Politics and the State–151
peting special interests that serve ethnic-
specific organizations, a key mechanism for
growth and development involves coalition
building among various CBOs within and be-
yond their own racial and ethnic communi-
ties. In doing so, individual ethnic-specific
organizations can help pool resources among
many different communities to sustain com-
munity programs and mobilize immigrants’
rights. More importantly, Tseng shows how
coalition building among different ethnic
groups can collectively empower communi-
ties across different groups.
The book is a useful reference for re-
searchers who would like to have a broad-
based understanding of non-profit community-
based immigrant and/or refugee organiza-
tions. It might also be a good book to use in
undergraduate courses on immigration, com-
munity studies, and race and minority rela-
tions, especially those that have a specific
focus on CBOs.
POLITICS AND THE
STATE
The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology,
and Development in American Urbanism, by
Jason Hackworth. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2006. 225pp. $22.95 paper.
ISBN: 9780801473036.
RICHARD CHILD HILL
Michigan State University
hillrr@msu.edu
A neoliberal city is a city whose mode of
governance, social structure, and spatial de-
velopment express the neoliberal vision of a
free market utopia. Economic progress in the
neoliberal city springs from individual initia-
tive and unfettered markets in land, labor,
and money. Government is modeled on the
enterprise, the citizen on the consumer, and
governance on business management.
Neoliberalism’s bete noire is Keynesian
liberalism, sometimes called “embedded” or
“egalitarian” liberalism because Keynes pre-
scribed government regulation, demand
management, and progressive taxation to
ameliorate the excesses of free market capi-
talism. The Keynesian project entered politi-
cal life in the 1930s, in response to the Great
Depression, and flourished into the 1970s un-
til the breakdown of the international mone-
tary regime, economic crises in the mass pro-
duction industries, and fiscal contradictions
in the welfare state jump started the neolib-
eral political project.
Neoliberalism is rooted in classical eco-
nomic liberalism but differs from its philo-
sophical parent in two important respects.
The classical doctrine pertains to the econo-
my alone, while neoliberalism extends the
market model to the political sphere and to
social relations in general. The nineteenth
century version depicts the market as natural
and self-regulating, while neoliberalism at-
tempts to bring the utopia to life via law and
public policy.
Pure in principle, neoliberalism is always
diluted in practice. As the doctrine spreads
among geographical areas and sectors of so-
cial life, it weighs into the balance of local
political forces, faces competing institutional
legacies, and combines with other gover-
nance practices. Consequently, the neoliber-
al city is always in the act of becoming.
Jason Hackworth, a geography and plan-
ning professor at the University of Toronto,
organizes The Neoliberal City around a series
of contrasts between the Keynesian manage-
rial city and the neoliberal city—in social
thought, in methods of local governance, in
urban form, in patterns of uneven develop-
ment, and in public activism. He analyzes the
mechanisms of “neoliberalization” driving
each transition and provides empirical stud-
ies of individual cities to flesh out the con-
trasts. Emphasis is mainly on the inner city,
where the vestiges of the Keynesian welfare
state are still most visible.
Keynesian urban governance is character-
ized by managerialism, that is, by an empha-
sis on national regulation, local participation
in federal programs, strong city administra-
tion, and commitment to decent standards of
collective consumption. The neoliberal coun-
terpart, urban entrepreneurialism, devolves
regulatory power from national to local au-
thorities, diffuses local government authority
to public/private partnerships, and empha-
sizes public choice and unregulated growth.
Urban form in the Keynesian era is char-
acterized by suburban growth, inner city de-
cline, regulated development, and public in-
vestment in infrastructure. The neoliberal
Contemporary Sociology 37, 2
152–Politics and the State
city, by contrast, evinces investment in the in-
ner city and in the exurbs, declining inner
ring suburbs, slack land use controls, and re-
duced public investment. The Keynesian fo-
cus on public housing in the inner city shifts
to the neoliberal emphasis on gentrification
and commercial mega-projects. The gentri-
fiers themselves also change as profit-seeking
land development firms replace individual
owner-occupiers.
Attempts to alter the course of neoliberal
urbanization are seldom successful. Move-
ments to preserve past Keynesian gains in
public housing, welfare, and other services
tend to be fragmented and co-opted by ne-
oliberal social policy. Anti-globalization
movements are diffuse and focus on corpo-
rations, not cities. Movements challenging
gentrification and downtown mega-projects
are usually site specific. Economic justice and
collective ownership movements are small in
scale. Activists opposing neoliberal urbaniza-
tion are tactically and ideologically divided,
and they are grappling with a discourse that,
for many Americans, has become a taken for
granted understanding of city life.
The mechanisms for neoliberalization are
several, and Hackworth never puts them all
together in one place, but the basic argument
goes something like this. National cutbacks
in urban expenditures require cities to find
new sources of revenue. Deregulation of fi-
nance simultaneously expands the range and
availability of private capital. Federal re-
trenchment and the devolution of revenue
raising responsibility to localities forces cities
to compete for resources in the private capi-
tal market. The upshot is that profit-driven fi-
nancial institutions (commercial banks,
thrifts, institutional investors), and their inter-
mediaries, like bond rating agencies, replace
federal regulatory agencies as overseers of
urban development and they wield enor-
mous “disciplinary authority” over cities
through their ability to turn the capital spigot
on and off.
The empirical documentation in The Ne-
oliberal City is sometimes persuasive, as in
Hackworth’s case studies of bond rating
agencies, public housing, and gentrification.
But the evidence can also be thin, as in his
study of public/private partnerships in New
Brunswick, and inconclusive, as in his census
based projections of changes in urban form;
and not in touch with the issues the data are
Contemporary Sociology 37, 2
supposed to address, as in his profiles of
Phoenix mega-projects. But never mind.
Hackworth adeptly applies the neoliberal
problematic to the urban scene, he offers a
fine survey and synthesis of relevant litera-
ture, and his empirical studies provide sign
posts for future researchers to follow.
The Neoliberal City’s critical edge may at-
tract students since a national reaction
against neoliberalism appears to be at hand.
And none too soon.
Selecting by Origin: Ethnic Migration in the
Liberal State, by Christian Joppke.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2005. 344pp. $54.50 cloth. ISBN: 0674015592.
THOMAS JANOSKI
University of Kentucky
tjanos@uky.edu
In 1999, Christian Joppke wrote Immigration
and the Nation-State: the United States, Ger-
many and Great Britain, in which he
showed that nation-states were resilient in
their immigration policies and that sovereign-
ty was still important. Although each country
dealt with similar issues, the nation-state
largely controlled its destiny and constructed
citizenship in different ways. In 2005, Joppke
takes each of the case studies from the pre-
vious books and pairs them with another
country: the US with Australia, the UK with
France, and Germany with Israel. He also
adds another pair—Spain and Portugal. He
views each country as representative of a
geographic-historical constellation—settler,
post-colonial, and diaspora states—and fur-
ther divides the post-colonial constellation
into Northwest (NW) and Southwest (SW)
empires. Each of these constellations differ:
1) the settler constellation is open to immi-
gration from Europe but has had to deal with
their past exclusionary policies toward
Asians; 2) the post-Colonial regimes are
somewhat bifurcated with the NW regime
closing from its previously open position of
the British and French empires, and the SW
constellation using unilateral treaties with
South America to “filter in” culturally similar
immigrants; and 3) the diasporic constella-
tions of Germany and Israel are the most eth-
nic since they privilege an ethnic or religious
diaspora. As a result, he classifies Israel and