Grappling with Smart City Politics in an Era of Market Triumphalism

Abstract

New 'sustainable' urban imaginaries are increasingly taking root in cities and regions around the world. Some notable representative examples of these include: new urbanism (Calthorpe, 1993), compact urban development (Urban Task Force, 2005) and smart growth (Flint, 2006). Proponents of these approaches argue that they are ostensibly built around a new consensus between the planning organisations at various scales, private developers, environmentalists and other relevant non-governmental interests, such as affordable housing advocates. In some sense, then, it might plausibly be argued that these new urban imaginaries transcend the parochial interests that ordinarily punctuate traditional urban and regional politics. Why might this be the case? Proponents of these imaginaries would contend that it is partly due to the fact that smart growth and new urbanist developments are designed to incorporate the tripartite vision of urban sustainability-economic prosperity, ecological integrity and social equity. Moreover, these approaches not only rely on grand visions of future urban utopias; they also incorporate the rhetoric of 'practical' visions and plain 'common sense' language, in the process broadening their appeal to contemporary policy agendas across the global landscape.And yet at the same time as governments, planners, environmentalists and private interests are actively calling for these new urban development imaginarieswhich can be viewed to encourage a revitalised role for more comprehensive and 'collaborative' planning-a discourse of market triumphalism has been continuing to sweep its way through different spatial scales of government. States-local, regional and national-seem to be rolling back their own authority and rolling out market-based approaches to urban development-what (Peck, 2004) has referred to as 'stateauthored market fundamentalism'. Some of the most notable impacts of this neoliberal

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