Category: Issue 3-2024
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The Neoliberal Agenda
Our forthcoming issue will focus on the ideology of a neoliberal market and its consequences, in particular the destruction of space and community. This will affect living spaces and the individual within society. To use the metaphor of an ecosystem, the worldwide conditions generated by a recent neoliberal market constitute the encompassing socioeconomic and cultural…
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The Neoliberal City, Democracy and Participation
This paper outlines some characteristics of neoliberalism and examines their impact upon the city and upon democracy and participation in urban spaces. The paper first maps out some themes of neoliberal ideals. Following this, and focusing in particular on the United Kingdom, it explores how neoliberalism has embedded itself in cities. The paper then discusses…
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Neoliberal Urbanism: Public Space, Liberty, Equality, and Community
Public space is premised on the free and equal access of citizens but its ‘order’ is always a precarious balance between homogeneity and diversity, freedom and oppression, superficial contact and deeper engagement. How is this balance tested and shifted by neoliberal urbanism when the city is both a site and agent in the process? Is…
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The Failure of Neoliberalism: The Case of Housing
Housing is a high-order human need in all societies, at all times. Under capitalism, especially in its neoliberal era, access to housing that meets basic human needs has been denied to an increasing proportion of the population. This has and is resulting in rising levels of over-crowding and homelessness that both undermines the productivity of…
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Parasites of Innovation
This critical interrogation of the neoliberal agenda pivots around its usurpation of creativity as crystalized in the creative city and related urban politics in the global North. Cities being the engines of the economy (Jane Jacobs and Peter Hall), Florida and Landry advocate the creative city as the real motor force of the neoliberal economy…
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From neoliberalism to authoritarianism in the perspective of socio-psychologial characterology
Today’s trend toward authoritarianism is not a rejection of neoliberalism, but rather a continuation of it through other means. This thesis can be supported by looking at the debate about changes in social character in social psychological characterology. Under neoliberalism, the authoritarian character (Fromm 1932) as a threat to democracy gave way to the marketing…
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No Such Thing as Society
This article looks at literary texts set in Johannesburg (Ivan Vladislavić, Portrait with Keys), London (Ian McEwan, Saturday) and Atlanta (FX series Atlanta, created by Donald Glover) to articulate the impact of neoliberalism in each text’s depiction of crime and communal urban society. By examining both how characters in each text react to crime, as…