This paper revisits the question of the political and theoretical status of neoliberalism, making the case for a process-based analysis of "neoliberalization." Drawing on the experience of the heartlands of neoliberal discursive production, North America and Western Europe, it is argued that the transformative and adaptive capacity of this farreaching political-economic project has been repeatedly underestimated. Amongst other things, this calls for a close reading of the historical and geographical (re)constitution of the process of neoliberalization and of the variable ways in which different "local neoliberalisms" are embedded within wider networks and structures of neoliberalism. The paper's contribution to this project is to establish a stylized distinction between the destructive and creative moments of the process of neoliberalism-which are characterized in terms of "roll-back" and "roll-out" neoliberalism, respectivelyand then to explore some of the ways in which neoliberalism, in its changing forms, is playing a part in the reconstruction of extralocal relations, pressures, and disciplines.

This article develops a critique of the recently popularized concepts of the ‘creative class’ and ‘creative cities’. The geographic reach and policy salience of these discourses is explained not in terms of their intrinsic merits, which can be challenged on a number of grounds, but as a function of the profoundly neoliberalized urban landscapes across which they have been traveling. For all their performative display of liberal cultural innovation, creativity strategies barely disrupt extant urban‐policy orthodoxies, based on interlocal competition, place marketing, property‐ and market‐led development, gentrification and normalized socio‐spatial inequality. More than this, these increasingly prevalent strategies extend and recodify entrenched tendencies in neoliberal urban politics, seductively repackaging them in the soft‐focus terms of cultural policy. This has the effect of elevating creativity to the status of a new urban imperative — defining new sites, validating new strategies, placing new subjects and establishing new stakes in the realm of competitive interurban relations. L’article présente une critique des concepts de ‘classe créative’ et ‘villes créatives’ publiés récemment. La portée géographique et la pertinence politique de ces discours s’expliquent non par leurs mérites intrinsèques, ceux‐ci pouvant être remis en question à plus d’un titre, mais en tant que fonction des paysages urbains fortement néolibéraux qu’ils ont traversés. Quant à leur manifestation concrète de l’innovation culturelle libérale, les stratégies de créativité dérangent à peine les orthodoxies qui subsistent en politique urbaine, fondées sur une compétition interlocale, un marketing de lieu, une expansion axée sur la propriété et le marché, un embourgeoisement et une inégalité socio‐spatiale normalisée. Mais surtout, ces stratégies toujours plus présentes prolongent et recodifient des tendances bien installées en politique urbaine néolibérale, les rhabillant de manière attrayante dans un flou artistique terminologique de politique culturelle. Ainsi, la créativité est élevée au statut de nouvel impératif urbain pour définir de nouveaux sites, valider de nouvelles stratégies, positionner de nouveaux sujets et instaurer de nouveaux enjeux dans la concurrence interurbaine.

Across the broad field of heterodox political economy, ‘neoliberalism’ appears to have become a rascal concept – promiscuously pervasive, yet inconsistently defined, empirically imprecise and frequently contested. Controversies regarding its precise meaning are more than merely semantic. They generally flow from underlying disagreements regarding the sources, expressions and implications of contemporary regulatory transformations. In this article, we consider the handling of ‘neoliberalism’ within three influential strands of heterodox political economy – the varieties of capitalism approach; historical materialist international political economy; and governmentality approaches. While each of these research traditions sheds light on contemporary processes of market‐oriented regulatory restructuring, we argue that each also underplays and/or misreads the systemically uneven, or ‘variegated’, character of these processes. Enabled by a critical interrogation of how each approach interprets the geographies, modalities and pathways of neoliberalization processes, we argue that the problematic of variegation must be central to any adequate account of marketized forms of regulatory restructuring and their alternatives under post‐1970s capitalism. Our approach emphasizes the cumulative impacts of successive ‘waves’ of neoliberalization upon uneven institutional landscapes, in particular: (a) their establishment of interconnected, mutually recursive policy relays within an increasingly transnational field of market‐oriented regulatory transfer; and (b) their infiltration and reworking of the geoinstitutional frameworks, or ‘rule regimes’, within which regulatory experimentation unfolds. This mode of analysis has significant implications for interpreting the current global economic crisis.

This paper revisits the question of the political and theoretical status of neoliberalism, making the case for a process-based analysis of "neoliberalization." Drawing on the experience of the heartlands of neoliberal discursive production, North America and Western Europe, it is argued that the transformative and adaptive capacity of this farreaching political-economic project has been repeatedly underestimated. Amongst other things, this calls for a close reading of the historical and geographical (re)constitution of the process of neoliberalization and of the variable ways in which different "local neoliberalisms" are embedded within wider networks and structures of neoliberalism. The paper's contribution to this project is to establish a stylized distinction between the destructive and creative moments of the process of neoliberalism-which are characterized in terms of "roll-back" and "roll-out" neoliberalism, respectivelyand then to explore some of the ways in which neoliberalism, in its changing forms, is playing a part in the reconstruction of extralocal relations, pressures, and disciplines.

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The article critically engages with the `varieties of capitalism' school, which since its origins in the early 1990s has been consolidated into one of the most influential strands in comparative and heterodox political economy. While the `varieties' approach can be credited with the development of several of the most evocative stylized facts in heterodox political economy, having served as a potent foil against the orthodox globalization thesis, its alternative vision of a bipolar global economy comprising two competing capitalisms is found to be wanting. The approach is limited by its methodological nationalism, a tendency towards static analysis and latent institutional functionalism, and by an inability to adequately balance national specificity and path-dependency on the one hand with common underlying tendencies in capitalist restructuring on the other. Nevertheless, the varieties approach has spawned an influential account of the spatiality of advanced capitalism from which economic geography can certainly learn, and to which it has much to contribute.

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