From Urban Entrepreneurialism To A "Revanchist City"? On The Spatial Injustices of Glasgow's Renaissance
From Urban Entrepreneurialism To A "Revanchist City"? On The Spatial Injustices of Glasgow's Renaissance
to a “Revanchist City”?
On the Spatial Injustices
of Glasgow’s Renaissance
Gordon MacLeod
Department of Geography, University of Durham, Durham, UK;
[email protected]
Recent perspectives on the American city have highlighted the extent to which the
economic and sociospatial contradictions generated by two decades of “actually exist-
ing” neoliberal urbanism appear to demand an increasingly punitive or “revanchist”
political response. At the same time, it is increasingly being acknowledged that, after
embracing much of the entrepreneurial ethos, European cities are also confronting
sharpening inequalities and entrenched social exclusion. Drawing on evidence from
Glasgow, the paper assesses the dialectical relations between urban entrepreneurial-
ism, its escalating contradictions, and the growing compulsion to meet these with a
selective appropriation of the revanchist political repertoire.
Introduction
Spurred on by the unrelenting pace of globalization and the
entrenched political hegemony of a neoliberal ideology, throughout
the last two decades a host of urban governments in North America
and Western Europe have sought to recapitalize the economic land-
scapes of their cities. While these “entrepreneurial” strategies might
have refueled the profitability of many city spaces across the two con-
tinents, the price of such speculative endeavor has been a sharpening
of socioeconomic inequalities alongside the institutional displacement
and “social exclusion” of certain marginalized groups. One political
response to these social geographies of “actually existing neoliberalism”
(Brenner and Theodore [paper] this volume) sees the continuous
renaissance of the entrepreneurial city being tightly “disciplined”
through a range of architectural forms and institutional practices so
that the enhancement of a city’s image is not compromised by the
visible presence of those very marginalized groups.
For some scholars, these tactics are further spiked with a powerful
antiwelfare ideology, a criminalization of poverty, rising levels of in-
carceration, and a punitive or “revanchist” political response (cf Mitchell
© 2002 Editorial Board of Antipode.
Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden,
MA 02148, USA
From Urban Entrepreneuralism to a “Revanchist City”? 603
might speculate that the lived spaces of the neoliberal city symbolize
an astonishingly powerful geographical expression of the erosion of
Keynesian ideals of full employment, integrated welfare entitlement,
and “social citizenship”4 (Marshall 1963)—not least in that when com-
pared to many earlier rounds of municipal investment, which sought to
engineer projects aimed at a “mass public” (Bianchini and Schwengel
1991:214), the new initiatives appear to be “reclaiming” public spaces
for those groups who possess economic value as producers or con-
sumers to the virtual exclusion of the less well-heeled (Amin and
Graham 1997).
The political economies enframing such displacements and margin-
alities are skillfully dissected in Wacquant’s (2000) theorizations on
the “penal state,” Mitchell’s (2001) work on the “postjustice” city, and
Smith’s (1996, 1998) writings on the “revanchist city.” This latter
concept is particularly powerful and derives from the French word
revanche, literally meaning “revenge.” Smith’s referent here is the
right-wing “revanchist” populist movement, which throughout the last
three decades of the 19th century reacted violently against the relative
liberalism of the Second Empire and the socialism of the Paris
Commune. Notably for Smith, as with the new urban politics of the
present fin-de-siècle, the original revanchists mixed military tactics
with moral discourses about public order on the streets (Smith 1998).
The next section highlights what I envisage to be some of the most
notable geographical contours of the early twenty-first century
revanchist city.
against the real and imagined dangers of daily life. Borrowing from
Foucault, [this] postmetropolis is represented as a collection of
carceral cities, an archipelago of “normalized enclosures” and fortified
spaces that both voluntarily and involuntarily barricade individuals
and communities in visible and not-so-visible urban islands, overseen
by restructured forms of public and private power and authority.
Notable examples of such “normalized enclosures” include the highly
exclusive gated communities that increasingly adorn the suburban
landscapes of postmetropolitan regions and the high-rent, design-
intensive shopping malls and omnicenters that continually infiltrate
urban downtowns (Crawford 1992; Judd 1995). Indeed, one cruel irony
pertains in the way that whilst mall designers are being authorized,
in architectural terms, to recreate “the street” and an organic “civic”
milieu (Goss 1993), so intensifying pressures to maximize the profit-
ability of retail space often leads to a penal exclusion of street people,
political campaigners, and independent artists, all of whom might be
deemed to compromise the strict ethics of “consumerist citizenship”
(Christopherson 1994).
