This paper uses several events in New York in the late 1990s to launch two central arguments about the changing relationship between neoliberal urbanism and so–called globalization. First, much as the neoliberal state becomes a consummate agent of—rather than a regulator of—the market, the new revanchist urbanism that replaces liberal urban policy in cities of the advanced capitalist world increasingly expresses the impulses of capitalist production rather than social reproduction. As globalization bespeaks a rescaling of the global, the scale of the urban is recast. The true global cities may be the rapidly growing metropolitan economies of Asia, Latin America, and (to a lesser extent) Africa, as much as the command centers of Europe, North America and Japan. Second, the process of gentrification, which initially emerged as a sporadic, quaint, and local anomaly in the housing markets of some command–center cities, is now thoroughly generalized as an urban strategy that takes over from liberal urban policy. No longer isolated or restricted to Europe, North America, or Oceania, the impulse behind gentrification is now generalized; its incidence is global, and it is densely connected into the circuits of global capital and cultural circulation. What connects these two arguments is the shift from an urban scale defined according to the conditions of social reproduction to one in which the investment of productive capital holds definitive precedence.

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Gentrification has changed in ways that are related to larger economic and political restructuring. Among these changes is the return of heavy state intervention in the process. This paper explores heightened state involvement in gentrification by examining the process in three New York City neighbourhoods: Clinton, Long Island City, and DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass). We argue that state intervention has returned for three key reasons. First, continued devolution of federal states has placed even more pressure on local states to actively pursue redevelopment and gentrification as ways of generating tax revenue. Second, the diffusion of gentrification into more remote portions of the urban landscape poses profit risks that are beyond the capacity of individual capitalists to manage. Third, the larger shift towards post-Keynesian governance has unhinged the state from the project of social reproduction and as such, measures to protect the working class are more easily contested.

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This paper uses several events in New York in the late 1990s to launch two central arguments about the changing relationship between neoliberal urbanism and so-called globalization. First, much as the neoliberal state becomes a consummate agent ofrather than a regulator of-the market, the new revanchist urbanism that replaces liberal urban policy in cities of the advanced capitalist world increasingly expresses the impulses of capitalist production rather than social reproduction. As globalization bespeaks a rescaling of the global, the scale of the urban is recast. The true global cities may be the rapidly growing metropolitan economies of Asia, Latin America, and (to a lesser extent) Africa, as much as the command centers of Europe, North America and Japan. Second, the process of gentrification, which initially emerged as a sporadic, quaint, and local anomaly in the housing markets of some command-center cities, is now thoroughly generalized as an urban strategy that takes over from liberal urban policy. No longer isolated or restricted to Europe, North America, or Oceania, the impulse behind gentrification is now generalized; its incidence is global, and it is densely connected into the circuits of global capital and cultural circulation. What connects these two arguments is the shift from an urban scale defined according to the conditions of social reproduction to one in which the investment of productive capital holds definitive precedence.Four sets of events in New York City at the end of the 1990s succinctly captured some of the central contours of the new neoliberal urbanism. The first concerns capital and the state. In the last days of 1998, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani announced a huge "Christmas gift" to the city's most elite capitalists. Responding to "threats" that the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) might relocate a mile across the Hudson River to New Jersey, Giuliani announced a $900 million taxpayer subsidy, ostensibly to keep the stock exchange in the city. This was only the latest and largest in a series of "geobribes" paid by the city to global corporations. The subsidy includes $400 million with which the city and state will build a new 650,000-square-foot Wall Street office for the NYSE. There was never any pretense that financial need was even an issue in this deal, since the subsidy came at a time when the

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The Homeless Vehicle is a jarring intervention in the landscapes of the evicted. Designed by Krzysztof Wodiczko, a New York artist, the vehicle was first exhibited in 1988. The prototype was constructed in consultation with homeless men and subsequently women; it was first tested in the streets of New York's Lower East Side, then elsewhere in the city and in Philadelphia. An ongoing project, it has undergone continual revision and modification, and there are now four variants. Its design and development has been funded by several art galleries and public art councils as well as by the artist himself, but it is more than simply a critical artwork heavy with symbolic irony; the Homeless Vehicle is deliberately practical. Indeed it works as critical art only to the extent that it is simultaneously functional. In this symbiosis of the functional and symbolic object, the Homeless Vehicle reveals a vital dimension of a spatialized politics, namely the importance of scale. Wodiczko's Homeless Vehicle and the Poliscar that followed it vividly express this politics of scale, and I begin with a discussion of these projects. There follows a brief discussion arguing more broadly that we lack any sophisticated language of spatial differentiation, and this theoretical project is taken up in the third section where I elaborate upon a schematic theory of the production of scale.