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The urban politics of roll-with-it neoliberalization

Roger Keil

Online Publication Date: 01 June 2009

To cite this Article Keil, Roger(2009)'The urban politics of roll-with-it neoliberalization',City,13:2,230 245 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/13604810902986848 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13604810902986848

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Politics, culture and consumerism, Berlin, Potsdamer Platz, April 2009 (above); and weekly demonstrators against Hartz IV social welfare reform in Frankfurt, Germany, July 2008 (below). Photos: Roger Keil

CITY, VOL. 13, NOS. 23, JUNESEPTEMBER 2009

The urban politics of rollwith-it neoliberalization

Roger Keil
Taylor and Francis

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Urban politics has changed during a generation of neoliberalization. This paper argues that next to the notions of roll-back and roll-out neoliberalization, which have been put forward to explain this change, a third concept might be helpful: roll-with-it neoliberalization. The three concepts refer to phases, moments and contradictions in neoliberalization. Roll-with-it neoliberalization captures the normalization of governmentalities associated with the neoliberal social formation and its emerging crises. The paper outlines an immanent critique of roll-with-it neoliberalization to determine possible consequences for urban politics in this current phase: (a) neoliberal governmentality has been generalized to the point that it does not have to be established aggressively and explicitly and (b) the farreaching crises of regulation that have gripped the capitalist urban system as a result of neoliberal roll-out now demand new orientations in collective action that involve both reformed neoliberal elite practices and elite reaction to widespread contestation of neoliberal regulation. The paper differentiates two ideal types of urban political discourses at the current conjuncture and adds a progressive alternative that points beyond the neoliberal agenda. While the previous era created governance conflicts around social cohesion and economic competitiveness, the current debate moves to new sectors of social concern, which broaden the agenda of urban politics to encompass fields traditionally not included in considerations on urban political regulation. The paper concludes that while roll-with-it neoliberalization has changed the game and moved the boundaries of urban politics, it has also created new contradictions that demonstrate its own unsustainability as a mode of regulation. As the financial and economic architecture of global neoliberalism fails, and communities world wide are thrown into the maelstrom of crisis, urban politics and the actors that make it need to be reimagined.

Neoliberalismso long, we hardly knew ya arx noted that each social formation carries within it another social formation (Legros et al., 1979). In this spirit, we need an immanent critique of the particular form of capitalist social formation we have encountered in the past generation, neoliberalism.1 Such an immanent critique may reveal the specific contradictions inherent in the

current conditions and point towards some new pathways for development. Analytically, neoliberalism is rarely seen as a social formation but like, for example, in the typical treatment of the subject in a recent essay by Brand and Sekler (2009, p. 6), as (1) a theory and an intellectual movement, (2) an elite strategy to reconfigure the Fordist compromise and (3) a social practice. Indeed, we now have a good general sense of what neoliberalism has meant as a

ISSN 1360-4813 print/ISSN 1470-3629 online/09/02-30230-16 2009 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13604810902986848

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CITY VOL. 13, NO. 23 of inciting the subjects to conduct themselves after the model of the enterprise and the general norm of competition. Whereas rollback and roll-out entailed clear references to the previous FordistKeynesian social formation, roll-with-it is self-referential and not in relation to something that has to first be brought down or brought in. Roll-with-it neoliberalization refers straight to ecological dominance as a natural and often unquestioned condition of life under capitalism today. It also means that to some degree the idea of external actors (e.g. Friedman, Hayek, Thatcher, the Ontario Tories, etc.) bringing in intended change to affected communities (e.g. university economics departments, the Chilean state, miners in Yorkshire, welfare recipients, etc.) has to be amended by the insight that when roll-with-it neoliberalization enters the picture, neoliberal subjects of all kinds co-construct, sustain and also contest a now normalized neoliberal social reality. To roll-with neoliberalization means that political and economic actors have increasingly lost a sense of externality, of alternatives (good or bad) and have mostly accepted the governmentality of the neoliberal formation as the basis for their action. While in the first instance I have introduced the concept of roll-with-it as a new phase of neoliberalization, which replaces and supplements roll-back and roll-out historically, it also, in the second instance, refers to a moment of neoliberalization which exists alongside and intertwined with its historical predecessors. Roll-back and roll-out have not ended but rather continue to work through the affected societies. The three moments are simultaneous and interactive. In the third instance, then, these three moments are dialectically related to one another. Actors moving along their various registers create new contradictions, struggles, conflicts and possibilities. The current crisis provides an excellent lens through which to observe the interaction among the different registers as politicians, capitalists and activists want to stabilize, restore and revolutionize the system all at once. As the shifts from roll-back/roll-out to

