Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 2025 Plenary Lecture
Date: 3/27/2025
Time: 2:30 PM – 3:50 PM
Room: 430A, Level 4, Huntington Place
Type: Plenary
Theme: Making Spaces of Possibility
Organizer(s):
Sharlene Mollett University of Toronto
Lyla Mehta
Chair(s):
Sharlene Mollett, University of Toronto
Description: Ante-Austerity Urbanism
Abstract: Attentiveness to the proliferation of neoliberal policies and austerity measures has expanded our awareness as to the scale and impact of post-Keynesian shifts in urban political economies. This study seeks to reorient the temporal insert of economic crises by questioning austerity’s origin story. Drawing on illustrations of ongoing racial exclusions in the U.S., here, anti-blackness is presented as a pre-neoliberal austerity measure. It furthers that this structure of boundless extraction was an undertone of the Keynesian brand of liberal democracy some decry the loss of. Though related to dominant models of austerity, ante-austerity does not fit squarely within the geopolitical (U.S., Britain, or the Eurozone), idiomatic (Reaganomics/Thatcherism), nor temporal (1970 or 2008) terrains attributed to the appearance of neoliberal austerity. This exercise concludes with suggestions for how a consideration of this sort may expand our knowledge, and quicken our interrogation, of how extraction and expulsion perform across the world stage. It also identifies the emergence of model cities in neoliberal America.
Presentations:
Discussant: Jamie Peck
Panelist: Sage Ponder
Panelist: Willie Wright