Traces decades of troubled attempts to fund private answers to public urban problems

The American city has long been a laboratory for austerity, governmental decentralization, and market-based solutions to urgent public problems such as affordable housing, criminal justice, and education. Through richly told case studies from Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and New York,Neoliberal Citiesprovides the necessary context to understand the always intensifying racial and economic inequality in and around the city center.

In this original collection of essays, urban historians and sociologists trace the role that public policies have played in reshaping cities, with particular attention to labor, the privatization of public services, the collapse of welfare, the rise of gentrification, the expansion of the carceral state, and the politics of community control. In so doing,Neoliberal Citiesoffers a bottom-up approach to social scientific, theoretical, and historical accounts of urban America, exploring the ways that activists and grassroots organizations, as well as ordinary citizens, came to terms with new market-oriented public policies promoted by multinational corporations, financial institutions, and political parties. Neoliberal Citiesoffers new scaffolding for urban and metropolitan change, with attention to the interaction between policymaking, city planning, social movements, and the market.

Andrew J. Diamond is Professor of American History at the Sorbonne University in Paris, where he is the director of the research center Histoire et Dynamique des Espaces Anglophones (HDEA). He is the author of Chicago on the Make: Power and Inequality in a Modern City andMean Streets: Chicago Youths and the Everyday Struggle for Empowerment in the Multiracial City, 1908-1969

Thomas J. Sugrue is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University, where he directs the Metropolitan Studies Program, and author ofThe Origins of the Urban Crisis andSweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North.