theory, ideology and practice of capitalist change (Harvey, 2005). Jessop has explained that there has been an ecological dominance of neoliberalism, that is, the predominance of neoliberal ideology in all areas of social life. This leads, as Jessop notes, to an increased intensity of capital accumulation processes, a reinforcement of exchange-value-oriented activities, general liberalization, the strengthening of the coercive power of competition and a reinforcement of shareholder value in the economy. The entire society, even nature must now be competitive (Jessop, 2008). When looking at neoliberalism as a social formation as I will in this paper, I am not suggesting a hermetic and fully developed system but accept that in the past 30 years more or less orchestrated and intentionally initiated social practices of neoliberalization have condensed into a geographically and culturally variegated set of societal arrangements that display at least some of the tendencies mentioned by Jessop above. I will examine these condensations with particular reference to urban regions. A generation ago, in the wake of the first oil shock and the global recession of the 1970s, we witnessed the dramatic retooling of urban regions across the capitalist West as we moved from a KeynesianFordist regime of accumulation to a neoliberalpost-Fordist regime (Hirsch and Roth, 1986). The crisis-induced restructuring that followedwhich Peck and Tickell (2002) have described as a rapid temporally and spatially entwined interplay of roll-back and roll-out neoliberalization may now have made room for yet another round of restructuring, which will set these urban regions on a path even more removed from their past trajectories than the momentous changes of the previous period. I am calling this new development roll-with-it neoliberalization. It means, in the first instance, the normalization of neoliberal practices and mindsets, the (frequently contested) acceptance of the conduct of conduct of neoliberalism, a manner, as Dardot and Laval (2009) note with reference to Michel Foucault,

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KEIL:THE URBAN POLITICS OF ROLL-WITH-IT NEOLIBERALIZATION 233 roll-with-it neoliberalization are emergent, the discussion that follows is mostly about the new and explicit politics of change. In particular, the discursive and rhetorical shifts in public policy and political contestation are relevant here. But these shifts in discourse are also beginning to lead to institutional transformations and new public policy, and are accompanied by realignments of social and political power relations, although it is too early to mark a major break from two decades of neoliberal formulations and realities.2 Clearly, the concept of roll-with-it neoliberalization relates to notions of postneoliberalism which are now being debated widely. No argument is made here that neoliberalism as a set of ideas and practices is simply going to vanish. By contrast, there is the intention to discuss different responses to the (negative) impacts of neoliberalism and its growing inability to deal with the upcoming contradictions and crises. The focus here is on a perspective on social, political and/or economic transformations, on shifting terrains of social struggles and compromises, taking place on different scales, in various contexts and by different actors (Brand and Sekler, 2009, p. 6; Demirovic, 2009). A new social formation seems to be taking shape, but much of it will carry forward the burdens incurred by a generation of neoliberalization while some yearn for a golden age of Keynesianism, which they would like to restore, and others dream beyond capitalism and revive socialist utopias that had been considered obsolete. In his recent speculations on post-neoliberalism, at the height of the world financial crisis, Bob Jessop (2008) insinuated that while it doesnt have a label yet, such a social formation might develop markedly nonliberal modes of regulation and reintroduce de-liberalization, empowerment, socialization, an emphasis on social use value, fair trade instead of free trade, progressive taxation, new forms of state intervention, the resubjectivation of subjects. Most importantly, perhaps, the ecological dominance of neoliberalism may have to be exorcized by a merger of political economy and political ecology as the central political axis of progressive political praxis. If we pronounce the end of neoliberalism, at least in its known incarnations, as expressed in its rhetoric and political agenda, we need to apply a measure of prudence in our prediction. The beast is not dead yet, and as those who think geohistorically and geopolitically have noted, it may be a while until the current dynamic plays itself out in any recognizable manner (Wallerstein, 2008; Harvey, 2009). But perhaps it is time to begin asking the questionhardly answerable at this point in timeof whether neoliberalization was a failure or a success by its own measure? In order to pose this question, let alone answer it, we need to acknowledge neoliberalization as a programmatic intervention, a deliberate attempt to make history (and geography, primarily through complex rescaling processes). In the West it has been first and foremost about the two connected processes of dismantling (the welfare state and Fordist compromise) and rebuilding (of less state and more market-oriented forms of capital accumulation). To some degree this double dynamics has been a rational process. Starting in the early 1970s in all seriousness, neoliberalization was a concerted, deliberateand in many of the less ideological cases even well-intended reaction to the perceived or real crisis of Fordism/Keynesianism. In this sense, it was a response to and ultimately driver of technological change (flexibilization, end of Taylorism, end of social compromise and its attached technologies of power). Thomas Lemke has perhaps captured this neoliberal rationality better than anyone else:
Neo-liberalism is a political rationality that tries to render the social domain economic and to link a reduction in (welfare) state services and security systems to the increasing call for personal responsibility and self-care. In this way, we can decipher the neo-liberal harmony in which not only the individual body, but also collective bodies and institutions (public administrations, universities, etc.), corporations and states

