Managing Memphis: governance and regulation in sterile spaces of play

Abstract

Designed for the express purpose of encouraging consumption-intensive capital accumulation, the physical and symbolic reconstitution of select parcels of America's urbanscape into spectacular, multifaceted environments has heralded a new epoch in the material [re]formation of urban America. Yet, on daring to venture behind the corporatist veil of urban regeneration, one is soon confronted with an array of social injustices instantiated through the brutalizing praxis of the neoliberal public/private institutional amalgams that regulate, manage, and govern today's entrepreneurial cityscapes. Our focal points in this paper are the policies and practices of social governance through which both valorized and pathologized urban bodies are made visible, regulated and managed, as they contribute toward materializing the differentiated (and indeed differentiating) new urban landscape. We concentrate our argument on one North American city, Memphis, and specifically the efforts by private and public institutions to regulate and manage the Memphis cityspace, and realize the goal of reinventing the city (both materially and symbolically). Through dissecting the Memphis scenario, we discuss, and expose: the ‘lean and mean’ (Smith, 1998) urban geographies of aggressive place management and marketing; and, the various narratives underpinning the discursive constitution of belonging and difference within the revanchist metropolis.

Keywords:

• neoliberalism
• governance
• regulation
• cityspace

Notes

1. Such partnerships are indicative of a power shift in urban politics from democratic local governing regimes to a constellation of public/private institutions and relations that operate largely independently from democratic politics. These partnerships operate with little public accountability, with less of a commitment to extend social justice to the whole of society, and, evidence the degree to which the power of (urban) citizens to influence their everyday lives is increasingly undermined (Brenner & Theodore, 2002b; Devas, 2001; Judd & Simpson, 2003; MacLeod et al., 2003; Sheller & Urry, 2003).

2. It should be noted that this practice does not create an exclusively white space. For instance, the nearby Isaac Hayes restaurant is a topophilic space for the city's African American elites, those connected to a ‘virtuous’, ‘civilized’ community through demonstration of ‘responsibility’ and duty to others generated through the responsibilizing circuits of moral [consumerized] community).