Neoliberalism has been a long, difficult and violent ride for millions if not billions of people around the world. The financial crash that began unfolding publicly in 2007 marked the end of neoliberalism in some sense, or so it has been suggested by many commentators, but it also provoked a longer view for those concerned more with capitalism in toto than with its specifically neoliberal variant. Unlike the so-called Asian economic crisis of 1997-1999, when the operative metaphors raised the threat of “contagion,” ten years later the language was of “toxic assets.” The shift from an epidemiological to an environmental metaphor may be symptomatic of a broader political shift in ruling ideologies, but both metaphors also express a certain denial of the gravity of the crises. In 1997, “contagion” expressed the fear that an otherwise healthy body (European and North American capitalism) would be infected by economic disease (Asia); ten years later, the new language expressed a parallel but less spatialized fear that an otherwise healthy capitalism would be polluted by an aberrant toxicity. When that pollution in fact occurred and capitalism itself became toxic on a global scale, desperate financiers around the world exclaimed in astonishment: “but this is not how capitalism is supposed to work!”

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Picture: SUFRIR and SUITS marchers, Milwaukee – 2008

Ten years after the 1991 coup that finalized the demise of the Soviet Union, the events of September 11, 2001 handed the US ruling class an unequalled opportunity to consummate a long sought imperial ambition at the planetary scale. Clearly within grasp lay a new global unilateralism centered squarely on the US. Washington and Wall Street responded. The subsequent “National Security Strategy of the United States” recognized all too well this amalgam of power and aspiration.

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Neil Smith – Ten Years After

The Homeless Vehicle is a jarring intervention in the landscapes of the evicted. Designed by Krzysztof Wodiczko, a New York artist, the vehicle was first exhibited in 1988. The prototype was constructed in consultation with homeless men and subsequently women; it was first tested in the streets of New York’s Lower East Side, then elsewhere in the city and in Philadelphia. An ongoing project, it has undergone continual revision and modification, and there are now four variants. Its design and development has been funded by several art galleries and public art councils as well as by the artist himself, but it is more than simply a critical artwork heavy with symbolic irony; the Homeless Vehicle is deliberately practical. Indeed it works as critical art only to the extent that it is simultaneously functional. In this symbiosis of the functional and symbolic object, the Homeless Vehicle reveals a vital dimension of a spatialized politics, namely the importance of scale.

Wodiczko’s Homeless Vehicle and the Poliscar that followed it vividly express this politics of scale, and I begin with a discussion of these projects. There follows a brief discussion arguing more broadly that we lack any sophisticated language of spatial differentiation, and this theoretical project is taken up in the third section where I elaborate upon a schematic theory of the production of scale.

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I am very grateful to all of the contributors to this symposium – Emily Eaton; Julie Guthman; Nik Heynen, Peter Hossler and Andrew Herod; and Mazen Labban – for their generosity, not just in taking time to pass comment on Uneven Development (UD) but to do so with such critical magnanimity. I will resist the temptation to respond to most of the points but let me begin with a couple of engagements addressed directly to the comments, before taking a wider view. This article briefly picks up on several comments made in this exchange concerning the book Uneven Development, then raises several issues that emerge from the original arguments and extend the theory in light of empirical shifts over the last quarter of a century.

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In order to understand the dimensions and significance of contemporary regional restructuring and in order to provide a coherent basis for a “new regional geography,” it is vital to tackle the question of scale. We hypothesize in this paper that the scale at which economic regions are constituted is periodically transformed, and we attempt to demonstrate this with respect to the coalescence in the postwar period of a single region comprising the Northern Core. A coalescence index is devised to measure levels of coalescence in experiences of manufacturing employment, service employment, value added, number of manufacturing establishments, and unemployment rates. The pattern which emerges might be interpreted in several ways, but it seems that the coalescence of a relatively homogeneous Northern Core by the mid-1970s has been superseded by a more fragmented pattern in the 1980s. While suggestive of complex changes in the regional scale, this inquiry also points toward further empirical research.

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Abstract: In the last three decades in the advanced capitalist world, the idea of revolution has largely slipped from political view. The neoliberal moment seemed to smother any political possibility other than capitalism, but with that historical phase now itself fading, it may be a good time to revive the idea of revolution if for no other reason than that revolutions do happen. Certainly, the political right is concerned about the possibility of revolts resulting from the social privation resulting, in turn, from the global economic crisis. This essay attempts to explore and reanimate the notion of revolution, both historically and in the present context.

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This paper examines the events, microgeography and broader context of the effective siege of downtown Toronto by Canadian security forces during the June 2010 meeting of the G20, and the unprecedented assault on peaceful protestors and innocent bystanders alike. An extraordinary clampdown of Toronto streets was organized by integrated security forces at the international, federal, provincial and local scales, leading to the arrest and jailing of a larger number of people (overwhelmingly released without charges) than in any other event in Canadian history. Whereas popular consternation emerged immediately against police brutality with many commentators aghast that this could happen in “Toronto the good,” suggesting that this represented an exceptional event, this paper argues that to a significant degree the crisis in the streets was precipitated by the security forces themselves, an argument buttressed by the refusal of the Canadian government to investigate the events. The paper connects the G20 to the larger issues of global political economic power and urban securitization, and puts the Toronto G20 police riot against protestors, if that is what it was, in the context of state power and the state’s claimed monopoly over violence. Far from an exceptional event, this repressive assault expressed the DNA of capitalist state behavior and the selectivity of its targeted social violence.

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Picture: G20 Toronto by kowaleski (CC licensed)

Post Picture: CC licensed: Delano United by jarito

The appeal to divine intervention was not entirely abandoned, however. A story circulated in the wake of Katrina concerning the Christian fundamentalist, global capitalist, and televangelist Pat Robertson, who was a 1988 Republican presidential candidate and who more recently called for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez—a recommendation that qualifies him as a potential terrorist under Britain’s new antiterrorist laws. Whether this multimillionaire and White House habitué really does believe that Hurricane Katrina expressed “God’s wrath” on the hometown of lesbian television celebrity Ellen DeGeneres is unclear, although such invocations of intelligent meteorology are a signature of Robertson’s modus operandi. About the comments of U.S. Representative Richard Baker of Baton Rouge there is no doubt, however. Stunning as it seems, this elected Louisiana offcial actually rejoiced at the death of working-class, usually aged African Americans in the  oodwaters of Katrina: “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans,” Baker commented as bloated bodies  oated through New Orleans streets. “We couldn’t do it, but God did.”

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[Image: "HURRICANE KATRINA" by au_tiger01]