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have to be lean, fit, flexible and autonomous: it is a technique of power. (2001, p. 203)

But inseparably, neoliberalization also has had an irrational bent to it. This is not to say that the irrationality of the markets is an aberration but that this irrationality is systemic and fits neoliberalisms ulterior goals as well as similar non-economic influences on its inner workings, such as the testosterone-driven lifestyle of the traders (McDowell, forthcoming). As an unregulated, anarchic process, neoliberalization created unprecedented scandals, a culture of greed and a general vindictiveness directed at the working classes and the poor. Often, the two processes were entwined and hardly a day goes by without another corporate leader caught stealing, and another politician revealed to have treated the states coffers as a base from which to roll out a feast for a clique of friends. When thinking about the new politics of roll-with-it neoliberalism, we will have to deal with both, the rational and the irrational elements of neoliberalization. Meanwhile, the neoliberal agenda has become a hard sell just at the time when neoliberalism enjoys its ecological dominance most visibly. Roll-out neoliberalism as political rhetoric has run it course in many jurisdictions. It is close to impossible for any political party in the current period to win an election with an openly revanchist and neoliberal program. In previous periods of neoliberalization, the roll-out of more market-oriented, less welfarist policy was often greeted with electoral success at various scales: politicians like Rudy Giuliani in New York City, Mike Harris in Ontario or Margaret Thatcher in the UK were voted in on programs that explicitly celebrated revolutionary neoliberal shifts. Yet, persuading voters to buy revanchism and privatization under their true label has become a more difficult affair of late. They must be articulated with other political registers to work. In the fall of 2008, the conservative Canadian government presented a budget update in the

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neoliberal tradition of zero deficit spending. But a huge public outcry and a political threat from the opposition forced it to renege on its original plans and it came back with a much different proposal in early 2009, which reflected some spending deemed necessary in light of the crisis in the Canadian economy. Similarly, the Sarkozy government in France reacted to general strikes and protest action in January and March 2009 with an infusion of social policy rhetoric that had previously been absent from the governments discourse (Figure 1). Yet the (all-but) disappearance of roll-out rhetoric does not mean the end of roll-out neoliberalism in practice. Even the historic victory in the American presidential election of Barack Obama, whose campaign had sent post-neoliberal signals in contradistinction to Bush era disaster capitalists (Klein, 2007), has consolidated into a broad and sweeping policy program which reveals a series of measures hardly alien to the prime philosophical tenets of neoliberalization. Responsibility remains heavily invested in individuals, the poor are hardly in the picture of reform, creative economic policies are put in place and the state grows deeper into its role as handmaiden of certain groups of capital that drive the new and old economies (Widmann, 2008, p. 14; Keil and Wilson, 2009).

Urban neoliberalization This paper deals specifically with the urban problematic. The social and spatial conditions of urban regions in advanced capitalist economies continue to undergo dramatic changes. Even before the world financial crisis altered the dynamics of the game, the most recent period of neoliberalization has seen widespread deindustrialization and very sparse reindustrialization in many cities and regions as China moved to become latelier du monde; we have witnessed the almost complete disappearance of a blue collar industrial workforce in many former industrial core regions in Europe and North America where

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Figure 1

Participants in general strike, Montpellier, France, March 19, 2009.

