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Progress in Human 2018, Vol. 42(2) 205–224 ª The Author(s) 2016 Municipal statecraft: Revisiting Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav the of the DOI: 10.1177/0309132516673240 entrepreneurial journals.sagepub.com/home/phg

John Lauermann Texas A&M University, USA

Abstract 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 entrepreneurial tactics – e.g. municipal speculation, place branding, and inter-urban compe- tition – 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.

Keywords entrepreneurial city, growth coalition, growth machine, local state, urban regime

I Introduction a growing sense that growth politics have lost salience as urban leaders shift their efforts The entrepreneurial city is no longer (only) a towards more diffuse forms of ‘policy booster- growth machine. Perhaps it never was, although ism’ (McCann, 2013), ‘growth machine dia- scholarship on the topic has historically high- spora’ (Surborg et al., 2008: 342), ‘de-growth lighted the interdependence between the politi- machines’ (Schindler, 2016), ‘diplomatic entre- cal practices of entrepreneurial governance and preneurship’ (Acuto, 2013a: 490), ‘networked the political logics employed in pursuing local entrepreneurialism’ (Lauermann, 2014: 2639), economic growth (see reviews in Harvey, 1989; or ‘co-produced entrepreneurialism’ (McFar- Hall and Hubbard, 1996; Ward and Jonas, 2004; lane, 2012: 2797). MacLeod, 2011). More recently, ongoing states of crisis and austerity (Davidson and Ward, 2014; Peck, 2014), new forms of financializa- tion (Weber, 2010; Fields, 2015), and diverse Corresponding author: experiments in urban policy (Karvonen and John Lauermann, Department of Geography, Texas A&M Van Heur, 2014; Roy and Ong, 2011) have University, College Station, TX 77843, USA. diluted local elites’ focus on growth. There is Email: [email protected] 206 Progress in 42(2)

Yet the ‘entrepreneurial’ concept remains city such speculation is typically a way to divert useful: practices of entrepreneurialism remain national economic gains into the city (Molotch, resilient even as they are applied to a broader 1976: 320–1) or to respond to national austerity range of urban governance agendas. These prac- (Harvey, 1989: 4–5). tices are – per Harvey’s (1989) classic frame- Recent scholarship on entrepreneurial cities has work – public-private partnerships, municipal presented a more dynamic interpretation of munic- real estate speculation, and a political economy ipal statecraft. While the approaches reviewed of place rather than territory (i.e. ‘the specula- here vary significantly, all suggest a more inter- tive construction of place rather than ameliora- ventionist role for municipal state institutions: tion of conditions within a particular territory’; 1989: 8). Common characteristics across entre- (i) They draw on entrepreneurial toolkits preneurial cities are public sector -taking in to pursue a more diverse portfolio of market ventures (often as a partner in public- investments and agendas, in parallel to private ventures), the use of regulatory power pursuing growth. Just as governments to protect municipal investments (often related use ‘neoliberalism as mobile technol- to real estate or to support locally-significant ogy’ (Ong, 2007) for pragmatic rea- industries), and a distinct state spatial logic sons which diverge from neoliberal which emphasizes targeted intervention into ideologies, the practices of entrepre- particular places rather than distributing neurial urban governance are deployed resources across municipal territory (e.g. busi- in ways that diverge from – and even ness improvement districts, tax increment contradict – the imperatives of growth financing zones, neighborhood regeneration politics. This signals to multiple forms projects). of state intervention within municipal There is a need to re-theorize the role of the territory ranging from a downscaling ‘entrepreneurs’ in entrepreneurial cities: munic- of developmental state practices into ipal governments. Underlying the assumed the city (Parnell and Pieterse, 2010; interdependence between entrepreneurial prac- Shin and Kim, 2015) to the upscaling tice and growth logic is a particular understand- of entrepreneurial tools for global ing of local government and its (lack of) agency. agendas (Acuto, 2013a; Beal and Consensus was that – especially Pinson, 2014; McCann, 2013). when engaged in neoliberal growth politics – (ii) Entrepreneurial is not only operated on political logics that were nested speculative but more broadly experi- within an exogenous political economy. Muni- mental. This allows a shift away from cipalities were said to react to various waves of economistic frameworks by suggesting roll out/roll back (Peck and Tickell, 2002) or a broader set of governmental ambitions. roll-with-it (Keil, 2009) neoliberalization – they While growth politics are evaluated acted entrepreneurially in order to fill fiscal and based on return on investment, experi- regulatory voids left by national rescaling and mental forms of entrepreneurial urban- decentralization (Brenner, 2004; Cox, 2009), ism are evaluated with a broader (and and they customized entrepreneurial strategies often self-defined) range of metrics asso- to fit ever-evolving neoliberal logics (Brenner ciated with policy agendas like smart et al., 2010). For example, while municipal real (Gibbs et al., 2013), resilient (Raco and estate speculation involves active risk-taking, Street, 2012), self-sufficient (March and the logic which motivates the risk-taking is Ribera-Fumaz, 2014), or world-class more passive. In the traditional growth machine (Goldman, 2011) cities. Lauermann 207

(iii) Entrepreneurial cities navigate geogra- leaders of post-industrial cities, a classic ‘how phies of inter-urban competition and to’ guide for entrepreneurial governments pur- cooperation. While they were histori- suing economic growth. In it Florida cast cally discussed as territories subject to municipal governments as laggards, needing to top-down pressures of neoliberal reposition themselves in a post-Fordist econ- political economy, the picture is omy where: complicated by diplomatic forms of municipal statecraft. Contemporary Access to talented and creative people is to mod- entrepreneurial cities are extrospective ern business what access to coal and iron ore was to steelmaking. It determines where companies (McCann, 2013), diplomatic (Barber, will choose to locate and grow, and this in turn 2013), and even geopolitical (Jonas, changes the ways cities must compete. (p. 6) 2013) in their approach to inter-urban relations, as urban politics are negoti- In this sense, ‘regional economic growth is ated through ‘topological’ rather than driven by the locational choices of creative peo- territorial political geographies (Allen ple’ (2004: 223) and the most effective urban and Cochrane, 2010). policy is one of luring in some of this mobile human capital. Florida’s critics adopted a simi- In the discussion that follows, I review lar narrative of exogenous neoliberal structura- debates over entrepreneurial cities in human tion, critiquing his normative commitments but geography and . I then examine the largely concurring with the spatial model. Peck geographic implications of interventionist (2005: 760), for instance, notes that ‘the creative municipal statecraft, asking how and why: credo is only modestly disruptive of neoliberal (i) the expansion of entrepreneurial practices models of development’. Indeed ‘there is no to multiple governance agendas (in parallel to challenge to