructure (or even to keep up with trash removal), while they attracted drug users making them increasingly forbidding to those who wanted to use them. As a result, fewer and fewer people did through the 1960s and 1970s, which in turn only led to more decay. Recognizing that simply demanding more resources from a city that had less and less to give was a fool's errand, park advocates looked elsewhere for solutions. Those advocates were the ones, in Holtzman's telling, who “championed turning to the private sector as the potential salvation for parks” (97). These private-sector partnerships began in earnest in the mid-1970s but initially private businesses weren't much interested. Eventually, they came around but only after park advocates worked hard to convince them to support green spaces. Holtzman reviews two of the most famous of these efforts – the rebuilding of Bryant Park and the restoration of Central Park. Holtzman astutely observes that the Central Park Conservancy, the private nonprofit founded in 1980, tapped into New York's much older tradition of cultural philanthropy that built its museums, performance spaces, and even green spaces like botanical gardens. In this sense, the turn to the nonprofit model was hardly “neo” at all.
Holtzman also takes us to parks much less well known and finds much the same: friends groups formed, volunteer labor organized, and private money raised. In the Yorkville section, to take one of Holtzman's examples, the Carl Schurz Park Association was founded by exasperated neighborhood residents in the late 1960s to reclaim their small but essential local park. City neighborhoods need parks, to be sure, but parks also need neighborhoods and so those neighborhoods turned to the private and nonprofit sectors to reclaim their green spaces. Still, as Holtzman acknowledges, the results of these public–private partnerships across the city have proved uneven. The Friends of Van Cortland Park were able to raise enough money to hire eighteen full-time summer employees to improve the park. The group formed to support Pelham Bay Park, in a much less affluent (and less white) part of the Bronx, folded shortly after it was founded, leaving the 2,700-acre park to be tended by a city staff of only thirteen (131).
In Holtzman's New York, neoliberalism – “marketization” – emerged in the 1960s, well before Ronald Reagan and the triumph of free-market fundamentalism at the national level. It was embraced by a wide variety of New Yorkers and represented less a radical break from an earlier version of liberalism than an evolution of it. In Holtzman's telling, the mayoralty of the now disgraced Rudy Giuliani was far less significant in this regard than that of Ed Koch. More than anything, however, Holtzman stresses the way New Yorkers created solutions to problems that the city could not solve. As he writes, “for many New Yorkers experiments came first, ideology second” (3). “Experiments” harkens back to the New Deal itself and to Franklin Roosevelt's 1932 campaign speech where he called for “bold, persistent experimentation” to bring the nation out of the Great Depression.
I found something inspirational in those experiments. In the face of crises coming from many directions the New Yorkers in this book dug in and dug out. They could have left the city – hundreds of thousands of their neighbors did, after all – but they stayed, they worked with what they had, and they helped rescue a city that plenty of commentators had written off as doomed. Though Holtzman does not go this far, there is a case to be made here that “marketization” generated a great deal of grassroots action and empowerment. That's not the story we usually tell about the Anschluss of neoliberalism.
The Long Crisis is a New York book, richly researched and nicely written. On a few occasions Holtzman suggests that what happened in New York happened elsewhere as well but developing that comparative angle is not his purpose. Sugrue and Diamond's collection Neoliberal Cities takes us on tour of cities from Boston to Los Angeles, with stops in Cleveland, New York, New Orleans, and Chicago.
Sugrue and Diamond observe in their brisk introduction that two groups of scholars have largely talked past one another – social scientists who have discussed neoliberalism almost as an abstraction and urban historians who in their concern for particularity have largely ignored those larger formulations. Their goal with these essays is “to bring the conceptual framework of neoliberalism into urban historiography, and in addition bring rigorous, place-based historical research to enrich and challenge social scientific scholarship on neoliberalization” (2).
Taken together, the essays rhyme nicely with Holtzman's analysis of New York. Once we get down to the sidewalk level, as Sugrue and Diamond note, whether in New York or New Orleans, it becomes clear that “neoliberal urbanism in the United States is scarcely the distinctive product of right-wing thought or of Republican policy initiatives. It took hold in many Democratic Party-dominated municipalities” (6). And its roots were already growing in the mid-twentieth century.
Racial dynamics may be the area of urban life that most confounds the neat periodization of neoliberalism put forth by social scientists. Historians have demonstrated that the welfare state – or the social-democratic one if you prefer – had racial discrimination wired into it from the very beginning. Over and over again, we have seen bootstraps austerity for poor black Americans; government subsidies for the white middle-class and the affluent. Nowhere has this played out more than in the housing market. In her contribution on Chicago, Mary Pattillo sees the seeds of neoliberalism sown during the New Deal itself and specifically by the racially discriminatory patterns of federal support for housing. On the one hand, the New Deal made major investments in urban public housing but almost immediately “undermined those investments with even greater support for white suburbanization” (15). As urban public housing, quickly seen as subsidized housing for the black population, “was doomed by incessant ideological wrangling,” she notes that “the tightfisted welfare state of the neoliberal era was already in evidence for the black urban poor in the mid-twentieth century” (28).
The so-called war on drugs and the era of mass incarceration also constitute part of the neoliberal era – begun in the 1970s and ramped up significantly in the 1980s. But examining racialized policing practices complicates that story. Donna Murch's essay looks at the rise of the prison complex in Los Angeles and links it to the neoliberal regime: “In an era of drastic reduction of social services and deindustrialization, mass incarceration … became de facto urban social policy for the residents of impoverished communities” (134). However, she also acknowledges that the story here “is not as neat as we might wish” because racialized policing in Los Angeles stretches back well before the neoliberal era. Given that, maybe neoliberalism does not provide a useful way of analyzing the history of LA's policing.