workers are now fighting a desperate fight to keep their plants open and where bossnappings, hunger strikes and other spectacular defenses have become de rigueur; but even peripheral production sites have lost appeal by comparison with what China has had to offer; various waves of apparent rejuvenation of the global capitalist machine, most obviously the electronic industries in the late 1990s, and the real estate triggered boom of recent years, have failed spectacularly in the dotcom and subprime crises, respectively. The period of roll-back and roll-out neoliberalization saw globalization coupled with de- and selective reindustrialization, de- and selective recentralization of activities andoften state-inducedprivatization in major urban centres (for an early and prescient description of this development see Soja et al., 1983). Globalization and neoliberalization created the conditions for massive urbanization in the global South and for expansive (sub)urbanization in the

industrialized North. Those countries and regions where industrialization has moved fastest and most intensively (China, India, Brazil for industrialized agriculture and manufacturing of consumer durables, for example; California, the South of France, parts of Japan for high-tech, etc.) have also had the most explosive urban growth. The winner regions of the past period of restructuringfor example, Ontario, LanguedocRoussillon, Baden-Wrttembergare now struggling to stay on top as other regions are beginning to bypass them on the global marketplace. There is some consolidation of winner regions (see Frankfurt, Toronto, Paris, Montreal) but there are also considerable shifts in regional power and economic influence as the crisis unfolds. Urban regions and the urban process are central to neoliberalization:
Urbanization has played a crucial role in the absorption of capital surpluses, at ever

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increasing geographical scales, but at the price of burgeoning processes of creative destruction that have dispossessed the masses of any right to the city whatsoever. The planet as building site collides with the planet of slums. (Harvey, 2008, p. 37, citing Davis, 2006)

Based on the general acceptance of the idea that capitalism survives through urbanization and urbanism, that is, in the broader sense through the production of space (Lefebvre, 1976, 1991, 1996, 2003; Harvey, 1982), some writers in the tradition of critical urban studies have pointed to recent neoliberal developments as confirmation of the importance of urban regions to the political, spatial and economic regulation of capitalism (Brenner and Theodore, 2002; Brenner, 2004). There has been the sprawling metropolitanization of global city economies beyond even the 100 km circle of the previous period and post-suburbia has emerged as the dominant form of urban life. Not just the social and institutional structure of cities changes under the impact of neoliberalization, the built environment becomes a haven for megaprojects and iconic development. Massive investment flowed into these projects which are built in a liberalized, unrestrained manner, often pushed by ambitious local, regional and national states keen on distinction in a globalized inter-jurisdictional competition (Diaz Orueta and Fainstein, 2008; Lehrer and Laidley, 2008). Many urban regions have seen a growing socio-spatial polarization with a continued weakening of middle income groups and of the entire idea of a secure middle-class society; alongside, we have seen in Europe and North America the increasing racialization of poverty and the re-emergence of catastrophic health threats (such as TB) to the poor areas of the city; the negative aspects of these dramatic changes have not been offset by the timid institutionalization of ecological modernization policies in the face of a growing awareness of global ecological crisis; rather, we have observed an increase of vulnerabilities and risk to all but few.

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These shifts took three decades to mature since Reagan, Thatcher and their acolytes in the 1980s first floated ideas about urban enterprise zones, defunded or sold public housing, destroyed urban school systems and built up local police states with vindictive philosophies of social cleansing directed at racialized youth and the poor. Furthermore, whereas the shift from FordismKeynesianism to Post-FordismNeoliberalism included inter alia a shift in scalar regulation from the national state to the urban region itself, and while now strategic differences and distinctive profiles among those regions in a global marketplace are more important than their equal accoutrement in national urban systems (Brenner, 2004), we now encounter an even more dramatic shift away from regional territoriality to predominantly topologically constructed relationships of metropolitan spaces (Amin, 2004). This is contradictory: deterritorialization is taken as an economic given at the same time as urban regions struggle as territorially defined collective actors in order to harness global streams of capital, investment and skilled labour. Articulating fixed scales and open topologies (Jessop et al., 2008), new urban governance forms must be viewed as products of complex struggles in networked and hierarchical interrelations among often antagonistic actors.