the extant ‘‘order’’ of market- growth) reflects the formation of extra- oriented flexibility’ which disciplines cities territorial political coalitions, (ii) the use of through inter-urban competition. But the second experimental action challenges top-down edition of the book (Florida, 2012) retreats from narratives of global markets disciplining local these very same growth models. While cities are polities, and (iii) inter-urban diplomacy is com- said to be generators of economic growth, ‘[o]ur plicating narratives about the geographic zero- cities are not just economic engines; they are sum game of inter-urban competition. I subse- the key to our health and wellbeing’ (p. 394). quently argue for the continuing relevance of They are ‘fulcrums of social and political the ‘entrepreneurial’ concept in urban govern- innovation’ because, unlike gridlocked nation- ance by showing how contemporary entrepre- states, ‘cities and community governments actu- neurial cities have disrupted urban politics by ally work’ (p. 395). diversifying their portfolios in potentially con- In the first edition municipalities can only tradictory ways. hope to skim some growth off the broader econ- omy; in the second edition they are leading the economy in a direct, interventionist manner. II Entrepreneurial practices and And this second edition has plenty of intellec- growth logics tual company: we are told that ‘mayors rule the Comparing the first and second editions of world’ (Barber, 2013), and that a ‘great inver- Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class sion’ (Ehrenhalt, 2012) of center and has reveals a surprising shift. The first edition facilitated ‘the triumph of the city’ (Glaeser, (Florida, 2004) was required reading for many 2011) (cf. a critique in Brenner and Schmid, 208 Progress in Human Geography 42(2)

2014). This illustrative example signals a economic void created by neoliberalization broader shift in the geographies of the entrepre- (Brenner, 2004; Jessop, 2002; MacLeod and neurial city – and indeed the authors above are Goodwin, 1999; Sbragia, 1996). only invoked as an introductory example. Orig- This marked a shift away from ‘urban man- inally conceptualized as a territorially bounded agerialism’ (Williams, 1982) associated with growth machine, it has been re-conceptualized national spatial Keynesianism. Managerialism as home terrain for an extraterritorial and glob- applied a Weberian bureaucratic logic to urban ally ambitious municipal state. Scholars have government (Pinch, 2006: 118–20), emphasiz- developed more dynamic theorizations of the ing the potential for urban managers to effec- municipal state – from reading it as under siege tively manage urban collective consumption by the neoliberal economy to reading it as the (Dunleavy, 1986) and redistribute resources vanguard agent of global governance. This lat- across municipal territory (Williams, 1982). ter theorization is at the core of my argument. Entrepreneurialism in contrast implied a more I am not critiquing past theorizations of the entre- decentralized geography of urban governance preneurial city; in their own contexts, they skill- and significantly more autonomy for local lead- fully interpreted the political economic stresses ers, as national states cut funding and decentra- endured by local governments and powerfully lized policymaking authority. This reflected described a sense of disempowerment among urban polities. Rather, I am suggesting that entre- some broader macro-economic shift in the form preneurial cities have expanded their agendas and style of capitalist development since the beyond local economic growth and contempo- 1970s ...the shift in urban politics and the turn rary scholars have begun to explore the resulting to entrepreneurialism has had an important facil- itative role in the transition from locationally geographies of urban governance. rather rigid Fordist production systems backed by Keynesian state welfarism to a much more 1 Entrepreneurial cities geographically open and market based form of flexible accumulation. (Harvey, 1989: 12) The entrepreneurial city framework emerged as a means to describe the localization of state This ‘flexible accumulation’ is based on spatial policy as part of neoliberal reforms; it growth in local economies, but a contradiction is closely correlated to conversations on growth emerges from the inter-urban competition it coalitions and urban regime theory. It refers to a necessitates. In his classic essay on growth contradictory hybrid of weak-state intervention machine politics, Molotch (1976: 320) is careful in local economies through the ‘proactive pro- to point out that local leaders pursue growth in motion of local economic development by local order to manage employment rates, but ‘local government in alliance with other private sector growth does not, of course, make jobs: it distri- agencies’ (Hall and Hubbard, 1998: 4). The butes jobs’. Local governments gained auton- framework highlighted the changing role of omy to take on risk through speculative government officials and other local elites in investments and public-private partnerships, but neoliberal cities, as municipal governments the impetus for risk-taking is imposed by the responded to a climate of austerity by seeking restructuring of national state space and the out their own funding sources. This shift also transnational spread of pro-market political reflected an exogenous shock to urban political economy. Urban leaders engaged in a ‘new regimes: cities became entrepreneurial in reac- urban politics’ of inter-urban competition (Cox, tion to a restructuring of the Keynesian welfare 1993), real estate speculation (Harvey, 1990), state, and in an effort to fill the political and a shift from managerial government to Lauermann 209 speculative governance (Hall and Hubbard, Subsequent critiques examined the causal 1996) in order to navigate deindustrialization. drivers behind entrepreneurialism, noting that Simultaneously, the national state used cities growth politics and state entrepreneurialism are as an outlet for neoliberal spatial policy. This correlated but the former does not necessarily ‘rescaling the state’ (Jessop, 2002) used decen- cause the latter. Commenting on state rescaling tralization to target neoliberal interventions into debates and emerging forms of city- particular cities. In these ‘state spatial strategies’ entrepreneurialism, for instance, Ward and (Brenner, 2004), the national state provides the Jonas (2004: 2125) noted that neoliberalization logic while local governments respond by innovating and speculating: the causal emphasis tends to be placed on subna- tional territorial reorganisation in relation to a urban policy – broadly defined to encompass all formerly cohesive national state. Here, the rescal- state activities oriented towards the regulation of ing of state functions and the assembling of insti- capitalist – has become an essential tutions around city- (or metropolitan political mechanism through which a profound areas) is seen as a deliberate orchestration on the institutional and geographical transformation of part of the national state (or local, regional, and national states has been occurring ...transforma- national actors selectively empowered by the tions of urban policy have figured crucially within state) as it seeks to adjust its territoriality to the a fundamental reworking of national statehood. changing geographical imperatives of late (Brenner, 2004: 2) capitalism. Other critics emphasized the empirical com- From the perspective of local governments, plexities of entrepreneurial