Cities 44 (2015) 121122
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Cities
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Guest Editorial
New perspectives on urban power and public policy
Editorial
Power and policy remain, as always, central concerns in urban
studies. Today, these concepts and the social relations they entail
are debated, perhaps more vigorously than ever. How is urban
power understood, contested, cultivated and enacted in multi-sca-
lar policy processes converging in and around cities and neigh-
bourhoods? In what ways is the power-policy nexus changing in
cities under austerity? How do cities enact and contest hegemony,
based on what congurations of coercion and consent? What does
the study of agency reveal about enactments of urban power and
policy? This special section reects on these questions, drawing
on research in the cities of Leeds (UK), Johannesburg (South Africa),
Las Truchas (Mexico) and Barcelona (Spain), and on the analysis of
urban policy and discourse in a multi-scalar, cross-national con-
text. The central message of the collection is that to study cities
effectively, we have constantly to challenge that which is taken
for granted, glossed over or suppressed: not only in urban gover-
nance but also academic practice, prone as it is to routines and
the internalisation of orthodoxies. The ve papers problematize a
variety of urban questions, focusing on community, language, the
technologies of power and agency but each follows a similar
strategy by taking a familiar policy or concept, questioning it and
offering a new interpretation.
Roy, Schrader and Crane (2015) begin by re-reading the history
of community development policy in US cities, interpreting it as a
set of tactics and strategies for the territorialisation of poverty and
a vehicle for pacication, in juxtaposition with the coercive man-
agement of deviance and dissidence. The major contribution of
the paper is its depiction of the war on poverty as a double system
of pacication, articulating trends in urban policy notably the
rising prominence of self help with counter-insurgency tactics
developed by the US in its imperialist adventures, today imprinted
in the manuals of city police forces. Accordingly, Roy, Schrader and
Crane (2015) argue that in the context of community development
policy, the international and domestic terrains should be construed
as a single multi-scalar unit of analysis. However, they remind us
that at a time of major struggles against racism in the 1960s, the
doctrine of self-help was contested and subverted by visions and
practices of self-determination, transforming community into a
space of militant autonomy. The lesson is that despite the tendency
of critical thinkers to treat community as a governmental strat-
egy for preventing change, it was, and remains, a locus of emanci-
pation too.
Guarneros-Meza (2015) considers the interdependence of con-
sensual and coercive modes of governing in greater depth, focusing
on the multiple modalities of coercion. Invoking the Gramscian
concepts of hegemony and domination, she argues that the
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2014.11.001
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militarization of the police shows that Mexican national security
policy is increasingly coercive, warranted in particular by the
so-called war on drugs. Her main focus, however, is how the
activities of local bureaucrats, though not necessarily violent in
themselves, contribute to the roll-forward of coercive governance.
Her case study of the Mexican municipality of Las Truchas illus-
trates how coercion coexists with citizen security programmes,
designed to foster a hegemonic consensus around security policy.
Guarneros-Meza (2015) argues that bureaucratic complicity with
the violence of others and laissez-faire neglect of violence in
peripheral communities constitute coercive tactics alongside direct
state-organised repression and strategies to enrol citizens into elite
discourses. Grassroots practices of complicity and neglect by
bureaucrats have the unintended consequence of undermining
national security policy. The main insight from the paper is that
local bureaucrats play a vital role in enacting and reconguring
hegemony and domination through their capacity to subvert policy
at the point of interface with citizens.
In his Viewpoint paper (appearing at the end of the special sec-
tion), Peter Marcuse (2015) moves the analytical lens from coer-
cion to how the power of discourse insulates policy makers from
critique. Inspired by the concept of One Dimensional Man devel-
oped by his father, Herbert Marcuse, he revisits the linguistic turn
in urban studies. Marcuse explores techniques employed in the
generation of one dimensional language and shows how they
operate through familiar signiers such as cities, housing markets,
inequality, competition and gentrication. Marcuse makes two
substantive points. First, in failing adequately to problematize con-
ventional policy vocabularies, critical thinkers are no less vulnera-
ble to linguistic recuperation than their mainstream counterparts.
Second, one-dimensional language must be understood as a vital
technique of power in the construction and execution of urban pol-
icies; not simply by repressing alternatives important as this is
but also by ensuring these are not generated anywhere near the
arena of policy discourse or power.
The two nal papers consider the role of agency in urban policy.
