Neoliberalism’s Urban Fringe: On the Trail of Actually Imagined Free-Market Cities

Exploring and problematizing “neoliberal urbanism,” understood in this instance as an empirically traceable, recurrent, and actually circulating imaginary, the article is concerned with a small but determined group of de facto neoliberal visionaries, ideational entrepreneurs, and policy activists, who through dispersed but well-connected networks are purposefully engaged in schemes to visualize, design, and even plan for free-market cities. Centering on these “properly neoliberal” visions of the city, the article analyzes the paradoxical robustness of this largely unrealized but insistently circulating idea. It tackles the emergent project of free-market urbanism as an ideational matrix, tracing continuities and tensions between a deeply ingrained strain of antiurbanism in neoliberal thought (both in the Old Testament of ordoliberalism and in the New Testament of the Chicago School), which serves as context and counterpoint to a critical assessment of the recent promotion, propagation, and intensification of purposive models for free-market cities. This ideational project might still be correctly characterized as “fringe,” but neoliberalism’s urban fringe is neither what, nor where, it once was.