cities, noting that then, entrepreneurial practices were a specia- the correlation between entrepreneurialism and lized form of urban regime politics (Sbragia, growth becomes less clear when looking to 1996; Stone, 1993; Ward, 1996), with regime cities outside the original historical and geo- legitimacy tied to the logics of economic growth graphic context. Entrepreneurial cities were rather than to Keynesian/Fordist logics of col- originally observed in North America and West- lective consumption (Cox, 1993; Merrifield, ern Europe, especially in the United States and 2014). Scholarship on the entrepreneurial city United Kingdom. But the framework was sub- has long been criticized for assuming interdepen- sequently extended – often with warnings about dence between entrepreneurialism and growth. the differences between this original context Early critics noted that entrepreneurial city ana- and new cases – to explain the occurrence of lysts ‘have baldly stated that ...entrepreneurial similar governance practices in regions like strategies generally favour development and Eastern Europe (Golubchikov, 2010; Young growth over the redistribution of wealth and Kaczmarek, 2008), Western Europe (Bren- and opportunity’’ (Hall and Hubbard, 1996: ner, 2004; Swyngedouw et al., 2002), East Asia 167) and (Jessop and Sum, 2000; Wu and Zhang, 2007; Xu and Yeh, 2005), Latin America (Portes and have forcibly argued that the emergence of a new Roberts, 2005; Crossa, 2009), and South Asia sphere of urban politics is intimately connected to a transition to new regimes of capital accumula- (Datta, 2015; Goldman, 2011; McFarlane, tion ...[but] a lack of empirical evidence makes it 2012). Cities in this broader geography have difficult to state with any certainty how entrepre- adopted elements of entrepreneurial practice neurial modes of governance succeed in mediat- like state-led real estate speculation (Goldman, ing local capital-labour relations in a manner 2011; Moser et al., 2015), enclosure of public conducive to such regimes. (1996: 53–4) space or services through public-private 210 Progress in Human Geography 42(2) revenue seeking ventures (Crossa, 2009; Zhang, and my arguments are not intended to be applied 2010), and the imitation of policy or architec- universally. Labels like ‘entrepreneurial’ have tural ‘models’ as a strategy for inter-urban com- geographically varying degrees of relevance, petition (Datta, 2015; Wu and Zhang, 2007). but there is nonetheless value in analyzing This broader geography differs from the shared characteristics associated with these original Anglo-American context based pri- labels in multiple geographies. If we are inter- marily on political economic circumstances ested in theorizing urban processes then ‘it is of municipal institutions (e.g. their legal clas- difficult to imagine how comparison can be any- sification across national contexts) and the thing other than an inevitable and important site degree of neoliberalization experienced in a of consideration’ (McFarlane, 2010: 726). city (especially across post-socialist and devel- Indeed ‘any act of theorizing the urban from opmental state contexts). This expansion is somewhere is by necessity a comparative ges- often an appropriation of tactics, not an imita- ture’ (Robinson, 2016: 5), and such a gesture tion of strategy. Writing on entrepreneurialism need not be colonizing. Rather, it can provide in Latin American cities, Crossa (2009: 45) a powerful analytic for unsettling narratives suggests it is perhaps more contradictory, less about a concept’s evolution. reactionary, and more reliant on the decision- Along these lines my assessment of entrepre- making agency of local governments: neurial urban governance can be considered a ‘genetic’ comparative tactic, ‘tracing the although the literature on EUG [entrepreneurial strongly interconnected genesis of often urban governance] has been useful for under- repeated urban phenomena’ (Robinson, 2016: standing the changing role of the local state 6) like the deployment of entrepreneurial prac- and its ties to the private sector, especially tices by municipal governments. The goal is not through growth coalitions, it falls shorts in one to classify cities as entrepreneurial or not in key respect: how urban governments engage in multiple and often incoherent urban develop- binary fashion, but to interpret why and to what ment strategies that, in many cases, do not extent city governments use practices com- coincide with the neoliberal agenda of the monly associated with entrepreneurial urban entrepreneurial city. governance. Entrepreneurial urbanism varies by degrees: some cities – like the classic In particular, an empirical preference for Anglo-American case studies – make full use stories about growth becomes less convincing. of the entrepreneurial city toolkit while others For example, writing on urban regeneration are more selective in which entrepreneurial initiatives in eastern Europe, Bernt (2009: practices they deploy. This also recognizes that 756) argues that entrepreneurial practices diffuse and evolve in an iterative manner. They move across cities to an overwhelming degree, empirical studies through a broader neoliberalization of policy, have explicitly or implicitly dealt with prospering the enrollment of municipalities in international regions, ‘going for growth’ strategies, or at least markets, and through policy mobilities across with events (such as the development of sports stadiums and entertainment complexes, publicly cities. But the occurrence of entrepreneurialism subsidized , and water- outside the original geographic context is not front development) where ‘big money’ is made. necessarily evidence of diffusion because not all entrepreneurial cities imitate each other. These geographic critiques require a caveat Genetic comparison is a way to trace the origin to my analysis. The entrepreneurial city thesis and diffusion of the concept, and also the ways developed in a particular geographic context, in which entrepreneurial practices developed Lauermann 211 organically as other municipal entrepreneurs Historically, municipalities were said to be innovated and competed for resources. disempowered through successive waves of ‘roll-back’ or ‘roll-out’ (Peck and Tickell, 2002) neoliberalization. More recently, they 2 Entrepreneurial municipalities were said to have thoroughly internalized neo- liberal imperatives, adopting a form of ‘roll- The ‘entrepreneur’ of the entrepreneurial city is with-it neoliberalization’ wherein ‘political and a municipal government. The ‘municipal’ label economic actors have increasingly lost a sense is a widely used legal designation; across of externality, of alternatives (good or bad) and national systems it can describe political institu- have mostly accepted the ‘‘governmentality’’ of tions ranging from autonomous city-states to the neoliberal formation as the basis for their departments nested inside a national govern- actions’ (Keil, 2009: 232). In this way entrepre- ment. The ‘entrepreneurial’ label remains a use- neurial cities innovate forms of ‘variegated neo- ful concept for describing the motivations of liberalization’, but the impetus for variegation is municipal governments. Entrepreneurial moti- often a reaction to a crisis or other exogenous vations are closer to Schumpeterian notions of shock. Such variegation is understood as a ‘sys- state entrepreneurship, which fuse governing tematic production of geoinstitutional differen- agendas with profit motivations (Mazzucato, tiation’ (Brenner et al., 2010: 184) in which the 2015; Schumpeter, 1947). For