The compatibility between an agenda for sustainable urban development and the neoliberal economic restructuring of urban space has been observed within cities in developed countries across the globe. From providing economic support to local 'green' industries to creating bike lanes, municipalities develop sustainability strategies that are designed to boost their competitive advantage. Moreover, municipalities are responding to demands from popular social movements and national governments that seek to reconfigure societal relationships with the natural environment in cities. Cities are increasingly understood not as part of the ecological crisis but as part of the solution, or as places where alternative patterns of sustainable consumption and new socially and ecologically responsible industries can be developed. Over the last decade in Austin, environmental sustainability has become an uncontested paradigm that has progressively shaped the city's urban space and policy. Two competing conceptualizations of the environment, so-called 'environmental' and 'just' sustainability groups, are explored in this article. I demonstrate how the notion of environmental sustainability has been selectively incorporated into the hegemonic vision of Austin's strategic growth plan. I argue that the dominance of this conceptualization is best understood by asking what counts as the 'environment' for environmentalists, and understanding the unstated assumptions about the environment shared by the business community and environmentalists.
This paper explores the development of the smart growth programme in Austin, Texas. Drawing on growth machine theory, it documents the conflict in Austin in the 1980s and 1990s between pro-growth and anti-growth machine coalitions over urban sprawl. Around that time, the business community also began to focus on the redevelopment of city's downtown and the need to address the problems of crime and homelessness. By the mid 1990s, the need to 'clean up the streets' was increasingly coupled with arguments about being 'green'. It is argued that the development of the particular urban sustainability compromise that emerged in Austin, which has become a core part of the city's competitiveness, was an institutional innovation made possible by struggles between the business community and local environmental activists. The institutional compromise, however, was achieved only by a spatial compromise that shifted the costs of growth from natural ecological onto the city's homeless population.
While many have recognized since the 1970s the strong relationship between culture and urban renewal, particularly as cities began to use cultural amenities to change their images and lure potential investors, little has been written about how and why cultural assets may be valued investments in their own right. There is at least one notable exception, in the work of David Harvey, and this approach takes as its starting point the importance of the monopoly aspects of culture, particularly for rents, competition and fixed capital. In part, I bring Harvey's theoretical insights on the political economy of culture to bear on the case of Glasgow, Scotland, in the 1980s, and particularly its nomination as the European City of Culture, with particular attention paid to how the economics of culture is related to local politics.
Over the last two decades, urban regime theory has become one of the most dominant paradigms of thought in urban studies. In particular, regime theory offers a complex account of urban governance, or how local governments, the business communities, and community organizations gain the capacity to shape the policies that affect cities, that is, govern. Although regime theory is a dominant theory in urban studies, it does, nevertheless, have its share of detractors, and one criticism has been its failure to take into account geographical scale. While there is an acknowledgment in urban regime theory of wider economic processes, such as the broad transformations in international and national trade, investment, finance, etc., or the role played by federal or state governments, the bias has remained mostly local, particularly in regards to urban governance. In urban regime theory literature the policies and actions of international and national institutions either nicely conjoin with local interests or are nearly totally absent. Due to this oversight, urban regime theory tends to underemphasize how the capacity to govern a city effectively is sometimes the result of the interaction of actions of people at multiple scales. This article attempts to address this oversight in an analysis of Glasgow, Scotland, during the 1980s. By focusing on the role of the European City of Culture in the revitalization of the city, this article demonstrates how the capacity for a ruling coalition to transform the city and to govern effectively was the consequence of the policy and administrative actions undertaken at other geographical scales.
This paper investigates two trends in contemporary forms of urban entrepreneurialism: (a) an increasing focus on cultivating entrepreneurship, and (b) the promotion of entrepreneurial ecosystems that leverage culture and sustainability to attract and support entrepreneurs. We argue that these trends signify a shift from the entrepreneurial city to new strategies that shape cities for entrepreneurs. Underpinning this development is a broad normalization and valorization of entrepreneurship as the dominant pathway for urban economic growth. Additionally, we show how sustainability and greening are enrolled in these economic development strategies, promising to bolster the environmental image of the city. We highlight these two changes by focusing on the intellectual foundations of the technopolis concept in Austin, Texas, and the development of a cleantech entrepreneurial ecosystem that has increasingly been leveraged in Austin’s entrepreneurial growth efforts. We offer insights into how the growing trend of “making cities for entrepreneurs” is reshaping urban entrepreneurial governance, potentially exacerbating inequalities in urban development.
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