Metropolitics

Useful Transgressions: Informality, Power, and Urban Life in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay

Ryan Thomas Devlin — 2026-02-17T06:00:00Z

Urban informality has been theorized as a process operating at the edges and margins under capitalist urbanization. Yet Outlaw Capital argues that the gray spaces of informality are essential to the vitality of cities, leveraged for different ends by elites and the poor alike.
On the Paraguay side of the Paraná River in Ciudad del Este, smugglers load up small boats with things like electronics and cigarettes bound for the opposite shore and eventually for consumers in Brazil, bypassing

- Reviews / informality, Latin America, South America, Global South, Paraguay, Ciudad del Este, neoliberalism, capitalism, urbanism, urbanization, gray spaces, informal urbanism, urban governance

Self-Determination for Who?

John Arena — 2023-11-17T06:00:00Z

Newark mayor Cory Booker garnered national accolades, and tens of millions in foundation funding, to advance his neoliberal reform agenda for the city's public schools. Locally, though, he was met by a wave of popular opposition to his privatization drive and thus decided on an exit to the US Senate. His successor, Ras Baraka, rode that opposition to the city hall, though the demands of this movement also conflicted with his economic development agenda. John Arena looks at how Black

- Essays / Newark, Black Power, New Jersey, mayors, neoliberalism, self-determination, Black politics

New York City's Descent into Neoliberal Policy: A Review of Benjamin Holtzman's The Long Crisis

John Krinsky — 2022-07-19T05:00:00Z

Benjamin Holtzman's The Long Crisis tells the story of New York's prolonged descent into neoliberal policy. For those trying to innovate community-based solutions to the shredding of welfare-state programs, it is a cautionary tale of cooptation and twisted intentions.
Benjamin Holtzman's The Long Crisis is a sharp account of New York City's turn toward neoliberal governance over the last 50 years. In six substantive, jargon-free chapters covering low-income housing, middle-class rental

- Reviews / housing, neoliberalism, land use, real estate, urban renewal, New York

Urban Renewal in the USA: A Neoliberal Policy?

Thomas Kirszbaum & translated by Oliver Waine — 2019-05-03T05:00:00Z

By allowing demolitions and evictions in well-located working-class neighborhoods, urban renewal is sometimes described as a neoliberal policy, favorable to land and property investors. But this interpretation, founded on the trauma of postwar urban policies, only tells part of the story when it comes to understanding contemporary urban renewal in the United States.
The policy of urban renewal implemented in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s came to symbolize the collusion of local

- Essays / working-class neighborhoods, working classes, urban renewal, United States, urban policy, capitalism, neoliberalism, demolition, Department of Housing and Urban Development, HOPE VI program

Marielle Franco and Brazilian Democracy at a Crossroads

Natália Alves & Isabella Gonçalves Miranda & Felipe Magalhães — 2018-06-26T05:00:00Z

Marielle Franco's life and death raised questions about the limits of Brazil's New Republic. It revealed the rising stakes, particularly for women and people of color, following the 2016 coup. In this piece, urban activists Isabella Gonçalves and Natália Alves and geographer Felipe Magalhães place Franco's embodied politics as a direct challenge to the regressive policies and aggressive austerity of the current regime.
We live in times when a culture of violence is a vocal minority of the

- From the Field / social movement, security, violence, corruption, neoliberalism, Latin America, Brazil, LGBTQ+, feminism, activism, Rio de Janeiro, queer, critical racial awareness, austerity, militias, queer theory, state violence, coup

Shanghai's West Bund Cultural Corridor Exemplifies the Opportunities and Risks of State-Driven Cultural Development

Siqi Tu — 2018-05-08T05:00:00Z

The West Bund Cultural Corridor in Shanghai is the latest entrant in a global competition to attract investment by combining cultural institutions with real-estate megaprojects. But arrangements between the corridor's private art museums and institutions of the local and national state remain ambiguous, raising questions about economic elitism and artistic freedom.
China's contemporary art scene is on the rise, as is the number of private museums in China, most notably in Shanghai. The Long

- From the Field / culture, urban development, China, development, neoliberalism, arts, global cities, Shanghai, cultural district, arts district, arts-centered development, cultural corridor

When Cities Fail, Babies Die

Monica J. Casper — 2016-02-02T06:00:00Z

Detroit, Michigan is often identified as the worst city in the United States, with excessive poverty, racism, and social disorder. The city also faces high infant and maternal mortality rates. Monica Casper explores interconnections among these issues.
Motor City
Detroit, Michigan, has been in the news in recent years as a city in horrific decline, a post-apocalyptic hub of industrial collapse, white flight, acute poverty, and municipal malfeasance. Once the nation's economic engine with

- Essays / racism, Rust Belt, United States, poverty, race, Detroit, neoliberalism, biopolitics, necropolitics, infant mortality, Make Your Day, maternal mortality, urban decay, ruin porn

Visual Boredom: Commodification and Exclusion in Graffiti-Less Auckland

Ronald Kramer — 2015-05-26T04:50:00Z

A common argument against neoliberalism is that it makes cities all look alike. In this piece, sociologist Ronald Kramer discusses the fate of graffiti in Auckland, New Zealand. He argues that efforts to commodify urban space, routinely promoted by landed capitalists and facilitated by the neoliberal state, have resulted in a loss of social diversity and visual ennui.
Graffiti-writing culture in Auckland
In the early 1980s, Subway Art (1984) and Style Wars (1983), two of the earliest

- Debates / neoliberalism, graffiti, broken windows theory, exchange-value, New Zealand, Auckland, street art

The Other Side of Austin, Texas

Caitlyn Collins & Katherine Jensen & Kristine Kilanski & Javier Auyero — 2015-03-02T05:50:00Z

Despite a booming economy, Austin, Texas, is a city where inequalities persist and grow in the shadow of neoliberal governance. Ethnographer Javier Auyero and his students give us a preview of the book Invisible in Austin: Life and Labor in an American City, where they explore the rough and varied lives of the contemporary urban poor.
Working on the dark side
“There's a joke: What's the difference between a cocktail waitress and a stripper? Two weeks.” Raven laughs loudly. “I literally went

- From the Field / inequalities, United States, work, exclusion, ethnography, poverty, neoliberalization, insecurity, Austin, homelessness, precarity, marginality, neoliberalism, urban poor