Commentary

Dialogues in Human Geography

1–6
The new urban managerialism in ª The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/2043820620921031
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Andrew EG Jonas
University of Hull, UK

Abstract
This commentary critically examines Phelps and Miao’s concept of the new urban managerialism (NUM) in
light of three geopolitical processes operating around the state and urban politics: (1) the geopolitics of city-
regionalism; (2) the geopolitics of urban environmental management; and (3) the geopolitical implications of
the public–private financing of urban infrastructure. It argues that the NUM remains fundamentally a ter-
ritorialized political project and raises questions about where to draw conceptual and territorial boundaries
around the urban public interest.

Keywords
city-regionalism, environment, infrastructure, geopolitics, urban managerialism

Introduction state-funded projects, such as infrastructure or

research facilities.
In a highly influential paper, Harvey (1989) argued
Municipal entrepreneurialism was already a
that, in the wake of the crisis of Keynesianism, the
well-established feature of urban development in
dominant political rationale for urban development
North America and, if to a lesser extent, parts of
underwent a decisive shift in the 1970s and 1980s
Western Europe too. Indeed, in the United States,
from managerialism to entrepreneurialism. Driven
municipal entrepreneurialism has operated in one
by the necessity to accumulate, urban elites in many
form or another since the early 19th century (Sbra-
Western countries were engaged in an intense inter-
gia, 1996). Despite prompting questions about its
locality competition to attract investment and, in the
empirical generality, Harvey’s analysis nevertheless
case of urban governments, accrue tax revenues. If
inspired other urban scholars to situate interurban
there was a strong sense of social necessity in Har-
competition in relation to the socio-spatial struc-
vey’s explanation for the rise of urban entrepre-
tures and regulatory tensions surrounding processes
neurialism, he nonetheless recognized that cities
of capital accumulation. In so doing, scholars also
pursued different entrepreneurial strategies by
exploiting place-specific attributes (e.g. the pres-
ence of a specialized labour force, local agglomera-
Corresponding author:
tion economies, etc.). Typical strategies might Andrew EG Jonas, Department of Geography, Geology and the
include efforts to attract corporate headquarters or Environment, University of Hull, Hull HU6 7RX, UK.
bidding for major cultural events and large-scale Email: A.E.Jonas@hull.ac.uk
 2 Dialogues in Human Geography XX(X)
drew their inspiration from critical realism (Sayer,
1992), rejecting empirical generalization as a form
of explanation and turning to the analysis of wider
socio-regulatory structures, causal mechanisms and
their place-specific contingent conditions of activa-
tion (Cox, 1993; Hall and Hubbard, 1998; Jonas and
Wilson, 1999; Lauria, 1997).
Phelps and Miao’s (2020) article extends this
genre of critical urban analysis and considers not
only how modes of urban governance today differ
from earlier managerialist forms but also from those
entrepreneurial modes originally described by Har-
vey. Notably, they identify four variations within
urban entrepreneurialism: new urban managerial-
ism (hereafter NUM); urban diplomacy; urban intra-
preneurialism; and urban speculation. These are
‘overlapping yet qualitatively different forms of
innovation in which local governments are engaged’
(Phelps and Miao, 2020). They further suggest that
in his original thesis Harvey underplayed the role of
the state in the politics of urban development. Not
only has there been substantial innovation from
within the public sector but there are also visible
continuities in state structures, incentives and prac-
tices shaping urban governance processes and struc-
tures in the present.
Today’s urban politicians and managers are
highly adept at networking and interacting across
local and national political borders; indeed, they are
often regarded to be more entrepreneurial and stra-
tegic in responding to global issues and challenges
than their counterparts in national government (Bar-
ber, 2013). Phelps and Miao highlight urban diplo-
macy as evidence of innovation and continuity in
the NUM. However, they do not press home their
argument by situating the NUM in a wider geopoli-
tical context. If cities (and city-regions) in effect
function as entrepreneurial managers, are they in
fact capable of operating completely independently
