This article develops a critique of the recently popularized concepts ‘creative class’ and cities’. The geographic reach policy salience these discourses is explained not in terms their intrinsic merits, which can be challenged on number grounds, but as function profoundly neoliberalized urban landscapes across they have been traveling. For all performative display liberal cultural innovation, creativity strategies barely disrupt extant urban‐policy orthodoxies, based interlocal competition,...

Abstract Across the broad field of heterodox political economy, ‘neoliberalism’ appears to have become a rascal concept – promiscuously pervasive, yet inconsistently defined, empirically imprecise and frequently contested. Controversies regarding its precise meaning are more than merely semantic. They generally flow from underlying disagreements sources, expressions implications contemporary regulatory transformations. In this article, we consider handling within three influential strands...

Abstract Austerity budgeting in the public sector, selectively targeting social state, is a long-established trait of neoliberal governance, but it has been enforced with renewed systemic intensity period since Wall Street crash 2008. The paper develops argument that these conditions are defining new operational matrix for urban politics. Examining some leading and bleeding edges austerity's ‘extreme economy’ USA, seeks to locate developments context mutating processes urbanism, commenting...

The article critically engages with the `varieties of capitalism' school, which since its origins in early 1990s has been consolidated into one most influential strands comparative and heterodox political economy. While `varieties' approach can be credited development several evocative stylized facts economy, having served as a potent foil against orthodox globalization thesis, alternative vision bipolar global economy comprising two competing capitalisms is found to wanting. limited by...

In this article, we analyze the connections between neoliberalization processes and urban transformations. Cities have become strategically central sites in uneven, crisis-laden advance of neoliberal restructuring projects. However, contrast to ideology, our analysis draws attention path-dependent interactions projects inherited institutional spatial landscapes. Accordingly, emphasize geographically variable, yet multiscalar translocally interconnected, nature urbanism. We also suggest that...

Abstract: The onset of the global financial crisis in 2008 has been widely interpreted as a fundamental challenge to, if not of, neoliberal governance. Here, we explore some near‐term and longer‐run consequences economic for processes neoliberalization, asking whether have witnessing terminal unraveling neoliberalism form social, political, regulation. In many ways creature crisis, could now be falling to its own making? Answering this question is impossible, argue, without an adequate...

The paper develops a geographical approach to the issues of policy transfer and transformation, taking form critical dialogue with three literatures at borderlands political science, comparative institutionalism, sociology. Making case for moving beyond rational-choice frameworks essentialized, formalist representations transfer, advocates social-constructivist understanding mobilities-and-mutations, sensitive constitutive roles spatiotemporal context.

Abstract Against the background of debates on origins and implications global economic crisis 2008–2009, this essay presents a theoretical framework for analyzing processes regulatory restructuring under contemporary capitalism. The analysis is framed around concept neoliberalization, which we view as keyword understanding transformations our time. We begin with series definitional clarifications that underpin conceptualization neoliberalization variegated, geographically uneven...

Abstract Neoliberalization processes have been reshaping the landscapes of urban development for more than three decades, but their forms and consequences continue to evolve through an eclectic blend failure crisis, regulatory experimentation, policy transfer across places, territories scales. The proliferation familiar neoliberal discourses formulations in aftermath 2007‐09 world financial crisis masks evidence deeply rooted transformations policies, institutions spaces that combatively...

The paper reflects on the methodological challenges involved in research movement and mutation of fast-moving policies, through globalizing networks across translocal settings. Inspired by ‘follow thing’ methods global ethnography program, it outlines a distended case-study approach to study policy mobilities.

The paper takes the form of a reflection on explanatory status neoliberalism, before and since global crisis 2008. Prior to crisis, political-economic conceptions neoliberalism as hegemonic grid relatively robust regime state-facilitated market rule were being received with growing skepticism by some poststructural critics, while ethnographers found accompanying conceptual tools rather too blunt for their methodological purposes. fact, however, that crisis—far from marking an inauspicious...

The 'varieties of capitalism' framework represents an influential methodological innovation in the field comparative political economy. It seeks to account for enduring spatial variations national economic performance by recourse macroinstitutional analysis, drawing ideal-type distinctions between liberal market economies, modeled on USA, and coordinated Germany. Moving beyond critiques varieties literature—for instance, its nationalism; preoccupation with limited, formal registers...

Neoliberal policies, strategies, and rationalities have been further entrenched rather than abandoned in the wake of 2008-2009 Great Recession. Understanding this state affairs requires careful reflection on process neoliberalization as a crisis-induced, crisis-inducing form market-disciplinary regulatory restructuring. Against monolithic conceptualizations that prevail most popular academic accounts, we emphasize constitutively uneven, institutionally hybrid, chronically unstable character...

Peck J. Cities beyond compare?, Regional Studies. Calls for more substantively multipolar, comparative and cosmopolitan modes of urban theory-making have been circulating than a decade now, they begun to spawn range alternative approaches studies. But in practice, the challenge worldly, theorization has unevenly met, often through difference-finding deconstructive manoeuvres projects urban-theoretical renewal reconstruction. The provisional outcome interpreted as an impasse theory; some are...