Entrepreneurial urbanism : between uncommon sense and dull compulsion

‘How many successful convention centres, sports stadia, disney-worlds, harbour places and spectacular shopping malls can there be?’ (Harvey 1989, p. 12). Precise answers to this question continue to elude us. However, it is surely fair to say that the question remains depressingly relevant and that the number is probably larger than most would have thought likely (maybe even feasible) in the late 1980s. David Harvey’s prescient article on the uneven and contradictory shift towards entrepreneurial urbanism came out in the year that I started teaching in a city, Manchester, which was palpably in the throes of just such a transformation. The fact that it remains a required reading on my syllabus today has to be put down, I sincerely hope, to more than professional negligence. Neither can we account for the article’s staying power solely in terms of Harvey’s characteristic combination of penetrating analysis and direct writing. This 15-page digest of urban political economy, in condensed-pill form, remains significant because it captured a conjunctural moment, maybe even an historical tipping point. And it linked together a synoptic reading of municipal politics, (macro) economic dynamics, and (historical-geographical) processes in a way that spoke not only to that moment but to what was to come.