of the state? If not, to what extent are the geopoli-
important tical interests of the state aligning with the new
managerialist strategies of cities? Where should
we draw the (conceptual and territorial) boundaries
around the NUM and urban speculation?
In this commentary, I consider these questions by
focusing on three geopolitical processes implicated
in the NUM: (1) the geopolitics of city-regionalism;
(2) the geopolitics of urban environmental manage-
ment; and (3) the geopolitical implications of the
public–private financing of urban infrastructure.
My overall aim is to extend and deepen some of the
conceptual insights that Phelps and Miao offer by
situating the NUM in a geopolitical context.
Upscaling urban governance: The
geopolitics of city-regionalism
An implicit argument in Phelps and Miao’s analysis
is the idea that the institutions and practices associ-
ated with urban entrepreneurialism are not restricted
to the jurisdictional limits of the city. When taken at
face value, this not an especially novel insight.
Peterson (1981), among others, argued that one of
the reasons why urban managers must compete is
because unlike capital, which is mobile, cities have
fixed jurisdictional limits. Yet in contrast to such
neo-classical economic reasoning, Phelps and Miao
consider whether entrepreneurialism comes from
within or without the institutions and territories of
urban government. One can push this idea a little
further and consider the extent to which the entre-
preneurial reach of the city is adjusting territorially
better to match the internal and external competi-
tiveness policies of the nation state. One distinct
possibility here is the deployment of city-
regionalism as a geopolitical instrument or ‘hege-
monic project’ (Jessop, 1997) on behalf of the
nation state.
In a passing reference to Magnusson (2012),
Phelps and Miao argue that the governance of pol-
itics at the urban scale predated the government of
urban politics by modern nation states. Today, how-
ever, urban entrepreneurialism has not only reached
beyond its local and metropolitan jurisdictional lim-
its but also that of its host nation states. For example,
Wachsmuth (2017) argues that the competitive
upscaling of urban governance in the United States
is driven not only by the needs of capital (e.g. urban
growth coalitions) but also by the agendas of state
and local politicians, who regard it as a viable if not
in fact necessary strategy for attracting inward
investment from outside the United States. It fol-
lows that, when considering the territorial reach
of urban entrepreneurialism, the state and its
Jonas
territoriality is not simply a part of the problem but
also a potential solution.
Phelps and Miao proceed to draw a distinction
between territorial and extraterritorial forms of
urban entrepreneurialism. The former refer to the
proliferation of all sort of new institutional spaces
within the city, such as tax-free enclaves, business
improvement districts and redevelopment authori-
ties. The latter refer to various forms of urban diplo-
macy that allow cities to reach out beyond nation
state territory. Yet this is a false distinction for two
reasons. First, it ignores how the so-called ‘territor-
ial’ urban management innovations often arise from
‘non-territorial’ (e.g. class, racial, etc.) struggles
over the distribution of the social product. With the
rise of the modern state, urban politics became
embroiled in all sorts of national political projects
of, and struggles around, socio-territorial redistribu-
tion. In the United States, such struggles under-
pinned the formation of new territorial structures
in the state, many of which coalesced in and around
cities and metropolitan areas (Cox and Jonas, 1993).
In short, urban governance innovation in the form of
new local and metropolitan spaces of the state is
itself a contingent outcome of all sorts of socially
determined conflicts around the spatial allocation of
social surplus.
Second, nation states increasingly enrol the entre-
preneurial attributes of cities – attributes like creativ-
ity, competiveness, resilience and so on – in their
own ‘extraterritorial’ efforts to promote international
competitiveness (Moisio, 2018). For example, nation
states often orchestrate city-regionalism internation-
ally in a manner that allows a national government to
channel state resources selectively towards those
city-regions that are best suited for nurturing innova-
tion and attracting global investment (on Chinese
city-regionalism, see Wu, 2016). Sami Moisio and I
therefore argue that city-regionalism is a fundamen-
tally geopolitical process, which reflects an ongoing
