Entrepreneurial Managerialism and Urban Renewal: The case of Boston and Cambridge

Abstract

When Harvey characterized the shift in urban governance after the 1970s as a shift from managerialism to entrepreneurialism, he spent much more time detailing the features of urban entrepreneurialism than managerialism, which he briefly characterizes as a “faceless[ly] bureaucratic” stance which emerges under “conditions of weak inter-urban competition”. His definition recalls Schumpeter’s distinction between entrepreneurialism and managerialism: the former is about “getting things done” while the latter is about extending the operations of a going concern. This paper argues that central cities in the 1950s and 1960s were not considered a “going concern” to be managed, but in need of active intervention – i.e. getting things done. I argue that ambitious attempts at urban renewal, such as the “New Boston” can characterized as “urban entrepreneurialism”. While strategies of urban entrepreneurialism in the urban renewal era were often oriented toward the federal government, so was techno-scientific entrepreneurialism at the time, which relied on federal military and R&D spending. Examining the case of Boston, Cambridge and the circumferential “technology highway” of Route 128, I show how that local governments acted as “structural speculators” and “political entrepreneurs” in collaboration with institutions like universities and hospitals, seeking to restructure the urban fabric and leverage the region’s emergence as a center of the knowledge economy to attract private investment to the urban core.