entrepreneurial differentiation is accomplished through cities cities, this means investing public funds with but the logics which are being differentiated simultaneous objectives of achieving public pol- derive externally to cities: icy goals and expanding public revenue. There is a tendency to interpret entrepreneur- entrepreneurial urban and regional policies may ial urbanism as a reactionary politics in which attract inward investment, but generally fail to municipalities respond to exogenous logics: the sustain economic development or income growth shift to post-Fordist regimes of accumulation while undermining territorial cohesion. These, in (Harvey, 1990), national decentralization initia- effect, are spiraling – crisis-induced, crisis- tives (Jessop, 2002), variegated neoliberalisms managing and crisis-inducing – processes of reg- applied to cities (Brenner et al., 2010), or the ulatory transformation. By way of successive, disciplining effects of imitating models from crisis-riven and often profoundly dysfunctional rounds of regulatory restructuring, the ideological elsewhere (Peck and Theodore, 2010). This is creed, regulatory practices, political mechanisms seen, for instance, in Harvey’s (1989: 12) early and institutional geographies of neoliberalization writing on inter-urban competition among have been repeatedly reconstituted and remade. entrepreneurial cities. He suggests that: (2010: 210) to the degree that inter-urban competition Thus municipalities might harness the becomes more potent, it will almost certainly ‘adaptive capacity inherent in neoliberalism’ operate as an ‘external coercive power’ over indi- in innovative ways, but that adaptive capacity vidual cities to bring them closer into line with the emerges because ‘[a]ctually existing neoli- discipline and logic of capitalist development. It may even force repetitive and serial reproduction beralism is flexible enough to influence pol- of certain patterns of development (such as the icy in other ways than through the mantra of serial reproduction of ‘world trade centers’ or of free markets: it thrives on presenting existing new cultural and entertainment centers, of water- socioeconomic conditions as failing and neo- front development, of post-modern shopping liberalism as the best solution’ (Aalbers, malls, and the like). 2013: 1089). 212 Progress in Human Geography 42(2)

In this framing the entrepreneurial city is tactics does not necessarily redistribute urban innovative, but innovation is circumscribed: it political power, as cities are often still directed takes place in reaction to ideological impera- by urban elites (Barber, 2013; Smith et al., tives that originate geographically and institu- 2014). And there is no guarantee that municipal tionally outside of the city. Some forms of governments will use their new-found agency to ‘roll-out’ neoliberalism can involve proactive govern wisely or fairly, as there are substantial municipal action ranging from paternalism to legal and institutional barriers to integrating revanchism, but that proactiveness is often public participation with speculative govern- understood as a response to exogenous impera- ance (Goldman, 2011; Raco, 2013; Van Der tives. This is a narrative which has been cri- Veen and Korthals Altes, 2012). tiqued as part of what Bunnell (2015: 1989) Conceptually, there is a need to understand describes as ‘neoliberalisation from above’. the resilience of entrepreneurial practices as an Discussing scholarship on the policy mobilities indicator of municipal state agency. By separat- of neoliberal and entrepreneurial models, he ing (entrepreneurial) practices from (growth) suggests that logics, recent scholarship on the entrepreneurial city has described municipal strategies that the dominant picture remains one in which, at any operate in parallel with, rather than as deriva- given moment, cities undergo neoliberalisation in tions of, urban growth politics. In particular, relation to imagined antecedent success stories, recognizing the multiple agencies of the local and what is mobilised is almost invariably ‘neo- liberal’, even if it transforms, mutates and hybri- state has allowed these scholars to assess how dises along the way. (2015: 1989) political logics are developed endogenously, as municipalities seek to define and pursue alter- Since neoliberal agendas are so malleable – and native development trajectories. The diver- their interpretation in urban politics literature is gence between the practices of urban so loose – a label like ‘entrepreneurial’ retains entrepreneurialism and the logics of growth is value. It offers a more precise description of a a disruptive force in cities. While post-growth type of urban governance practice that is corre- entrepreneurialism reflects a broader shift lated but not identical to neoliberalism. towards post-political urbanism (MacLeod, An increasing divergence between entrepre- 2011; Swyngedouw, 2009), this should not be neurial practices and growth logics requires dis- written off as simply a return to technocracy and cussion beyond economistic explanations of managerialism, as it holds the potential for municipal statecraft. Empirically, there is a disruption within governance (Davidson and need to understand entrepreneurial cities’ diver- Iveson, 2015). sified portfolios as more than just a fracturing of a neoliberal project, for instance recognizing the impact of ‘growth agendas without growth’ in III Municipal statecraft which ‘[s]tates are once again taking a direct, Contemporary entrepreneurial cities deploy interventionist role in shaping social and well-established entrepreneurial toolkits economic affairs’ (Raco, 2012: 163) by diversi- (i.e. public-private investment ventures, munic- fying their interventions. They open the possi- ipal real estate speculation, place branding, bility for ‘theorizing the agency of the local inter-urban competition). But these tools are state as potentially developmental, even pro- used to pursue multiple political logics in par- gressive’ (Parnell and Robinson, 2012: 594), allel with growth, in ways that are not only spec- with a few caveats. The pursuit of alternative ulative in an economistic sense but more ideological agendas using entrepreneurial broadly experimental, and which create a Lauermann 213 political space for both inter-urban competition practices like real estate speculation or place and diplomacy. This suggests a more interven- branding to implement developmental pro- tionist role for municipalities in development: grams (Parnell and Pieterse, 2010; Saito, not only responding to exogenous imperatives 2003; Shin and Kim, 2015) and leverage the city (e.g. in response to inter-urban competition or as a platform to articulate and experiment with revenue gaps left by national decentralization) geopolitical ambitions (Olds and Yeung, 2004; but seeking to define governance logics endo- Koch, 2013; Jonas, 2013). But closer attention genously. These trends have been explored in to the multiple agencies of local states reveals recent scholarship by mapping three forms of the diversity of stakeholders and agendas statecraft in entrepreneurial cities. involved in municipal intervention. While municipalities may aspire to intervene in devel- opment, they are also smaller institutions which 1 Diversified portfolios may lack the capacity of national states. Thus First, entrepreneurial city governments have municipal interventionism is necessarily a diversified their investment and policy portfo- coalition-based endeavor. Such forms of entre- lios. These state entrepreneurs articulate visions preneurialism are ‘co-produced’ through state- for urban development including, but not lim- civil society coalitions, and ited to, growth politics. In some ways, this marks a return to classical urban regime politics, there is often an important excess to the confines which can accommodate a range of political of entrepreneurialism: a set of solidarities, com- agendas and which rely on an interventionist mitments to collective improvement and forms of local state. Urban regime politics are those mutual support that cannot be subsumed into mar- ket and financial processes. While it would be too which preserve regime legitimacy by providing far reaching and hopeful to call this excess post- economic incentives to build an electoral base capitalist ...