The session recording will be archived on the site until June 25th, 2023

This session was streamed but not recorded

Curated Track: 

Description:

WHEN WAS URBAN ENTREPRENEURIALISM? THE SPATIO-TEMPORALITIES OF A CONCEPT

Julie T. Miao, Nicholas A. Phelps, Andrew Wood

Harvey (1989) launched a vast agenda on urban entrepreneurialism that has continued to be elaborated on and off by geographers. His thesis focused on one extended moment or historical conjuncture of a transition from one mode of urban governance - urban managerialism - to another - urban entrepreneurialism. Theories are products of the places from which they are formulated. Thus, one line of thought along which the literature on urban entrepreneurialism has developed is, for example, whether the formulation is – with or without lags - applicable beyond some of its North American and Western European reference points (Wood, 1998). Perhaps reflecting the variety of national contexts in which the urban sits, and the rescaling of the national state, subsequent extensions have also emphasized the (multi)scalarity of the entrepreneurial transformations involved, especially with respect to city diplomacy and policy formation (Lauermann, 2018; Ward, 2010; Phelps and Miao, 2020).

If theories are products of their places of origin, they are also products of their times. Thus, the precise content - policy and industry foci – of urban entrepreneurial strategies can certainly be enlarged from the particular foci that Harvey made the centerpiece of his contribution at the time. Where Harvey saw the likes of tourism, foreign direct investment, defense expenditures as the key content of urban entrepreneurial strategies in the 1980s, most recently a host of specifically urban services, including smart and sustainable city solutions, have come to the fore as foci for urban entrepreneurial strategies (Miao, 2018). Entanglements of urban entrepreneurialism with processes of financialization have also been apparent. At the time of Harvey’s writing, the stimuli were widely seen as being external to state organizations but have since been recognized as also originating from within state bureaucracies in processes of intrapreneurialism (Miao and Phelps, 2019, Phelps and Miao, 2020). Building on Harvey’s periodization, authors have offered accounts of urban entrepreneurialism 2.0 (Wilson, 2017) presenting the intriguing possibility of both variety (Phelps and Miao, 2020) and succession in the content of, or constituent processes implicated in, urban entrepreneurialism.

Attention to the geographies of theory formation, travel and extension alerts us not only to the scales and relationality of urban entrepreneurialism but also its temporalities. Underexplored questions remain as to how the concept might be better historicized by way of periodization, overlapping phases, conjunctures. Here geographical appreciation of the concept of urban entrepreneurialism could benefit from the deployment of a variety of historical sensibilities (Tilly, 1984). These range from the historical materialist tradition in which the concept is rooted but which emphasize, for example, the eventfulness of capitalism (Sewell, 2008), the phases or conjunctures, to the more traditional preoccupations and methods of investigation which focus on institutions and individuals, and even how these three interact.

References:

Harvey, D. (1989). From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: the transformation in urban governance in late capitalism. Geografiska Annaler: series B, human geography, 71(1), 3-17.

Lauermann, J. (2018). Municipal statecraft: Revisiting the geographies of the entrepreneurial city. Progress in human geography, 42(2), 205-224.

Miao, J. T. (2018). Parallelism and evolution in transnational policy transfer networks: The case of Sino-Singapore Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP). Regional Studies, 52(9), 1191-1200.

Miao, J. T., & Phelps, N. A. (2019). The intrapreneurial state: Singapore’s emergence in the smart and sustainable urban solutions field. Territory, Politics, Governance, 7(3), 316-335.

Phelps, N. A. (2021). The Urban Planning Imagination: A Critical International Introduction. John Wiley & Sons.

Phelps, N. A., & Miao, J. T. (2020). Varieties of urban entrepreneurialism. Dialogues in Human Geography, 10(3), 304-321.

Sewell Jr, W. H. (2008). The temporalities of capitalism. Socio-Economic Review, 6(3), 517-537.

Tilly, C. (1984). Big structures, large processes, huge comparisons. New York: Russell Sage.

Wilson D (2017) Entrepreneurialism. In: Jayne M and Ward K (eds) Urban Theory: New Critical Perspectives. London: Routledge, pp. 122–133.

Ward, K. (2010). Entrepreneurial Urbanism and Business Improvement Districts in the State of Wisconsin: A Cosmopolitan Critique. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 110(5), 1177-1196.

Wood, A. (1998). Making sense of urban entrepreneurialism. Scottish Geographical Magazine, 114(2), 120-123.

Non-Presenting Participants