Gated communities, shopping malls, and publicly subsidized
corporate plazas thereby represent living embodiments of Flusty’s
(2001:659) “interdictory spaces,” designed to “systematically exclude
those adjudged to be unsuitable and even threatening, [or] people
whose class and cultural positions diverge from the builders and
their target markets.” Moreover, their very banality, the extent to
which such interdictory spaces have become naturalized—uncritically
regarded as a “mainstay” of the contemporary urban environment
or, in some cases, even “quaintified” as a positive cultural presence
(Flusty 2001:660)—nurtures some profound questions about citizen-
ship and social justice in the city, particularly as these relate to the life
chances of those displaced by the unforgiving social Darwinism incul-
cated through disciplinary neoliberalization. This arises not least in the
way that such security-obsessed architectures are increasingly supple-
mented with authoritarian legal measures and policing tactics designed
to regulate the very spatial practices of the displaced urban poor.
Indeed, Smith’s (1996) revanchist thesis derives from his rousing
analysis of the battle to stretch the gentrification frontier of
Manhattan’s Lower East Side and the brutally repressive policing
practices deployed to “take back” Tompkins Square Park; deemed to
have been stolen from gentrifiers and the wider public by the homeless
and other victims of real-estate displacement. These vengeful state
tactics intensified dramatically under Republican Mayor Rudy
Giuliani (Smith 1998). Amid his growing concern about “disorder in
the public spaces of the city,” Giuliani identified certain groups—
homeless people, panhandlers, prostitutes, squeegee cleaners, and
608 Antipode
their companions, where they might feel safer and cultivate a “sense
of community” (Fitzpatrick and Kennedy 2000:39). Political concern
is also mounting that plans to “sell off” the city’s public housing stock
might only exacerbate the crisis.13
In 1990, throughout its year as European City of Culture, Glasgow’s
political economic elite stood accused of sanitizing the past by erasing
the city’s proud socialist heritage (Boyle and Hughes 1994). Now, over
a decade on, in the fanatical search to contrive a sanitized urban
landscape (McInroy 2000), the city’s elite appears to be suspending
any remaining managerialist commitments to extend social citizenship
and spatial justice throughout the wider populace. Indeed far from
creating “civic spaces [for] everyone” (GCC 2000:1). Glasgow’s city
center is mutating into a plethora of interdictory landscapes contrived
in the image of fictitious capital and consumerist citizenship. For
unlike vacant property, which (as rent-gap theory informs us) can
often be perceived as a space with a potentially higher value (Smith
1996), amid the banality of interdiction and the normalization
of postjustice discourses associated with “roll-out” neoliberalism, the
question of potential value appears not to extend to homeless people
and other displaced groups. Here we might reflect on an argument
Mitchell (2000:8) has made in a reference to the very “Culture War”
that ensnared Glasgow throughout 1990:
The city-as-landscape does not encourage the formation of
community or of urbanism as a way of life; rather it encourages the
maintenance of surfaces, the promotion of order at the expense of
lived social relations, and the ability to look past distress, destruc-
tion, and marginalization to see only the good life (for some) and to
turn a blind eye towards what that life is constructed out of.
Acknowledgments
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the seminar
Neoliberalism and the City, held in the Center for Urban Economic
Development, University of Illinois, Chicago, September 2001. I am
grateful to all the delegates for such valuable discussion and also to
Mark Boyle, Neil Brenner, Nicholas Fyfe, Emma Mawdsley, Eugene
620 Antipode
Endnotes
1
I thank Eugene McCann for prompting me on this issue.
2
Peck and Tickell create a useful analytical distinction between “roll-back” and “roll-out”
neoliberalism. The latter describes the political projects (such as Clintonism) that have
sought to ameliorate the intense contradictions generated by earlier “roll-back” versions.