[it] holds out the possibility of more and maintain coalitions (see reviews in Stone, mutual and collective forms of urban develop- 1993; MacLeod and Jones, 2011; Ward, 1996). ment. (McFarlane, 2012: 2801) Delivering growth is one of the most common forms of regime maintenance, although recent Growth is a dominant reference point, but scholarship has shown how regime elites these diverse policy logics operate in parallel increasingly pursue agendas beyond growth. with rather than derivative of growth politics. Beal and Pinson (2014: 305), for instance, have This reflects a broader expansion of the geogra- described this diversification of agendas as a phies of urban politics: diversification becomes shift from a ‘politics logic’ of conventional possible and necessary as urban politics moves coalition-building to a ‘policy logic’ by which from a territorially bounded endeavor to one that ‘urban leaders are more and more inclined to incorporates extraterritorial concerns and stake- turn away from consolidating their power base holders (McCann, 2013; Allen and Cochrane, through daily grassroots political work, the 2010). This is a form of urban politics that is maintenance of clientelist networks or the dis- globally ambitious, but with ambition rooted in tribution of public goods ...[and] rely more on local development concerns. their ability to deliver urban policies to gain To provide one specific example, diversifica- legitimacy’. tion of entrepreneurial city portfolios is seen in Diversification provides a rationale for state planning for ‘mega-events’ like the Olympics. intervention. A well-established literature has Mega-events have long been considered part of explored the intervention of national develop- the entrepreneurial city toolkit, a ‘production mental states into the city. They often use and consumption of spectacles’ (Harvey, 214 Progress in Human Geography 42(2)

1989: 13) tied to the sports industry’s role as ‘an localized features’ (Allen and Cochrane, extraordinary mechanism for instilling a spirit 2014: 1613). of civic jingoism regarding the ‘‘progress’’ of the locality’ (Molotch, 1976: 315). Mega- events were often explicitly linked to growth 2 Experimentation vs speculation coalition politics, for instance through their role Second, entrepreneurial cities increasingly rely in place branding and urban competitiveness on experimentation rather than speculation. strategy (Gold and Gold, 2008) or by ‘catalyz- This means moving towards a variety of metrics ing’ land investment (Essex and Chalkley, for evaluating entrepreneurial ‘success’ and 1998) when global media attention was lever- ‘failure’ in terms other than local economic aged to promote growth coalition projects growth. Historically, narratives of the entrepre- (Andranovich et al., 2001). neurial city tended to view speculation as a But recent mega-events have been linked to a revenue-generating opportunity. Entrepreneur- much broader range of objectives in parallel to ial projects were typically evaluated based on local economic growth, promising agendas like a return on investment, with return measured in urban regeneration, sustainable design, world the terms of growth: Does municipal real estate class place branding, or management speculation grow the tax base? Is inter-urban (Lauermann, 2014). While many of these buzz- competition adding jobs to the local economy? words are correlated to growth politics, they Can a place brand be leveraged to increase tour- only partially overlap. For instance, writing on ism revenue? the interplay of neoliberal growth politics and If speculation is the mechanism for conven- politics in Sydney, Davidson tional entrepreneurial urbanism (entrepreneurs (2013: 658–9) argues that these agendas ‘exist by definition take on in search of profit), in an uneasy co-dependent relationship, then policy experiments are a basic mechanism with neoliberal goals always dominant and for entrepreneurialism beyond growth politics. sustainability goals moving in and out of Policy experiments differ from traditional forms prominence according to context and circum- of speculation because they do not require an stance’. Diversification often means reaching economic return on investment: they are evalu- beyond municipal territory to garner support ated with a broader and often self-defined set of and financing for local agendas: mega-event metrics. Successive rounds of experimentation planners evolved from a local growth machine are used when municipal entrepreneurs inno- to a ‘growth machine diaspora’ whose ‘func- vate and creatively destruct. In this way the tion is to balance the traditional political power entrepreneurial city functions as a sort of ‘urban of locally-based growth coalitions with the laboratory’ (Karvonen and Van Heur, 2014), as need to respond to extra-territorial actors and municipal states experiment with various gov- coalitions’ (Surborg et al., 2008: 342). A diver- ernance practices: for example, experimenting sified entrepreneurial city plans mega-events on with smart (Gibbs et al., 2013), resilient (Evans, multiple political scales through the lens of 2011), self-sufficient (March and Ribera-Fumaz, local concerns (Mu¨ller, 2014), such that ‘rather 2014), or world-class (Goldman, 2011) models than being some free-floating (corporate) festi- for urban design, management, or planning. val of sport ...[events] also have to be under- Some of this experimentation is growth-focused stood through a connected politics of as cities import models from elsewhere in order development that locates them in place, and to facilitate efficiency and competitiveness always has quite distinct and distinctive (McCann and Ward, 2011; Clarke, 2012). But Lauermann 215 as municipalities branch out into non-economic urban policy learning ‘depends on the (re)con- experimentation like climate change science struction of functional systems that coordinate (Acuto, 2013b; Bulkeley and Casta´n Broto, different domains’ (McFarlane, 2011: 363). 