Making up the neoliberal city
Résumé
What is the role of market actors in recent urban transformations? To what extent do market actors and logics organize urban governance and policies? In the current era of austerity, evolving State-market relations and their transformative role for urban governance and policies have been reexamined in relationship with the diffusion and resilience of neoliberal ideas. Although these approaches give market actors a chief role – sometimes as triggers – in the observed transformations, they have rarely been analyzed on their own in a comparative and systematic perspective. This chapter addresses precisely this empirical issue. Our main assumption is that the design and governing of cities result from evolving forms of collective action, and as such these processes are partly – but not exclusively – explained by market-driven logics. Drawing on public policy research, we argue that inferring causality from such complex political processes is first and foremost an empirical question. We suggest focusing on market actors as a single unit of analysis, which allows shifting the usual point of view from the “neoliberal city” concept. We assess empirically this analytical choice’s contribution to the understanding of urban transformations by drawing on two contrasting case studies, namely real estate developers and airport companies.