Davies and Msengana-Ndlela (2015) begin with the structure-
agency binary, arguing that agency tends to be assumed rather
than demonstrated and remains somewhat elusive. In this paper,
they consider the agency of city government in Local Economic
Development policy (LED), in the cities of Leeds (UK) and Johannes-
burg (South Africa). Their policy problem is that despite the stated
ambition of reducing deprivation and enhancing social inclusion,
LED in both cities has, if anything, aggravated exclusion. By focus-
ing attention on local political agency, they seek to demonstrate
that city leaders bear at least part of the responsibility for these
outcomes. Davies and Msengana-Ndlela treat agency as an inher-
ent property of human action, dening it as the combination of
122 Guest Editorial / Cities 44 (2015) 121122
effortful decision-making by individuals, collectivities and organi-
sations made in response to dilemmas and their contextual efcacy
(their power), whose inter-relationships evolve, are more or less
reexive on one another and are situationally contingent. Based
on this denition, they argue that whatever exogenous constraints
and structural contradictions pertain, local agency mattered in set-
ting the exclusionary trajectory of LED in both cities. The argument
is sustained rst by highlighting the dilemmatic nature of LED pol-
icy decisions, and second by demonstrating that even if local lead-
ers have no choice but to follow the rules of neoliberalism, these
are sufciently nebulous to require effortful decisions such as
whether or not to support small and medium-size enterprises. By
selecting against roll-out neoliberal policies, ostensibly progres-
sive city governments are thus implicated in the exclusionary
dynamics of LED.
Blanco (2015) problematizes agency in a different way, navigat-
ing what he sees as two contrasting but equally reductive litera-
tures positing, on one hand, the transformation to a world of
trust-based governing networks and on the other the roll-forward
of neoliberal authoritarianism particularly in the austerity condi-
tions experienced in Southern Europe. Blanco believes these world-
views introduce a specious dualism neglecting subtleties of
continuity and change in city governance, and the opportunities
and constraints facing urban social movements. To overcome the
dualism, he rereads urban regime theory. His study of regime gov-
ernance in Barcelona points to the co-existence of two distinct
regime-types: a business regime organised around a neoliberal
growth model, and an empowerment regime centred on relation-
ships between the social movements and sympathetic local
authority insiders in social policy. Since Barcelona sustains multi-
ple regime-types, it follows that urban policy is not determined
solely by neoliberalism and austerity, or by the ideals of network
governance, but depends on how political actors mobilise urban
power through coalition building and maintenance. Blancos study
poses the question of how sustainably competing regimes can
coexist within a city and, like Davies and Msengana-Ndlela
(2015), whether progressive regimes can be built in the sphere of
local economic development.
In summary, the collection highlights several overlapping ques-
tions linking concepts and language, the multiple technologies of
power converging in, over and around the city, and the nature of
cities as the terrain of political agency. One issue highlighted by
both Roy, Schrader and Crane and Marcuse, for example, is how
community is forged, territorialised, narrated, enforced, and con-
tested and how this most evocative of urban concepts can be
recuperated for emancipatory politics? By extension, is it possible
to develop a common critical vocabulary of concepts like commu-
nity that avoids the snare of one-dimensional language, while
remaining intelligible cross-nationally, and to actors at the front-
line of urban struggles? Second, how are technologies of urban
power changing? The collection does not point to any fundamental
transformation in the nature of urban power. It rather highlights
the continuing salience of language and discourse and policies to
pacify and secure consensus, mobilising familiar tropes such as
self-help and newly meaningful ones, like security. Moreover,
Roy, Schrader and Crane and Guarneros-Meza both paint pictures
of a highly coercive not to say brutal policy terrain, suggesting
that the repressive apparatus continues to cast a long shadow over
city governance both sides of the Mexican border. Blanco and
Davies Msengana-Ndlela remind us, thirdly, that all forms of
power, including repression, entail effort and organisation, and
very often, real and acknowledged dilemmas. Political actors must
decide, institutions must be built and sustained. But if summoning
urban power requires effort and skill, what are the parameters of
urban agency in the shadow of a potent, multi-scalar neoliberal
hegemony? Can progressive governing coalitions extend to local
economic development and inward investment, or do they remain
conned to social policy arenas with dwindling government
resources? The collection does not engage directly in cross-
national analysis, but the diversity in cities such as Barcelona,
Johannesburg, Las Truchas and Leeds points to the need for com-
parative work on these themes, asking for example how the gover-
nance and contestation of community translates between
Mexico, Spain, the UK and the USA, and between languages. We
hope the special section encourages readers to engage these and
many other topics discussed in the ve contributions.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks are due to the Editor in Chief, Professor Ali Modar-
res, anonymous reviewers and all the staff working on Cities, for
their help and advice in bringing this project to a conclusion.
References
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Jonathan S. Davies
Available online 24 November 2014