Civic City Cahier 4: Afterlives of Neoliberalism

Neil Brenner, Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore

The global financial collapse of 2008 was widely interpreted as discrediting the neoliberal project and its false utopia of market rule, though it remains to be seen whether the death of neoliberalism has in fact been greatly exaggerated. Brenner, Peck and Theodore raise the question: will late-neo-liberal regulatory reforms and modes of crisis management usher in a truly post-neoliberal political settlement, or will the neoliberal project continue to stagger on in the form of a leaner and meaner politics of austerity, a politics that fails to fundamentally disrupt prevailing neoliberalised regulatory settlements and sociospatial relations? And finally, how can a rejuvenated ‘civic city’ emerge from within the interstices of the fractured, polarised urban spaces of late neoliberalism?