Excavating the logic of British urban policy: Neoliberalism as the "crisis of crisis-management"

This paper suggests that crisis theories provide a framework for analyzing the urban spaces of neoliberalism. Drawing on crisis-theoretic approaches to state theory, we examine the path-dependent links between neoliberalism, urban policy, and Britain's cyclical and crisis-prone cities through three tendencies: the geographies of state regulation, the institutionalization of interurban competition, and rescaling as the "crisis of crisis-management." These are used to explore the argument that Britain's cities are hosts to ineffectual regulatory strategies because urban policy appears to be a response to the sociopolitical and geographical contradictions of previous rounds of urban policy, and not the underpinning contradictions of accumulation.