3
Earlier “end of public space” perspectives (Davis 1990; Sorkin 1992) have been
followed by those intimating an improved safety for a “pluralistic public” and the
possibility of countercultural spaces of representation (Iveson 1998; McCann 1999;
Soja 2000). This has led some commentators to talk of the “ambivalent” nature of
public space in the contemporary city (Fyfe forthcoming; Lees 1998).
4
Marshall (1963:74) defines social citizenship as “the right to a modicum of economic
welfare and security [alongside] the right to share to the full in the social heritage and
live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in the society.” In
making this claim, though, I acknowledge that Marshall’s schema has been reasonably
criticized for heralding “social citizenship” as the highest form, its failure to consider
attacks on postwar citizenship rights, and its weakness in analyzing the gender and
ethnic inequalities of postwar citizenship (Urry 2000).
5
It is worth mentioning how this image of Giuliani as both combative and intolerant
might seem at odds with the “globalized” figure who, with compassion and in fulsome
praise of the city’s public services, presided over a devastated Manhattan in the
immediate aftermath of the terrorist atrocities of 11 September 2001. Indeed, during
those traumatic times, Giuliani was the first to caution against jingoistic attacks on the
city’s Arab and Muslim communities (Said 2001).
6
The extent to which the “rolled-out” version of neoliberalism is purportedly articu-
lated through a combination of neoliberalized economic management allied to author-
itarian state forms and modes of policy-making “concerned specifically with the
aggressive regulation, disciplining, and containment of those marginalized or dispos-
sessed by the neoliberalization of the 1980s” (Peck and Tickell this volume) prompts
me to contend that, depending upon the particular spatial context, a revanchist
political approach may well represent a key “destructive” and “creative” moment in
the move from “roll-back” to “roll-out” neoliberalism (see Brenner and Theodore
[paper] this volume:Table 2).
7
Here it is worth noting that the concept of citizenship encounters a range of positions,
one notable tension being “between the neoliberal assertion of the market and the
free individual, and the civic republican tradition with its emphasis on participation in
a polis fashioned by its members” (Hill 1994:4). More recent discourses have moved
from such formal “political” models towards “social-cultural” approaches “wrapped
up in questions about who is accepted as a worthy, valuable, and responsible member
of an everyday community of living and working” (Painter and Philo 195:115). It seems
to me that these latter approaches could prove most instructive in analyzing the
current erosion of citizenship rights for marginalized social groups.
From Urban Entrepreneuralism to a “Revanchist City”? 621
8
Whilst acknowledging the various discriminations that punctuated postwar efforts
to extend social citizenship (see endnote 4), it seems to me that some of the ideals of
inclusive entitlement inscribed into the Keynesian and New Deal political projects
offered a necessary—if hardly sufficient—condition to widen inclusive citizenship.
Quoting Hill (1994:4) again: “[P]ossession of civil and political rights without social
rights reduces citizenship to a façade.”
9
In explaining this more consensual mood, it is important to consider the role played
by a distinctively institutionalized Scottish policy network and civil society (MacLeod
1999).
10
The SDA was introduced in 1975 and funded by the Scottish Office (MacLeod 1999).
11
Some 4,000 acres of land—almost 10% of the city’s area—remain vacant or derelict
(Webster 2000).
12
Life expectancy in the outer housing estate of Drumchapel is ten years below the
adjacent suburb of Bearsden, and people in Glasgow live ten years less than those in
the South of England.
13
While this radical move may fit neatly with a post-Thatcherite New Labour ideology,
the decision to “rid this monument to municipal socialism” was taken by the Labour
pragmatists running Glasgow City Chambers, albeit aided and abetted by a firm prod
from the then-Communities Minister in the Scottish Parliament, Wendy Alexander
(Hetherington 2000).
14
Of course, this raises a general point about the qualitative difference the post-1999
Scottish Parliament and Executive could make to the institutional powers of Scotland’s
policy network. It also demonstrates how any “locally” inscribed urban political strategy
is always embedded within and structured through a multiscaled ensemble of state
governmentalities (MacLeod and Goodwin 1999).
References
Althusser L (1971) Ideology and ideological state apparatuses. In L Althusser (ed)
Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (pp 136–170). London: New Left Books
Amin A and Graham S (1997) The ordinary city. Transactions of the Institute of British
Geographers 22:411–429
Atkinson R (forthcoming) Domestication by cappuccino or a revenge on urban space?