2013), there is also a focus on using local experi- To provide one specific example, the shift ments to design and export policy to other cities from speculation to experimentation is seen in (Lauermann, 2014; McCann, 2013). American municipalities’ evolving approach to This is not to say that experimentation has debt. Growth politics involve a speculative form replaced speculation. Experimentation reflects of debt financing, often as a ‘politics of circum- a diversified portfolio of agendas that encom- vention’ (Sbragia, 1996: 9) in which ‘general- passes growth and other objectives in parallel, purpose governments (that is, city governments) rather than growth with other objectives sub- created innovatively financed, non-elected, sumed under its discursive banner: special-purpose governments in order to dilute [national] state power and the power of local The burgeoning realisation that ‘business as electorates’ (p. 4). City governments as inves- usual’ will no longer do has prompted a search tors dabbled in ‘municipal capitalism’ (Chapin, for alternative ways to organise, plan, manage and 2002), such that ‘just as flexible accumulation live in cities. Experimentation promises a way to looks more to finance capital than the Fordist do this ...initiating innovation activities to trial firm did, entrepreneurial states rely more heav- alternative future visions of local development, social cohesion, environmental protection, crea- ily on the markets in public debt and private tive sector expansion, policy evolution, service equities in real estate than did the Keynesian delivery, infrastructure provision, academic state’ (Weber, 2002: 536). research and more. (Evans et al., 2016: 1) All of this required a particular type of municipal debtor: a responsible borrower offer- Multiple entrepreneurial agendas can be ing low-risk bonds backed by the promise of coordinated in tandem with growth politics, but future growth in government revenue. But are not necessarily evaluated based on return on recent trends in municipal investing have under- investment criteria which characterize munici- mined this role. New instruments like tax- pal speculation. While ‘there is an assumption increment financing and bond derivatives that by producing knowledge ‘‘in the real allowed municipal governments to ‘financia- world’’ and ‘‘for the real world’’, urban labora- lize’ their operations by ‘devising new ways to tories can catalyze rapid technical and monetize their own assets and create new secur- economic transformation’ (2014: 415), experi- ities ...turn [ing] income streams from their ments’ success and failure are defined based on existing and future tax bases, infrastructure, and their ability to deliver a more diverse set of pension funds into fungible securities and objectives. This challenges top-down geogra- help[ing] build secondary markets for their phical narratives about entrepreneurial cities. exchange’ (Weber, 2010: 270). Likewise, Speculation implies discipline through risk as municipal governments have increasingly local governments respond to exogenous turned to bankruptcy to discharge debt (Peck, imperatives set by the invisible hand of inter- 2014), a practice that wreaks havoc in tradi- urban markets (for capital, talent, jobs, etc.). But tional municipal bond markets but which has experimental objectives are often self-defined allowed a form of ‘bottom-up austerity’ (David- by municipal governments when setting up the son and Kutz, 2015) by which political factions parameters of an experiment, and can be quite take ‘advantage of their opportunity to realign fluid: the criteria for evaluating success and the city’s politics, despite no clear eligibility for failure evolve through experimentation, since bankruptcy’ (p. 1457). An entrepreneurial city 216 Progress in Human Geography 42(2) that is willing to experiment with debt chal- politics, because cities compete against each lenges geographic narratives that posit global other for growth. And this link to growth poli- financial markets disciplining cities. Instead, tics provided a reactionary dimension to early these cities also shape market geographies entrepreneurial city politics: municipal states because municipalities engaged in ‘the proactive promotion of local economic development’ (Hall and Hubbard, were not just arbitrarily selected for investment 1998: 4), but that proactiveness was a beggar- as a result of a game played far above their thy-neighbor form of competition. Indeed, heads; their local government representatives played a critical role in constructing the condi- Molotch’s (1976: 320) growth machine frame- tions under which capital could be channeled work made clear that growth politics is a geo- into locally embedded assets ...some municipa- graphic zero-sum game: lities were able to steer capital toward what was formerly a backwater of financial markets. the key ideological prop for the growth machine, (Weber, 2010: 270) especially in terms of sustaining support from the working-class majority, is the claim that growth ‘makes jobs’ ...But local growth does not, of 3 Inter-urban diplomacy course, make jobs: it distributes jobs .... All that a locality can do is to attempt to guarantee that a Third, analysts highlight how contemporary certain proportion of newly created jobs will be in entrepreneurial cities engage in both inter- the locality in question. urban competition and inter-urban diplomacy. This is not to say that contemporary entrepre- More recent scholarship on policy mobilities neurialism is more global than earlier forms. and the entrepreneurial city has examined why Rather, these scholars signal to municipal out- cities develop extra-territorial relations: in order reach strategies that build on entrepreneurial to compete more effectively, but also to build practices like ranking/benchmarking, partici- inter-urban cooperation in a more diplomatic pating in competitions for symbolic status or fashion. The inter-urban movement of policy hosting events, or providing incentives for expertise signals a mutual dependence among industries to relocate. While the historical turn entrepreneurial cities, which ‘is a quite funda- toward competition was a reaction to political mental recalibration of the relationship between economic crisis (e.g. deindustrialization) and the neoliberal capitalist system and the urban restructuring of state spatiality (e.g. the decen- condition ...One city and its experiences tralization of Keynesian welfare states), there is appear to be increasingly implicated or a growing interest in the agencies that emerge entangled in another’ (Ward, 2011: 732). This within municipal state institutions as local elites entanglement is based on circulating entrepre- use entrepreneurial practices to pursue transna- neurial practices and models like business tional agendas. improvement districts (Ward, 2006), enterprise The move toward municipal diplomacy is zones (Gotham, 2014), urban regeneration mod- seen in recent conversations around boosterism els (Gonza´lez, 2011), creative economy initia- and inter-urban relations. Recalling Harvey, tives (Ponzini and Rossi, 2010), or cultural inter-urban competition was an important spectacles and mega-events (Mu¨ller, 2014). The mechanism for disciplining cities: ‘an ‘‘external practices are similar: municipalities engage in coercive power’’ over individual cities to bring local boosterism and place branding, using their them closer into line with the discipline and position in various imagined urban hierarchies logic of capitalist development’ (1989: 12). to lure private sector investors. But the logic Those relations are also an arena for growth behind policy imitation is more strategic: Lauermann 217 engaging and disengaging from inter-urban cir- (see reviews in Acuto, 2013b; Barber, 2013; cuits, thereby creating space for more coopera- Bontenbal and Van Lindert, 2009). These insti- tive forms of translocal networking. tutions act as lobbyists and knowledge brokers This approach explores the contradictions on themes like climate policy (C40 Climate between inter-urban diplomacy and inter- Leadership Group, Covenant of Mayors), sus- urban competition. Closer empirical and histor- tainability (International Council of Local Envi- ical readings have called into question the links ronmental Initiatives, United Cities and Local between inter-urban competition, growth poli- Governments), or best practices tics, and entrepreneurialism. One representative (City