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The theory of capitalist urbanization posits that the built form serves as a crucial sink through which overaccumulated capital is "switched" from industrial production into long-term investments in urban infrastructure. Since Harvey's (1978) deployment of the theory, researchers have attempted to empirically substantiate the switching thesis with limited success. Christophers (2011)

Austerity appears to be a globally coordinated restructuring process, where international and national governments cooperate to stymie economic crisis and socialize the costs of systemic economic failure. However, austerity is also shaped from the bottom-up. This paper examines the 2008 bankruptcy of Vallejo, California. This city of under 120,000 people became the first municipal bankruptcy in the Great Recession period. We explore how it became the first to fail. In doing so, we outline the finances of a city whose entrepreneurial activities continued to flounder, making it a good candidate for austerity reforms. However, we also find the city home to a political movement long predicting a municipal default. When economic crisis hit, this movement pushed for the city to make an unprecedented test of Chapter 9 bankruptcy law. Vallejo's bankruptcy, and the related changes to Chapter 9 law, are therefore interpreted as events that were generated by systemic conditions but ultimately precipitated by decisions taken at the municipal level. We therefore call for austerity to be understood as both a top-down and bottom-up process of state restructuring.

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Poststructuralist perspectives need to be reconciled with political economic readings of urban globalization. One approach complements the other: the enactment of distantiated circuits and the territorialization of fl ows occur within existing geographies of uneven development while contingently reproducing or reshaping such spatial conditions of possibility. We argue that broadening the realm of critical urbanism is particularly relevant for researching peripheral entrepreneurialisms and their inherent (im) mobilities, conspicuous ambition paired with unavoidable constraints. This paper focuses on Tanger City Center, a landmark redevelopment controversial for its exclusionary designs and troubled inception. Adopting mobile methods with relational perspectives, we retrace the translocal negotiation of this symptomatic assemblage. However, we show that its territorialization cannot be understood apart from the statesponsored remaking of Tangier into an expansive yet also unequal and fragmented city-region. Furthermore, underneath globalist discourse, the assemblage evinces circumscribed (trans)national agency at the planning stage, while subsequent frictions and disruptions punctuate the construction rhythm. Alongside its theoretical thrust, the paper contributes to: (a) the advancement of explicitly urban interpretations of globalization of the Middle East and North Africa, particularly Morocco's emerging neoliberal geographies under King Mohammed VI; and (b) the diversifi cation of narratives of globalization-led urban change by theorizing entrepreneurial predicaments from off the map of global city imaginations.