From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism

In recent years, urban governance has become Increasingly preoccupied with the exploration of new ways in which to foster and encourage local development and employment growth. Such an entrepreneurial stance contrasts with the managerial practices of earlier decades which primarily focussed on the local provision of services, facilities and benefits to urban populations. This paper explores the context of this shift from managerialism to entrepreneurialism in urban governance and seeks to show how mechanisms of inter-urban competition shape outcomes and generate macroeconomic consequences. The relations between urban change and economic development are thereby brought into focus in a period characterised by considerable economic and political instability. A centerpiece of my academic concerns these last two decades has been to unravel the role of urbanisation in social change, in particular under conditions of capitalist social relations and accumulation (Harvey, 1973; 1982; 1985a; 1985b; 1989a). This project has necessitated deeper enquiry into the manner in which capitalism produces a distinctive historical geography. When the physical and social landscape of urbanisation is shaped according to distinctively capitalist criteria, constraints are put on the future paths of capitalist development. This implies that though urban processes under capitalism are shaped by the logic of capital circulation and accumulation, they in turn shape the conditions and circumstances of capital accumulation at later points in time and space. Put another way, capitalists, like everyone else, may struggle to make their own historical geography but, also like everyone else, they do not do so under historical and geographical circumstances of their own individual choosing even when they have played an important and even determinant collective role in shaping those circumstances. This two way relation of reciprocity and domination (in which capitalists, like workers, find themselves dominated and constrained by their own creations) Geograflska Annaler . 71 B (1989) . 1 can best be captured theoretically in dialectical terms. It is from such a standpoint that I seek more powerful insights into that process of city making that is both product and condition of ongoing social processes of transformation in the most recent phase of capitalist development. Enquiry into the role of urbanisation in social dynamics is, of course. nothing new. From time to time the issue flourishes as a focus of major debates, though more often than not with regard to particular historical-geographical circumstances in which, for some reason or other, the role of urbanisation and of cities appears particularly salient. The part that city formation played in the rise of civilization has long been discussed, as has the role of the city in classical Greece and Rome. The significance of cities to the transition from feudalism to capitalism is an arena of continuing controversy, having sparked a remarkable and revealing literature over the years. A vast array of evidence can now likewise be brought to bear on the significance of urbanization to nineteenth century industrial, cultural and political development as well as to the subsequent spread of capitalist social relations to lesser developed countries (which now support some of the most dramatically growing cities in the world). All too frequently, however, the study of urbanization becomes separated from that of social change and economic development, as if it can somehow be regarded either as a side-show or as a passive side-product to more important and fundamental social changes. The successive revolutions in technology, space relations, social relations, consumer habits, lifestyles, and the like that have so characterised capitalist history can, it is sometimes suggested, be understood without any deep enquiry into the roots and nature of urban processes. True, this judgement is by and large made tacitly, by virtue of sins of omission rather than commission. But the antiurban bias in studies