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New York & Los Angeles: Politics, Society, and Culture—A Comparative View

neoliberalism privileges free markets liberated from many forms of state intervention; neoliberal doctrine is premised on a ‘‘one size fits all’’ model of policy imposition; the state is now dead beyond its simple regulating of markets, and this combination of governance and restructuring is only nominally unstable and contradictory. This book puts neoliberalism and cities on the table for consideration better than any text I have seen. Its careful and reasoned presentation opens up many important research questions for urbanists. I liken this book to Dear and Scott’s (1981) Urbanization and Urban Planning in Capitalist Societies and Soja’s (1989) Postmodern Geographies in paving the way for new visions and agendas to understand these cities. Deepening its sketch of issues, I believe, will entail a rigorous tackling of their constitutive and humanly interpreted dimensions, centering on their cultured, gendered, ethnicized, and racialized influences. At issue will be case-specific social constructing, national and international political engineering, the interplay of intertwining spatial scales in producing discourses and forces facilitating urban restructuring, the role and process of resistance, and a host of other things. The book, in this sense, is just a beginning. The task now is to deepen our inquiries into the messy dynamics of neoliberal ascendancy. The framework for future inquiry is revealed; it is up to us to follow the lead.