The Role of Private Consultancies in Neoliberal Urban Regeneration

Abstract

The politically sensitive nature of the role that the local state plays in executing the planning authority with which it has been entrusted has long been recognised by urban geographers. Urban planning, as Dear (1981, p. 196) has stated, ‘experiences the same crisis of legitimation that haunts the state as a whole in capitalist society’. It is thus that the local state has come to play a key role in crisis avoidance through a ‘pre-politics processing of political information’ (Dear, 1981, p. 193), which is undertaken in the interests of forestalling political disputes and facilitating and legitimating the state’s decisions. Recognition of the political sensitivity attaching to all such state interventions in the urban-planning realm continues to command significant attention. If anything, this concern has intensified in the neoliberal era as the local state has begun to intervene in the urban environment in a manner more overtly facultative of capital. Urban planning remains very much ‘a crucial site of political struggle’ (McCann, 2001, p. 2007). However, the complexion of that political struggle and the extent to which underlying struggles and fundamental political antagonisms crystallise and become manifest in the public realm has been significantly impacted by the evolution of new modes of urban governance (see Chapter 13) and the insinuation of a number of key intermediaries between the state and those most disadvantaged by the implementation of its neoliberal urban-re generation policies. This chapter addresses the increasingly important role which one such private-sector intermediary, international private consultants, has played in the transmission, mediation and depoliticisation of highly political urban-development agendas in working-class areas of the city.