Entrepreneurial urbanization and masculine identities: an exploratory study of Khon Kaen, Thailand

Abstract

Our study identifies the relationships between entrepreneurial urbanization and masculine identities through the case study of smart city development in Khon Kaen, a secondary city in Thailand. We studied the planning and governance structure of the smart city plan, vis-à-vis the motivations, experiences, and responses to urban development in poor communities. We interviewed men and women from different livelihood, age, and class groups to answer the following questions: (a) How do masculine identities and roles shape entrepreneurial modes and processes of urbanization? Specifically, how is urban governance gendered? (b) How does urban development reinforce, reconfigure, or alienate masculine identities? We argue that while technocratic business masculinities are reinforced in an age of neoliberal urbanization, the spurring of privatized smart enclaves and knowledge economies threaten the identities of working-class men and their gendered experience of belonging in the city. The masculinization of urban elite networks accompanied by the feminization of the civil society further enables exclusionary modes of city governance to operate. This is brought about through the tokenizing of poor communities’ participation in planning processes and a manufacturing of cohesion through the appropriation of technocratic and evidence-based approaches by elite networks that typify technocratic masculine ideals, as opposed to the ‘feminine’ affective and consultative strategies employed by civil society groups.