Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Lisa Berglund, Dalhousie University

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Description:

A body of literature on ‘shrinking cities’ has framed municipalities experiencing population decline and structural crisis as being in need of new planning, governance and finance tools so that they may once again realize their market potential. These perspectives are linked to what Wacquant et al. (2014) have termed a ‘territorial stigmatization’ of declining cities and communities that house increasingly concentrated amounts of racialized poverty; such places thus often become sitting ducks for technocratic experiments to resolve social and economic problems under austerity. This panel will explore the ways that narratives of exceptionalism in declining cities like Detroit, Flint, Buffalo and St. Louis have driven the demand for policy experimentation in various realms. We will focus on policies, development strategies, management schemes, and financing that treat declining cities as places of desperation where extreme examples of austerity governance are piloted. Following Kirkpatrick and Smith (2015) we will explore the significance of exceptionalizing so-called shrinking cities, as their “anomaly serves to camouflage the fact that the city may well represent the leading political edge and/or logical endpoint of advanced (post-crisis) neoliberal austerity”. As such, this panel will also consider the ways in which the results of such policy experiments are exported to other locales, both domestically and internationally

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda