OK, I've invited all the Madison folks, and I've put a "Blog" link on the UW web site pages, which opens up this nice posting/viewing area in a new window. Check it out, someone, if you like.

I think we need to wait for Eric and Jamie to weigh in; after all, they'll need to monitor this blog regularly if it goes live. If they agree, then I'm happy to invite the Madison people over the weekend if Anant will invite the Mpls ones.

I do think, however, that people on the Madison side are still going to collate their email responses off-line for this week. That collated document can then be posted on the blog, though, by our designated discussants. Haven't heard if the Mpls folks are doing something similar, or if they're going to do the email barrage again?

Helga, to print all the posted messages you might want to go to the "published" version of the site at http://urbanspring.blogspot.com/ and just print that page -- it automatically shows the last 7 days of posts. A quick way to get to that page from the blog-editing page is to click the yellow "view web page" text. Make sense?

Uh-oh -- did something happen to the text wrapping?

[Here are Jamie's notes from class on Tuesday]

Urban entrepreneurialism in critical context

- From introspective cities to externally-oriented cities

- Surface manifestations of entrepreneurial politics ?
o shift towards a pro-growth or growth-first economic development agenda
o shift from urban government to governance

- Paradox #1: the act of pursuing a more aggressive, growth-oriented approach intensifies the same competitive?pressures that reduced cities options in the first place
o so there is agency here, but it is a perverse form of agency that erodes urban capacities even as it mobilizes them.
Harvey's fatalism is a fatalism of the intellect, not the will, in this respect

- Paradox #2: these pressures seem to induce cities to be less, not more, innovative?
o even if the consequences are not simple convergence (or a race to the bottom?, the associated policy repertoire is just as depressingly thin as it is depressingly familiar
o does this apparent lack of creative reflect limited local vision or limited local capacity?


- What the experience of the 1990s revealed ?

o that some of the pessimism was appropriate, given the limited or isolated achievements of progressive urban strategies
o that the new forms of urban politics that did emerge in some senses reflect the limitations and contradictions of the 1980s?project, though this functional?explanation alone is (surely!) insufficient
o that the competitive forces of urban entrepreneurialism (Harvey's force field of competitive pressures) were not simply out there,?nor were they strictly economic in origin
in some respects, they are discourses that circulate largely within neoliberalized state structures
competitive pressures themselves do not float in the air, but are constituted though local and extralocal action

- What the case study of Manchester revealed ?

o strategies of state restructuring frame?urban entrepreneurialism in a profound way (grant coalitions not growth coalitions)
o even if this is the only game in town, there are many ways of playing it
o the elite networks of the entrepreneurial city are anything but free floating
o that the frailties/contingencies of the project are strongly evident under close (empirical) inspection, in contrast to the rhetoric/some theory claims

Anant, I've made myself an "admin" too and changed the title of the blog from "Neoliberalism" to "Urban futures" because I think that rather than trying to have a different blog for each week (each with a different URL!), we should just have a single blog for the whole class. How does that sound to you?

This is a test posting to the "neoliberalism" blog by Greg Downey in Madison. Will this work for our class, I wonder? Hmmm.