Neoliberal urban politics During the roll-back and roll-out phases/ moments of neoliberalization a distinctive politics took shape, and a more and more predictable set of policies such as workfare, targeted policing and publicprivate partnerships were disseminated through fast policy transfer to many cities around the globe (Peck and Theodore, 2001). The elements of this have been poignantly summarized by David Wilson in a review of Spaces of Neoliberalism:
[P]rograms flagrantly bolstering business and corporations, hypermarket rhetoric,

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punitive and inflammatory discourse against the poor, and the intensification of social segregation. In this new reality, welfare benefits are shrunk and tied to five-year limits, cities balkanized into mosaics of segregated communities, ghettos left to rot, and public spaces virulently policed to control access and use. The more polarized city visibly displays societys growing inequalities in its evolving form and fabric. (2004, p. 676)
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In the case of Toronto the competitive city was characterized by entrepreneurialism, revanchism and differential social segregation, often couched in a language of opportunity and diversity (Kipfer and Keil, 2002). Neoliberal urban governance has taken hold in what can be termed, following Erik Swyngedouw (2005, 2007), the local state of post-politics, built on the political neutralization of dissent through cooptation and marginalization of critique in current urban governance agendas. The right to the city

became redefined, in many instances, as the right of the consumer to privatized urban space and differential commodities on the marketplace rather then the right of the urban inhabitants to the possibilities the urbanized societies have to offer and to the historical achievements previous social struggles have yielded (Mitchell, 2003) (Figure 2). Just as local welfare states were most needed by a growing and diversifying clientele, they were undercut and much responsibility was shifted to the voluntary sector or to the patients, clients and citizens at the receiving end of state assistance. At the same time, the organizations of affected communities and individuals changed their strategies. Chouinard and Crooks have examined, for example, how
disability organizations are experiencing significant pressures to change how they deliver services and support to disabled people in need. These include pressures to diminish levels of service provision to clients,

Figure 2

Politics, culture and consumerism, Berlin, Potsdamer Platz, April 2009.

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particularly those in greatest need, to reduce staffing levels and institute survival strategies that negatively impact working conditions, to rely even more heavily upon volunteer labour, and to modify their operations and organizations in a struggle to cope with harsh neoliberal conditions. (2008, p. 173)

Third sector and security services, for example, became part of the overall shadow state on which much of neoliberal governmentality came to rest (Eick et al., 2003, 2007). Under these conditions, as Harvey said, politics changed: This is a world in which the neoliberal ethic of intense possessive individualism, and its cognate of political withdrawal from collective forms of action, becomes the template for human socialization (2008, p. 32). In terms of the urban politics of neoliberalization, there was a re-bourgeoisement of the political process (the renewed political activism of more conservative urban middle classes in lieu of working class or popular groups in liaison with progressive middleclass groups); there was also an internationalization of politics as inter-urban competition became a game played out locally through benchmarking and market-oriented performance standards against which all social services came to be measured. At the same time, the registers of collective political action changed noticeably, became selective and geared towards specific classes and other social groups: more coercive political action by the state was directed against racialized youth, for example, while evocative, creative types of politics and governance were offered to other segments of the urban population; and while public spaces became more and more restricted and policed, more innovative uses of privatized, festivalized and spectacularized spaces were created to capture the imagination of a new politics of lifestyle, talent, performance, consumption and events (Florida, 2002; Lehrer, 2005, 2006). Urban regions became the collective actor and strategic terrain in the globalized struggle for location of individual enterprises,

sectors of the economy, branch plants of multinational corporations, creative workers, museums, sports teams and more fleeting imagined benefits such as the Olympics, world exhibitions, large scientific congresses and so forth (Boudreau et al., 2007). The neoliberalization of urban-regional governance often entailed intense pressures on the public economy as privatization and downloading were part of the rescaling of government architectures. In sum, then, cities and regions have been both prime sites of and major laboratories of neoliberal restructuring and state rescaling (Brenner and Theodore, 2002; Brenner, 2004, 2009; Keil and Mahon, 2009). Yet, when we speak of urban neoliberalism and neoliberalization today, we refer to a strongly contradictory and contradicted processa contested landscape of social struggles (Leitner et al., 2007). Also, many programs that have been brought in by aggressive roll-out governments in earlier years have been shown to have little or detrimental effect and have been rescinded by the same or future governments (for the Ontario case see Boudreau et al., 2009). This is not to belittle the devastating impact of decades of neoliberal-led capitalist restructuring. Any Hartz IV recipient in Germany can attest to the cruelty of structural adjustment on his or her back (Figure 3). The poor and the working class have come through these devastations as the true creative class (Wilson and Keil, 2008). It is also undisputed that the strategic positions from which the left has resisted and contested have been hollowed out, as trade unions, social movements and progressive political parties have been among the losers of the political game accompanying neoliberalization in many, even progressive jurisdictions. The terrain has been thoroughly bounded by the limits set through normalized neoliberal governmentalities. These new policies did, of course, not remain unopposed. And while under the hegemony of neoliberalization most critical political forces were pushed into a register between criminalization and creativity, there

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Figure 3

Weekly demonstrators against Hartz IV social welfare reform in Frankfurt, Germany, July 2008.

has been growing unrest or at least unease about the victimization of large parts of the urban population (Leitner et al., 2007), and struggles to democratize urban politics have occurred in many places (Purcell, 2008). Not everywhere was doom and gloom and neoliberal compliance. In Porto Alegre, for example, new forms of radical municipalism were tested; in Europe, many redgreen governments defended progressive agendas, and social movements continued to see the city as their main terrain of action (Nicholls, 2008).

A new urban politics Urban and regional regulation, widely seen as having included often simultaneous processes of roll-back and roll-out neoliberalism (Peck and Tickell, 2002), has now moved to a third moment, roll-with-it neoliberalization. Politically, this contains primarily two elements:

(a) neoliberal governmentality has been generalized to the point that it does not have to be established aggressively through an explicit policy of roll-back and roll-out (as happened, for example, during the Harris years in Ontario; Keil, 2002); and (b) the farreaching crises of regulation that have gripped the capitalist urban system as a result of neoliberal roll-out now demand new orientations in collective action that involve both reformed neoliberal elite practices and elite reaction to widespread contestation of neoliberal regulation. I propose to typologically capture the range of potential kinds of collective action in this period as Roll-with-it 1 (referring to more authoritarian, capitaloriented, market-serving policies and political constellations) and Roll-with-it 2 (meaning more democratic, populist, reformist, ecological options) (Table 1). The two versions of roll-with-it governance and politics often exist side by side and many current governments that struggle to find ways to address the

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Possible pathways of urban politics in an era of roll-with-it neoliberalization Roll-with-it neoliberalization 2 Governance; neoreformism New forms of communal service provision; cooperative ownership; community-based ecological modernization schemes in cities Crisis capitalism Global cooperation in public health New multilateralism Transparency and Rechtsstaat Melt-down Ecological modernization; techno-fixes New public infrastructures; transit, etc. New public health debates Contestation, alternatives, hope Political liberation; the right to the city Politics of hope

Table 1

Roll-with-it neoliberalization 1 Authoritarian government; revanchism Splintering urbanism

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Disaster capitalism Infection as metaphor of globalization American empire New normal Financial capitalism Militaryurban complex Automobile production; road building Privatization of public health assets; abstention policies; control; illness redefined as wellness

Yes we can! Rising awareness and positive politics of health World Social Forum Civil society based Regulation; redistribution Peace economies; environmental justice Off the grid ecologies, cycling, community energy systems Re-communalization of health care

current crisis are Janus-faced. Blackgreen or redred coalitions in Germany, for example, express some of the spectrum of realpolitical reactions to the challenges of the current period. Alongside, and often intertwined with official politics, are areas of contestation and resistance that open up possibilities of change which point beyond the limits of neoliberalization. Attached to these ideal types of neoliberal politics in the current period are possible new political orientations that transcend the horizon of current roll-with-it neoliberalization. Globalized urbanization, then, continues largely in a neoliberal context but it also opens new conditions for reformist politics (official and not) and contestation. Neoliberal governmentalities in a globalized urban world have been normalized despite ongoing contestations. Larner et al. have captured the new complexity in a period of what they call after neoliberalism in an analysis of New Zealand:
the economic and social configurations that characterize after neoliberalism are emerging out of a range of political projects that are only now being consciously aligned into a

new stance on how to participate in the globalizing economy. Each of these projects constitutes its objects and subjects of governance in distinctive ways. Moreover, while there are many conjunctures between them, the ambitions of these projects may work, if not in opposition then at least tangentially to each otherglobal versus domestic orientations, elitist versus democratic impulses, national versus regional economic ambitions, economic versus social capital. (2009, p. 222)

Yet there is, at this point, little imagination beyond thinking neoliberally. Even in the remarkable municipal anti-neoliberal experiments of Latin America or in the leftist regions of France, for example, we have seen markets on the march in areas of collective and individual consumption, have seen campaigns for efficiency in government programs and bureaucracies and have seen the gap between rich and poor grow wider. But what we do register now is the end of the conventional crisis-induced restructuring that had been characteristic of socio-spatiality since the 1970s which operated by simple replacement of one form of doctrine with another and a sequential and sometimes

