2010 Urban Geography Plenary Lecture—The Travels of Urban Neoliberalism: Taking Stock of the Internationalization of Urban Theory

Abstract

The influence of neoliberal policy ideas in urban government is widespread across the world of cities, making it a useful focus for assessing the internationalization of urban theory. To this end, the paper addresses three aspects of studies of urban neoliberalism that speak to the promise of methodological experiments in urban studies and potentially contribute to the internationalization of urban theory. These are the analytical potential of tracing the substantive connections among cities forged by neoliberal policy circuits; the possibility that formal comparative methods might contribute to building new theoretical understandings of the diverse landscape of urban neoliberalism; and the importance of building on analyses of connections and rigorous comparisons to generate new theoretical understandings based on attending to urban neoliberalism's travels. Together I hope that these offer some practical ways in which to generate more international urban theory and provide some methodological directions for this project. The paper aims to demonstrate that building understandings of cities through engagement with a greater diversity of urban experiences could encourage some new thinking about core theoretical concepts such as (urban) neoliberalism.

Keywords:

• urban neoliberalism
• urban policy
• internationalizing urban theory
• methodologies
• comparisons