Urban Studies
Bauman Z (2000) Liquid Modernity. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press
Beazley H (2000) Street boys in Yogyakarta: Social and spatial exclusion in the public
spaces of the city. In G Bridge and S Watson (eds) A Companion to the City
(pp 472–487) Oxford: Blackwell
Beck U and Beck-Gernshiem E (1996) Individualization and “precarious freedoms”:
Perspectives and controversies of a subject-oriented sociology. In P Heelas, S Lash
and P Morris (eds) Detraditionalization (pp 23–48). Oxford: Blackwell
Belina B and Helms G (2001) Zero tolerance for the industrial past? Policing
and urban entrepreneurialism in old industrial cities in Britain and Germany.
Mimeograph. Glasgow: Department of Geography, University of Glasgow
Bianchini F and Schwengel H (1991) Reimagining the city. In J Corner and S Harvey
(eds) Enterprise and Heritage (pp 212–263). London: Routledge
Boyer C (1993) The city of illusion: New York’s public spaces. In P Knox (ed) The
Restless Urban Landscape (pp 111–126). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall
Boyle M (1997) Civic boosterism in the politics of local economic development:
“Institutional positions” and “strategic orientations” in the consumption of hallmark
events. Environment and Planning A 29:1975–1997
Boyle M and Hughes G (1994) The politics of urban entrepreneurialism in Glasgow.
Geoforum 25:453–470
622 Antipode
Buchanan Galleries (2000) Shopping for Glasgow’s Future. Glasgow: Buchanan Galleries
Caldeira T (1999) Fortified enclaves: The new urban segregation. In J Holston (ed)
Cities and Citizenship (pp 114–138). Durham, NC: Duke University Press
Christopherson S (1994) The fortress city: Privatized spaces, consumer citizenship. In
A Amin (ed) Post-Fordism: A Reader (pp 409–427). Oxford: Blackwell
Coleman R and Sim J (2000) “You’ll never walk alone”: CCTV surveillance, order and
neoliberal rule in Liverpool city centre. British Journal of Sociology 51:623–639
Crawford M (1992) The world in a shopping mall. In M Sorkin (ed) Variations on a
Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space (pp 3–30). New
York: Hill and Wang
Damer S (1990) Glasgow: Going for a Song. London: Lawrence and Wishart
Danson M, Johnstone C and Mooney G (1997) Social and economic change on
Clydeside in the 1980s and 1990s. Paper presented to the European Regional
Studies Conference: Regional Frontiers, Frankfurt, 20–23 September
Davis M (1990) City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. London: Verso
Domosh M (1998) Those “gorgeous incongruities”: Polite politics and public space
on the streets of nineteenth-century New York City. Annals of the Association of
American Geographers 88:209–226
Doron G (2000) The dead zone and the architecture of transgression. City 4(2):
247–263
Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR) (2000) Our
Towns and Cities: The Future: Delivering an Urban Renaissance. Cm 4911. London:
Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions
Eisenschitz A and Gough J (1993) The Politics of Local Economic Development.