KEIL:THE URBAN POLITICS OF ROLL-WITH-IT NEOLIBERALIZATION 241 simultaneous deployment of roll-back and roll-out measures. Instead, we are entering a period of profound uncertainty about the future path. Recent state actions to stem the wave of financial crises around the globe contained some important aspects of finding new modes of engagement, to alter the very premises on which capitalist restructuring has been built for a generation. As elite strategies for survival of the fittest assets and most competitive investments abound, alternative, critical and contesting counterstrategies will have to be recalibrated, too. While the previous era created governance conflicts around social cohesion and economic competitiveness, the current debate moves to new sectors of social concern, which broaden the agenda of urban futures in Europe and North America. In the context of this development, urban governance has been expanded to encompass fields traditionally not included in considerations on urban political regulation. Among these new policy areas/fields are public health, human security, infrastructure and urban ecology (Figure 4). Despite the pressing issues served up to urban and regional agendas in an era of post-SARS, pre-avian flu (Ali and Keil, 2008), post-9/11 concerns around security, massive splintering of urban infrastructure systems and continued pressures on urban environments, the political and policy programs of cities have been brought under the public hegemony of creative economics and cultural politics. In past decades cities have been the grounds of rearguard battles around collective consumption (neoliberalization of services, for example) as well as around workers status and rights as well as jobs in general. These struggles have not disappeared. But there are now new collective actor constellations (hegemonic and subaltern), which push for a rather new type of urban politics. As urban elites struggle to reorient themselves in a frantic world of inter-urban competition, they introduce drastic austerity policies on their budgets and communities while toying with concepts such as the creative class and the culture industry to save their position vis--vis other urban regions who follow the same path (Peck, 2005). While many progressives justifiably find the creative turn threatening to progressive political agendas, the politics of the creative city, a celebration of culturalized hegemony will have to be engaged with. The idea of creativity will need to be linked to a redistributive anti-poverty politics in new and innovative ways (Wilson and Keil, 2008). As we come to terms with the dramatic consequences of the financial crisis for the coffers of cities and communities, globally mobile investors that had once been seen as saviours of public transportation and housing are now moving their assets out or fail altogether. In this situation, a courageous, politically correct and often populist appeal to recollectivize the ways in which we consume shelter and move around will unfortunately not be enough. New forms of post-Keynesian modes of collective consumption will need to be invented. Poverty and social polarization have themselves reached catastrophic levels in many post-neoliberal cities. But they are now made worse by the threat and reality of a politics of social and ecological catastrophe in an age of calculated disaster capitalism (Klein, 2007). This includes a progressive politics of risk and vulnerability that does not abandon the

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Figure 4 Flu preparedness billboard, Athens, Georgia, October 2008.

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CITY VOL. 13, NO. 23 lives. Any surprise about systematic inequities in the landscapes from which people have to escape in times of crisis can thusly be avoided (Young and Keil, forthcoming).

field of dealing with cataclysmic or pandemic threats to the statist and authoritarian right or the liberal and deregulated markets. Such a reorientation of progressive strategy would also need to extend to a politics of mobility which lives up to the multivariant needs of a widely differentiated urban society and still is guided by fundamental social justice concerns of affordable mobility for all (Cass et al., 2005). There needs to be an open and positive reengagement by the urban left with a politics of socio-technologies and socio-natures in order, as Coutard and Guy have proposed, to repoliticize our panic cities with a politics of hope: we need to identify an urban technological politics that breaks free from technological pessimism and offers some hope for change (Coutard and Guy, 2007, p. 731; Monstadt, forthcoming). Similarly, a politics of dwelling and place must break down the boundaries established by gentrificationwhich Smith (2002) denounced as a global strategy of neoliberalismand reintroduce dignity into the struggle for cooperative and collective ownership, rental housing and against homelessness. Steve Graham (forthcoming) ends his chilling book on cities and war with an appeal for political resistance. It is a difficult proposition because we cannot fight the fire that has been brought to our cities with fire. We need to disable the militaryurban complex that chokes the urban system with other means. Similarly, we need to recapture a sense of public health with the emphasis on both aspects of this compound term. An awareness of and a struggle for democratic forms of organizing healthy lives on a continuum of social justice concerns and medical considerations rather than in a catastrophic regime of health and wealth in peace times for some, and poverty and sickness in times of crisis for most (Ali and Keil, 2008). We learned from Hurricane Katrina that dealing with disaster does not start once the dam breaks but has to begin in the preparation and affirmative action taken to support the infrastructures of the neighbourhoods and worlds in which the poor and disadvantaged live their everyday