Protocol Society, World Association of interpretation concludes, for example, that Major ). These types of inter- extra-territorial outreach of the entrepreneurial municipal organizations have existed for city involves ‘an inherently politicized process decades (e.g. municipal leagues or mayors’ of policy mutation whereby a complex interplay associations), but they have become increas- of bureaucratic interests and political forces ingly global in recent years (Acuto, 2013b). were determinant ...a battlefield of contention Municipalities’ global outreach has often been in which different state agencies and state offi- interpreted as a form of competition: Knowl- cials struggled to design and implement the pro- edge sharing occurs when municipalities hire gram’ (Gotham, 2014: 1184). That is, the consultants or send representatives to learn from geographies of urban entrepreneurialism were elsewhere through ‘policy tourism’ (Ward, messier than previously thought. As entrepre- 2011), but extra-local learning is often an ‘oli- neurial practices have spread globally they have garchic diffusion’ of knowledge brokered by been used as a sort of ‘mobile technology’ (Ong, elite stakeholders to improve a city’s competi- 2007) divorced from its ideological origins in tive position (Smith et al., 2014), and municipal growth politics and deployed toward develop- entrepreneurs have slowly expanded the scope mental and post-colonial agendas (Roy and of their inter-urban relations (Ponzini and Rossi, Ong, 2011; Goldman, 2011). Others have gone 2010; Beal and Pinson, 2014). Using these further still, emphasizing ways in which urban city-to-city networks expands a ‘growing trans- politics might move beyond zero-sum inter- national agency [that] has rested mainly on self- urban competition. They highlight the more appointment by mayors to the central stage of diverse ways in which municipal states build global policymaking’ (Acuto, 2013a: 485). In local political legitimacy through translocal an era when traditional growth and regime pol- cooperation. City elites in particular engage in itics are not enough to maintain voter loyalty, various forms of city-to-city diplomacy (Acuto, ‘these leaders tend to favour the mobilization of 2013a; Barber, 2013): ‘extrospective’ booster- electoral support through the production of ism (McCann, 2013) which allows a form of ‘‘indivisible goods’’ such as major urban proj- ‘networked entrepreneurialism’ (Lauermann, ects or festivals and relying less on traditional 2014) by which entrepreneurial practices are electioneering methods and party campaigning’ conducted through a lens of inter-urban (Beal and Pinson, 2014: 305). The result is an cooperation. urban-scale geopolitics which is reshaping the To provide one specific example, the turn ‘neoliberal competition state’ through ‘ongoing toward inter-urban diplomacy is seen in a pro- attempts (and, at times, failures) to re-couple liferation of city-to-city policy networks. These economic development with the collective pro- are transnational organizations with municipal vision of social and physical infrastructure’ governments as members and which advocate (Jonas, 2013: 294). These practices change the for urban-level solutions to global problems geographic scope of urban politics from 218 Progress in Human Geography 42(2) boosterish concerns to a more broadly diplo- These analysts suggest that a transition from matic function: a means for municipal states to entrepreneurial to post-political maintains the build transnational relations while simultane- hegemony of growth while diversifying policy ously competing for resources. agendas. One interpretation is that entrepreneur- To summarize, while the practices of entre- ial cities have simply adopted a more diverse preneurial governance remain common, these vocabulary. ‘Post-growth’ agendas could be practices are deployed towards an increasingly seen as discursive tools which provide an diverse range of agendas in parallel to local appearance of diversified governance but which economic growth. My goal is not to critique ultimately fold back into growth politics. In this previous scholarship for its reliance on neolib- way, ‘vague concepts like the creative city, the eral frameworks or its geographic origin in post- , the green city, the eco-city, the industrial cities of Western Europe and North competitive city and the inclusive city replace America (although if it were, I would build from the proper names of politics’ (Swyngedouw, critiques by analysts like Bunnell [2015], Par- 2009: 612). The proliferation of entrepreneurial nell and Robinson [2012], or Shin and Kim labels (creative, smart, etc.) has allowed a de- [2015]). Rather, my goal is reviving debate over politicizing form of technocracy by which entrepreneurial urbanism as the entrepreneurs – diverse agendas are able to be re-articulated municipal governments – repurpose their invest- through the lens of growth. Thus, ‘there may ment portfolios and policy toolkits in new ways. indeed be scope for debate about which politics Recent research demonstrates that entrepreneur- might help that city to become more competi- ial cities are diversifying their portfolios, specu- tive, more global, more sustainable, more lating and experimenting, and engaging in secure, and so on ...But challenging the under- inter-urban competition and diplomacy. It has lying necessity and legitimacy of these visions also sought to re-theorize the agency of munici- is far more difficult’ (Davidson and Iveson, pal state institutions, demonstrating the role of 2015: 546). local elites and municipal officials in shaping However, this conversation would be new entrepreneurial agendas. enhanced by examining the disruptive potential that emerges from municipal statecraft. In par- ticular, there is a need to ‘re-consider the form IV Disrupting urban governance and character of emerging [post-growth] state The replacements for growth politics require spatialities’ (Raco, 2012: 163) and for more further analysis. A typical interpretation is to ‘studies geared toward recognizing and examin- view them as an intensification of technocratic ing the ‘‘messy actualities’’ of state pro- tendencies already latent in neoliberal urban- grammes, in the sense of their internal and ism. Most prominently, a growing literature on external contradictions and tensions’ (Fuller, the post-political city describes an evolution 2013: 645). For example, sustainability plan- from entrepreneurial to post-political govern- ning might be understood as a green-washing ance, such that entrepreneurial policies and pro- of growth politics (While et al., 2004), but qua- grams ‘have been presented by apologists and a litatively distinct sustainability politics also benign media as the ‘‘commonsense’’ doxa and emerge in parallel (Davidson, 2013). Smart city the only ‘‘sensible’’ or ‘‘responsible’’ mode of initiatives are undoubtedly entrepreneurial ‘‘good governance’’‘ (MacLeod, 2011: 2632). (Hollands, 2008), yet that entrepreneurialism In this way, entrepreneurial agendas filter the is not a growth politics per se, but rather a form places and institutions which have a voice in the of corporate welfare promoted by technology political process. firms and consultants (So¨derstro¨m et al., Lauermann 219