Basingstoke: Macmillan
Evening Times (2001) Editorial: Beggars are damaging city center. 17 April:8
Fitzpatrick S and Kennedy C (2000) Getting By: Begging, Rough Sleeping and The Big
Issue in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Bristol: The Policy Press
Flusty S (2001) The banality of interdiction: Surveillance, control and the displacement
of diversity. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 25:658–664
Fyfe N (forthcoming) Zero tolerance, maximum surveillance? Deviance, difference
and crime control in the late modern city. In L Lees (ed) The Emancipatory City:
Paradoxes and Possibilities. London: Sage
Fyfe N and Bannister J (1998) “The eyes upon the street”: Closed-circuit television
surveillance and the city. In N Fyfe (ed) Images of the Street: Planning, Identity and
Control in Public Space (pp 254–267). London: Routledge
Glasgow City Council (GCC) (2000) Glasgow City Centre Millennium Plan. Glasgow:
Glasgow City Council
Gomez M (1998) Reflective images: The case of urban regeneration in Glasgow and
Bilbao. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 22:106–121
Goss J (1993) The “magic of the mall”: An analysis of the form, function, and meaning
in the contemporary retail built environment. Annals of the Association of American
Geographers 83:18–47
Hamnett C (1995) Controlling space: Global cities. In J Allen and C Hamnett (eds)
A Shrinking World (pp 103–142). Buckingham: Open University Press
Harvey D (1989) From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: The transformation of
urban governance in late capitalism. Geografiska Annaler 71B:3–17
Harvey D (2000) Spaces of Hope. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press
Helms G (2001) Glasgow—The Friendly City, the Safe City. Praxis Kultur—Und Sozial-
geographie 23. Potsdam: Universität Potsdam
Hetherington P (2000) Out of stock. The Guardian 6 September:2–3
Hill D (1994) Citizens and Cities: Urban Policy in the 1990s. Hemel Hempstead:
Harvester Wheatsheaf
From Urban Entrepreneuralism to a “Revanchist City”? 623
Iveson K (1998) Putting the public back into public space. Urban Policy and Research
16:21–33
Judd D (1995) The rise of the new walled cities. In H Liggett and D Perry (eds) Spatial
Practices: Critical Explorations in Social/Spatial Theory (pp 144–66). London: Sage
Katz C (2001) Hiding the target: Social reproduction in the privatized urban environ-
ment. In C Minca (ed) Postmodern Geography: Theory and Praxis (pp 93–110).
Oxford: Blackwell
Keil R (1999) Los Angeles: Globalization, Urbanization and Social Struggles. Chichester:
Wiley
Lees L (1998) Urban renaissance and the street: Spaces of control and contestation.
In N Fyfe (ed) Images of the Street: Planning, Identity and Control in Public Space
(pp 236–253). London: Routledge
Lees L (2001) Towards a critical geography of architecture: The case of an ersatz
Colosseum. Ecumene 8:51–86
Leitner H (1990) Cities in pursuit of economic growth: The local state as entrepreneur.
Political Geography Quarterly (now Political Geography) 9:146–170
Logan J and Molotch H (1987) Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place.
Berkeley: University of California Press
Lund Hansen A, Andersen H and Clark E (2001) Creative Copenhagen: Global-
ization, urban governance and social change. European Planning Studies 9:851–869
MacLeod G (1999) Entrepreneurial spaces, hegemony and state strategy: The political
shaping of privatism in Lowland Scotland. Environment and Planning A 31:345–375
MacLeod G and Goodwin M (1999) Reconstructing an urban and regional political
economy: On the state, politics, scale, and explanation. Political Geography 18:
697–730
Marcuse P (1993) What’s new about divided cities? International Journal of Urban and
Regional Research 17:355–365
Marshall T H (1963) Citizenship and social class. In T H Marshall (ed) Sociology at the
Crossroads (pp 67–127). London: Heinemann
McCann E (1999) Race, protest, and public space: Contextualizing Lefebvre in the US
city. Antipode 31:163–184
McInroy N (2000) Urban regeneration and public space: The story of an urban park.
Space and Polity 4:23–40
McKinsey and Company (1994) The Potential of Glasgow City Centre. Glasgow:
Scottish Development Agency
Merrifield A (2000) The dialectics of dystopia: Disorder and zero tolerance in the city.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24:473–489
Mitchell D (1995) The end of public space? People’s Park, definitions of the public,
and democracy. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 85:108–133
Mitchell D (1997) The annihilation of space by law: The roots and implications of
antihomeless laws in the United States. Antipode 29:303–335
Mitchell D (2000) Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell
Mitchell D (2001) Postmodern geographical praxis? Postmodern impulse and the war
against homeless people in the “postjustice” city. In C Minca (ed) Postmodern
Geography: Theory and Praxis (pp 57–92). Oxford: Blackwell
Mollenkopf J and Castells M (eds) (1991) Dual City: Restructuring New York. New
York: Russell Sage Foundation
Mooney G and Danson M (1997) Beyond “culture city”: Glasgow as a dual city. In
N Jewson and S MacGregor (eds) Transforming Cities: Contested Governance and
New Spatial Divisions (pp 73–86). London: Routledge
Nicoll V (2001) Beggars “scaring away city centre shoppers.” Evening Times 17 April:4
Paddison R (1993) City marketing, image reconstruction, and urban regeneration.
Urban Studies 30:339–350
624 Antipode