In the standard chronology, neoliberalism took hold at the same moment as black politicians assumed power in cities across the country. Megan French-Marcelin, writing about New Orleans, and Michael McQuarrie, writing about Cleveland, both examine black political participation, and what they find is also interestingly complex.
In New Orleans a “pro-growth,” racially integrated coalition emerged as an opposition to the city's older entrenched political machine, which continued to marinate in its own toxic commitment to segregation. Thus those who pushed a growth agenda of the kind we associate with neoliberalism could portray themselves as “progressive.” French-Marcelin calls this “ironic” but I'm not sure that's entirely fair, given the city's long history of vicious racism. Either way, French-Marcelin finds that these racial liberals, black and white, shared a willingness “to subordinate appraisals of structural inequality to pro-growth visions of progress” (99). Cleveland became the first major city in the nation to elect a black mayor when Carl Stokes won the office in 1967 – this when the city was still two-thirds white. In subsequent decades, McQuarrie argues, black Clevelanders have had access to the city's political life but that “inclusion now facilitates marginalization rather than serving as a barrier to it” (175). McQuarrie feels that a shrunken public sector and its replacement by the market as the arbiter of public good have led to a situation where “black participation is more welcome than it has ever been,” but the forms of that participation and its efficacy have shrunk dramatically (202). This is a compelling argument but I also wonder whether city politics, whatever its stripes or configurations, could have done much to stem the city's population loss and economic collapse.
Thomas Adams looks at “the rise of neoliberal urbanism” in LA by examining the redevelopment of the Bunker Hill section of the city. The effort to tear down the old neighborhood started in the 1950s and was facilitated by a first-of-its-kind 1945 California law which granted public–private partnerships the power of eminent domain. What emerged in Bunker Hill, and elsewhere around the city, was “a reimagination of healthy, vibrant urban space centered around private services rather than housing or industrial development” (70). Among other things, the Bonaventure Hotel rose on Bunker Hill after the houses were demolished and has been made infamous by Frederick Jameson, Edward Soja, and Mike Davis for its forbidding, carceral design. The hotel has become emblematic of neoliberal, indeed postmodern, Los Angeles urbanism. But Los Angeles never developed much by way of a public sphere or liberal order in the first place, certainly not as compared to New York. So can a city that had never really been liberal in the New Deal sense become neoliberal?
Perhaps the most pointed contrast between the two books under review here comes when reading Kim Phillips-Fein's chapter on what she calls – after E. P. Thompson – the “moral economy” of New York in the 1970s. Whereas Holtzman found ordinary New Yorkers experimenting widely with solutions to their urgent and immediate problems, Phillips-Fein sees elites imposing austerity and other neoliberal policies on an “ambivalent” working class. In her search for “demonstrations of resistance” she finds interracial solidarity directed at the “financial elites of the city.” Rather than refashioning the shape and meaning of the public sphere, as Holtzman's New Yorkers did, Phillips-Fein sees a working class fighting to preserve the old order.
Gentrification is in some ways the urban cousin of neoliberalism – a term never quite defined with much precision and used primarily as an insult. Sylvie Tissot opens her essay on gentrification and Boston's South End neighborhood by highlighting the confusion surrounding both terms. As she acknowledges, neoliberalism can only “partially” explain what happened in the South End. She stresses “the decisive role played by South End residents themselves” from the 1960s through the 1980s (155). Central to her story is the South End Historical Society, founded in 1966, and its role in creating a particular image of the neighborhood shaped around its “Victorian” architecture. Those houses, gussied up from the disrepair into which many had fallen, drew a new generation of gentrifying residents to the South End.
I have chosen to discuss Tissot's essay last because I think it points to another dimension of the postwar city that ought to be part of this discussion of what the neoliberal city is or isn't. The South End Historical Society was founded in the same year as Congress passed the National Historic Preservation Act. The Act helped galvanize a growing discontent with the wanton destruction of the nation's architectural resources and helped any number of local organizations stave off the kind of demolition that had torn apart so many urban neighborhoods.
It was also passed in the midst of a sea change in attitudes about urbanism and planning altogether. The story here is familiar to urbanists. The writings of William Whyte, the battle between Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses, Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (published, as it happens, in 1966) – all this and more besides shifted planners, urbanists, and eventually policymakers toward a different conception of what makes cities work. Eventually, these ideas coalesced into what we call “new urbanism,” and the Congress of New Urbanism was founded in 1993 – just as most scholars argue the neoliberal regime, whenever it may have started, had firmly taken hold. As a result, Robert Moses, Ed Bacon, Ed Logue, and other Olympian city planners have been replaced with planning processes that routinely involve community engagement. High-rise housing projects have been torn down and replaced, however inadequately, with HOPE VI housing. Boston buried one of its most destructive highways and Milwaukee tore down the Park East Freeway altogether. Bike lanes have proliferated. All of this has taken place in the neoliberal city.
Are these parallel developments or are they causally connected? If they are connected, then are we prepared to credit neoliberalism, however we finally define it, with fostering the so-called urban renaissance that people started touting in the 1990s? Should the proliferation of neighborhood associations, farmers markets, and community gardens be considered part of the neoliberal triumph? Many scholars, including several of the contributors to Neoliberal Cities, clearly don't like neoliberalism and what it has wrought. Fair enough, but more people live in neoliberal New York than at any time in the city's history. How do we reckon with that?
