Neoliberal necropolitics and the global competition for urban dominance

Abstract

I deploy Achille Mbembé’s notion of necropolitics to show that neoliberalism as an urban development strategy has resonant, however differential, impacts between the Global North and South. As neoliberalizing cities throughout the world engage in interurban competition in their efforts to achieve or maintain “global city” and “world-class” city status, this is intertwined with necropolitics in that local governments must decide whose lives are expendable and whose are not, who is valuable to neoliberal capitalist interests and who may be devalorized, excluded, and subjected to forms of violence such as expulsion and displacement—processes connected to disrupted social and resource networks, psychological trauma, disease, and death. I rely upon a series of urban vignettes (LA, Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai, London, and Paris) to articulate several resonances and points of departure between them, shedding light on “actually existing” manifestations of neoliberal necropolitics and its contemporary relationship to interurban competition.