2014). Entrepreneurial governance initiatives in pressing need to trace how alternative urban the informal sector certainly include attempts at politics operate alongside the growth politics instilling a neoliberal ethos in low income com- of the contemporary entrepreneurial city. munities, but these initiatives are also paired with a diverse set of state- or civil society-led developmental politics (Crossa, 2009; McFar- V Conclusion lane, 2012). The urban politics of the entrepreneurial city are While contention has always been possible in evolving, as the practices of entrepreneurialism entrepreneurial cities, the potential for disrup- (e.g. municipal investing, speculation, inter- tive, paradigm-shifting conversations is less urban competition) are increasingly separated clear. Moving entrepreneurialism beyond from the logics of growth politics (e.g. growth growth politics does not in itself lead to more machines, growth coalitions, and urban regimes participatory urban politics. Nor is there any- premised on growth). Entrepreneurial practices thing inherently progressive about an entrepre- are applied to multiple governance agendas par- neurial city that is diversified, experimental, allel to growth, evaluated based on return on and/or diplomatic. Diversifying entrepreneurial investment and on a more diverse set of metrics, city agendas may disrupt the more economistic and are deployed in a more diplomatic manner forms of governance, but entrepreneurs by def- by pursuing both competitive and cooperative inition operate on political economic logics of inter-urban relationships. Each of these trends profit and growth thereof. Experimental govern- demonstrates multiple – and potentially contra- ance may appeal to a wider stakeholder group dictory – agencies within municipal statecraft, than traditional municipal speculation but none- nuancing analysis of who the entrepreneurs are theless display elitist tendencies for the simple and why they act entrepreneurially. The diver- reason that ‘[i]t is very hard to say no to rich, gence of practices and logics in entrepreneurial powerful actors, particularly when their pre- cities calls into question the role of neoliberal ferred policy appropriations are framed as pri- political economy in disciplining cities. vately financed, and thus publicly costless, This evolution matters because entrepreneur- experiments’ (Smith et al., 2014: 24). And ial urban governance is widespread; while each despite the diverse territorialities of contempo- city has a unique political history, it has been rary urban politics (Allen and Cochrane, 2014; widely practiced in European and North Amer- Jonas, 2013; Beal and Pinson, 2014) and recent ican cities while individual elements have praise for the pragmatic and participatory nature spread globally. Analysis of the entrepreneurs of city government (Barber, 2013; Florida, in the entrepreneurial city – municipal govern- 2012; Glaeser, 2011), we cannot assume that ments – remains an important task, especially as municipal leaders like mayors are more adept they seek influence in global debates and mar- at diplomacy and global governance than their kets. Future research would do well to consider nation-state counterparts. the disruptive urban politics which emerge However, these trends do signal a challenge within entrepreneurial states. First, there is a to the hegemony of growth agendas within need to evaluate how entrepreneurial practices entrepreneurial cities. The breakdown of the are subverted and what the impacts of that dis- relationship between entrepreneurial practices ruption entail. There is a need to nuance cri- and growth logics reworks definitions of urban tiques of post-politics in entrepreneurial city development, contesting what ‘development’ and ‘see the city as a space through which pol- can mean and introducing alternative rationales itics is staged, but one in which the stage is con- for its pursuit. In this sense there remains a stantly being constructed and re-constructed’ 220 Progress in Human Geography 42(2)

(Davidson and Iveson, 2015: 558). For exam- conference. Likewise Pauline ple, questions remain about the contradic- McGuirk, Christian Berndt, and three anonymous tions which emerge when entrepreneurial reviewers provided insightful feedback during the practices are repurposed or when growth review process. politics is practiced alongside other urban Declaration of conflicting interests political strategies. Second, there is a need for detailed analysis The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of inter- of ‘actually existing’ (Brenner and Theodore, est with respect to the research, authorship, and/or 2002) entrepreneurial cities as they evolve insti- publication of this article. tutionally and spatially. There is a need for Funding ‘thinking cities through elsewhere’ (Robinson, The author(s) received no financial support for the 2016) while carefully ‘recogniz[ing] both the research, authorship, and/or publication of this territorial and the relational histories and geo- article graphies that are behind their production and (re)production’ (Ward, 2010: 480). This References requires a particular type of comparison, which Aalbers MB (2013) Neoliberalism is dead ...long live reads state entrepreneurialism through a spec- neoliberalism! International Journal of Urban and trum of more and less entrepreneurial political Regional Research 37: 1083–1090. systems. While the entrepreneurial framework Acuto M (2013a) City leadership in global governance. is based historically on trends in Anglo- Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and American cities, an analysis of municipal state- International Organizations 19: 481–498. craft can certainly be informed by parallels and Acuto M (2013b) Global Cities, Governance and Diplo- discontinuities with other modes of urban macy: The Urban Link. London: Routledge. government. Allen J and Cochrane A (2010) Assemblages of state Third, there is a need to evaluate the possi- power: Topological shifts in the organization of gov- bility of a ‘post-neoliberal analytical optic on ernment and politics. Antipode 42: 1071–1089. contemporary urbanism (Parnell and Robinson, Allen J and Cochrane A (2014) The urban unbound: London’s politics and the 2012 Olympic Games. 2012: 594) and to theorize contemporary International Journal of Urban and Regional Research entrepreneurial urban governance as ‘more- 38: 1609–1624. than-neoliberalisation’ (Bunnell, 2015: 1992). Andranovich G, Burbank M and Heying C (2001) Post-neoliberal entrepreneurialism would not Olympic cities: Lessons learned from mega-event necessarily move beyond growth politics; it politics. Journal of Urban Affairs 23: 113–131. means simply that entrepreneurial cities are Barber BR (2013) If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunc- engaged in parallel, diverging, and contradictory tional Nations, Rising Cities. New Haven: Yale political agendas which cannot be described University Press. solely through a neoliberal analytic. There is a Beal V and Pinson G (2014) When mayors go global: need to catalogue and compare the types of urban International strategies, urban governance and leader- politics which a post-growth entrepreneurialism ship. International Journal of Urban and Regional might be used to pursue. Research 38: 302–317. Bernt M (2009) Partnerships for demolition: The govern- ance of urban renewal in East Germany’s shrinking Acknowledegements cities. International Journal of Urban and Regional Mark Davidson and Alireza Farahani provided Research 33: 754–769. feedback on early drafts of the paper, as did parti- Bontenbal M and Van Lindert P (2009) Transnational city- cipants in a panel on ‘The Entrepreneurial City to-city cooperation: Issues arising from theory and Reconsidered’ at the 2015 Association of American practice. Habitat International 33: 131–133. Lauermann 221

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