Municipal statecraft Revisiting the geographies of the entrepreneurial city

• Published in: Progress in human geography Vol. 42; no. 2; pp. 205 - 224
• Main Author: Lauermann, John
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London, England SAGE Publications 01.04.2018
• Subjects: growth machine; growth coalition; entrepreneurial city; local state; urban regime
• ISSN: 0309-1325; 1477-0288
• DOI: 10.1177/0309132516673240

The entrepreneurial city is no longer (only) a growth machine: recession and austerity, new forms of financialization, and diverse experiments in urban policy have diluted local elites’ focus on growth. But entrepreneurial urban governance remains remarkably resilient despite its inability to deliver growth. Indeed, in many cities entrepreneurial tactics – e.g. municipal speculation, place branding, and inter-urban competition – are simply standard operating procedure. Recent scholarship on entrepreneurial urban governance demonstrates a need for re-theorizing the assumed interdependence between entrepreneurial practices and growth politics. This calls into question the nature of the ‘entrepreneurs’ of the entrepreneurial city, that is, the nature of municipal states. They increasingly (i) apply entrepreneurial practices to multiple governance agendas in parallel to growth, (ii) evaluate their portfolios in both speculative and more broadly experimental ways, and (iii) challenge top-down narratives about inter-urban competition through inter-urban diplomacy. Each of these characteristics shows the disruptive potential of interventionist forms of municipal statecraft.