The contributions to Urban neo- liberalisation bring together critical analyses of the dynamics and processes neo- liberalism has facilitated in urban contexts. Recent developments, such as intensified economic investment and exposure to aggressive strategies of banks, hedge- funds and investors, and long- term processes of market- and state- led urban restructuration, have produced uneven urban geographies and new forms of exclusion and marginality. These strategies have no less transformed the governance of cities by subordinating urban social life to rationalities and practices of competition within and between cities, and they also heavily impact on city inhabitants' experience of everyday life. Against the backdrop of recent austerity politics and a marketisation of cities, this volume discusses processes of urban neo- liberalisation with regard to democracy and citizenship, inclusion and exclusion, opportunities, and life- chances. It addresses pressing issues of commodification of housing and home, activation of civil society, vulnerability, and the right to the city.
Bryan S. Turner is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for Religion Politics and Society at the Australian Catholic University, Honorary Professor and Director of the Centre for Citizenship, Social Pluralism and Religious Diversity at Potsdam University, Germany, and Emeritus Professor at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York City. He is the founding editor of the Journal of Classical Sociology. He edited the Blackwell Wiley Encyclopedia for Social Theory (2018). He was awarded a Doctor of Letters by Cambridge University in 2009 and received the Max Planck Award in social science in 2015.
Hannah Wolf is a researcher and lecturer completing her PhD at the University of Potsdam, Coordinator of the Centre for Citizenship, Social Pluralism, and Religious Diversity and associate member at the collaborative DFG-research centre Re- Figuration of Spaces (TU Berlin). Her academic background includes theatre and media studies, anthropology, philosophy, and sociology. Her research interests lie in the political and moral economies of housing and home, citizenship, urban sociology, and the sociology of everyday life.
Gregor Fitzi is Co- Director of the Centre for Citizenship, Social Pluralism and Religious Diversity at University of Potsdam, Germany. After his PhD in Sociology at the University of Bielefeld, he was Assistant Professor at the Institute of Sociology, University of Heidelberg, Germany. Among his recent publications are The Challenge of Modernity. Simmel's Sociological Theory (2019) and Populism and the Crisis of Democracy, 3 vols. edited with Jürgen Mackert and Bryan S. Turner (2019).
Jürgen Mackert is Professor of Sociology and a Co- Director of the Centre for Citizenship, Social Pluralism, and Religious Pluralism at the University of Potsdam, Germany. His research interests lie in the sociology of citizenship, political economy, closure theory, (neo- )liberalism, settler colonialism and de- democratisation. His most recent publication is Populism and the Crisis of Democracy, 3 vols., edited with Gregor Fitzi and Bryan S. Turner (2019).
