Abstract
Drawing on the example of the UK, this chapter argues that the principal aim of neoliberal urban policy is to create less welfare dependent, more entrepreneurial, and responsible citizens through the establishment of new urban cultures and high-aspirational urban spaces. The chapter begins by discussing the work of Pierre Bourdieu and his concept of distinction. It then moves on to an assessment of British urban policy and the recent turn to a discourse of ‘aspirational citizenship’. It explores its uses as both a description of, and an explanation for, growing socio-economic inequalities in cities. In this way, the chapter argues, policy not only reproduces inequalities but also provides an individualised explanation for their existence and perpetuation. The chapter concludes by highlighting future research avenues and the value in re-thinking the cultural politics of neoliberal urban policy.
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Notes
- 1.
Bourdieu used the example of private education and the role it plays in reproducing class stratification, to examine how distinction is not only created through the formal procedures of educational attainment but also through a myriad of complex and subtle distinctions that are mobilised between different types of activities, procedures, and practices. Culturally-distinctive matrices of preferences are established in which school-based forms of class reproduction become shrouded by the discursive illusions of meritocracy and democratic openness.
- 2.
Chomsky describes the way in which US President Woodrow Wilson’s post-war advisor, Edward Bernays, characterised the use of public relations as a vehicle for ‘regimenting the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments its body of soldiers’. Government, Bernays argued, should seek to bend political priorities towards the needs of ‘intelligent minorities’, such as business elites, through the ‘conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses … to engineer consent’ (p. 20).
- 3.
The most significant of these has been New Deal for Communities initiative launched in 1998 that has spent over £2billion on projects in 39 of the most deprived urban neighbourhoods in the country, with indifferent success (see Lawless, Foden, Wilson, & Beatty, 2009).
- 4.
Such discourses follow a long tradition. Victorian commentators wrote openly about the concentrations of poverty within ‘rookery-like’ neighbourhoods in industrial cities and the ways in which destitution was perpetuated by concentrations of the wrong types of undeserving poor. In the 1960s authors such as Goffman (1963) highlighted the power of stigmas to reproduce existing social distinctions and differences (see also Harrington, 1962; Rolison, 1991; Wilson, 1980).
- 5.
The Inspiring Communities Campaign is a cross-departmental, £10million programmes that will initially be targeted at 15 neighbourhoods in deprived areas, a figure that is likely to be expanded in the coming years.
- 6.
For example, despite enormous public and private sector investment in the London Docklands since the early 1980s, unemployment rates in the neighbouring borough of Tower Hamlets have not significantly changed, nor have levels of deprivation and environmental degradation.
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Raco, M. (2012). Neoliberal Urban Policy, Aspirational Citizenship and the Uses of Cultural Distinction. In: Tasan-Kok, T., Baeten, G. (eds) Contradictions of Neoliberal Planning. GeoJournal Library, vol 102. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8924-3_3
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