Urban political economy

This chapter offers a reconstruction of the evolving trajectory of entrepreneurial urbanism from a perspective of urban political economy that combines attention on both the structural and performative dimensions of urban economic arrangements. Our journey started from early debates on urban entrepreneurialism, and particularly from David Harvey's seminal article on the entrepreneurialisation of urban governance as an essential component of the rising neoliberal regimes in the 1980s. At that time, manufacturing decline and the related post-Fordist transition, at least in the Global North, shifted the urban mechanisms of economic value creation and extraction from the sphere of production to that of consumption, leisure and events in which real-estate capital acquired a prominent place. Our text has then explored the subsequent manifestations of entrepreneurial urbanism in the form of tech-driven urbanisms (from the creative and smart city projects to startup urbanism), the sharing economy and other types of platform-mediated urban economies