Conclusion This paper has argued that there have been different phases and moments of urban neoliberalization that have been linked through dialectical contradictions: in the 1990s a narrative of outside influence was present in much of the debate on neoliberalization and the city. Cities were ostensibly attacked by neoliberal policies and overwhelmed by foreign concepts derived from an alien Thatcherism or Reaganism. Rollback of more welfarist modes of social regulation and roll-out of more market-oriented forms, for example, defined the battleground of social struggles in many cities in the 1980s and 1990s. In the 2000s, we have experienced neoliberalization from within: in Toronto, for example, this marked the shift from the mayoralty of conservative Mel Lastman to that of social democrat David Miller (Boudreau et al., 2009). To some degree, this latest shift has entailed a naturalization and normalization of neoliberal concepts in public policy and everyday life. I have called this process roll-with-it neoliberalization in order to capture a new phase and moment of neoliberalization at this present time. This shift also pointed to the implication and collusion of most actors in urban politics with the doctrines and beliefs set by three decades of neoliberalization. Seen as an internalized process now, and not as an external threat to a (more collective, solidaric, redistributive) social mode of regulation, neoliberalization builds more and more on the existence of already socialized neoliberal subjects that have internalized neoliberal governmentalities. The paper has argued that while roll-with-it neoliberalization has changed the game and moved the boundaries of urban politics, it has also created new contradictions that demonstrate its own

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KEIL:THE URBAN POLITICS OF ROLL-WITH-IT NEOLIBERALIZATION 243 unsustainability as a mode of regulation. As the financial and economic architecture of global neoliberalism threatened to fail, and communities world wide were thrown into the maelstrom of crisis, the neoliberal subject crashed. Viewed by many neoliberals, who dont believe in society as a concept, as the centre piece of the myriad rational profit seeking decisions that define our existence, the neoliberal subject appears to have come to the limits of its capacities (Dardot and Laval, 2009). Perhaps in the next decade, we will see a departure from neoliberalization? There may be two larger options if that occurs. We could see stepped up polarization, fascism, war. Or we could alternatively see a renewed emphasis on redistribution, democracy, peace. Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin have said recently:
It is possible that a new form of social rule within capitalism may emerge to succeed neoliberalism. But given how far subordinate social forces need to go to reorganize effectively, it is most likely that the proximate alternatives to neoliberalism will either be a form of authoritarian capitalism or a new form of reformist social rule that would reflect only a weak class realignment. (2008)
implying that neoliberalism, in all its many differentiated forms, has now congealed into something of a structural whole with its ideological state apparatuses firmly aligned with the project of making capitalism free from social constraints that had been put in place as a result of 100 years of class and other struggles. Pointing beyond Althusser, though, is the insight gained from Lefebvre and Foucault that such a project can only succeed through the colonization of everyday urbanity and through the recasting of the technologies of power that rule urban space. I would like to thank Margit Mayer who pointed out this important distinction between rhetoric and reality of change. While I focus on the discursive shifts in political programs and rhetoric particularly since the emerging global crisis, I also rest my argument on a decade of empirical work in areas such as the urban governance of global infectious disease outbreaks, the relationships of homelessness and disease, the urban political ecology of (failing) social and technical infrastructures in cities and the restructuring of governance in globalized city regions. References to these real (rather than just discursive) areas of neoliberalized urban reality are sometimes made explicit, but mostly serve as implicit reference to the arguments developed here.

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References
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In all likelihood neoliberalisms moments roll-back, roll-out and roll-with-itwill continue to exist side-by-side, layered or in rhyzomatic embrace for a while and will demand a certain nimbleness on the side of its declared political adversaries.

Acknowledgements Research for this paper was supported by SSHRC and Infrastructure Canada. I thank Karen Bakker for her comments on an earlier draft.

Notes
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I am aware of the Althusserian undertones of the term social formation. In this sense, I am

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Roger Keil is the Director of the City Institute at York University, Canada. Email: rkeil@yorku.ca