tension between the attempts of the state to manage
the domestic territorial politics of distribution, on the
one hand, and its efforts to foster urban entrepreneuri-
alism as a basis for promoting its own internationa-
lization agenda, on the other (Jonas and Moisio,
2018). Entrepreneurial cities as well as larger urban
agglomerations, such as city-regions and mega-
3
regions, can be theorized as simultaneously geo-
economic and geopolitical constructions, which are
strategically mobilized by various local and national
political actors in the service of the interests of the
nation state as well as local factions of capital and
labour.
The new environmental geopolitics
of urban development
While research often highlights the entrepreneurial
characteristics of contemporary processes of urban
development, a range of new environmental policy
issues and agendas, especially climate change and
sustainability (Long and Rice, 2019), are colonizing
emergent ‘spaces of urban politics’ (Ward et al.,
2018). One dimension of this new environmental
politics of urban development is how urban citizens
and voters participate in various urban ‘sustainabil-
ity fixes’ (While et al., 2004). As Aidan While,
David Gibbs and I have argued at some length, dis-
courses, strategies and struggles around urban
development frequently underpin the search for
some sort of a vision of an alternative and environ-
mentally sustainable (e.g. low-carbon) urban future.
Given that Phelps and Miao do consider the diverse
ways in which local citizens are enrolled as prosu-
mers (co-producers and consumers) of urban policy,
it is worth reflecting on citizen participation in the
new environmental politics of urban development.
Given globally pressing issues surrounding cli-
mate change, along with all sorts of citizen-led cli-
mate emergency measures and initiatives at the
urban scale, urban managers and politicians are
under increasing pressure to reduce carbon dioxide
(CO2) and other greenhouse gas emissions as a part
of strategies to de-carbonize urban development
(Rice, 2010). What potentially marks the NUM as
quite distinctive from earlier phases of urban devel-
opment – factors not considered by Phelps and Miao
– is that such de-carbonization initiatives are trans-
forming the economic rationale of interurban com-
petition, empowering new strategic alliances
between citizens, business organizations and local
government, and generating innovative approaches
to place marketing and imagineering. This is espe-
cially the case for cities that have an appropriate
4 Dialogues in Human Geography XX(X)
combination of place-specific conditions (e.g. port
facilities, proximity to offshore wind farms, access
to alternative energy technologies, etc.) to enable
innovation in carbon-neutral and renewable energy
sectors (Jonas et al., 2011). In such cities, the switch
to a low-carbon urban polity often requires the
enrolment of citizens as prosumers of new kinds
of green jobs and services. Although some might
see this as evidence for the ‘green-washing’ of urban
governance (Andersson and James, 2018), certain
aspects of the NUM are conducive to a host of green
urban initiatives, such as freecycling, repair and
reuse (the circular economy), and sustainable urban
living, many of which involve innovative ways of
engaging urban citizens as prosumers.
One of the ‘extraterritorial’ factors driving cities to
adopt innovative approaches to urban environmental
management is the increasing participation of munic-
ipal governments and citizens in urban diplomacy
around climate change. City managers, politicians
and citizens groups have come to recognize the huge
potential for political capital to be realized from pur-
suing local and global leadership on climate change
and exposing the weakness and inaction of the nation
state. Nonetheless, if cities are indeed decoupling
themselves from nation states with respect to climate
policy action, it is perhaps stretching a point to say
that they are transforming into green geopolitical
actors in their own right. Instead, the growing inter-
nationalization of green urban management requires a
fundamental rethinking not just of the changing form
of urban entrepreneurialism but also of our assump-
tions about where environmental agendas are located
within the presumed spaces of urban politics. At the
very least, the ensuing decades could mark the emer-
gence of a new environmental geopolitics of urban
development in which cities, states and global envi-
ronmental politics become increasingly intertwined
(Dierwechter, Forthcoming).
Going extraterritorial: Global
speculation and the financing
of urban infrastructure
Harvey (1989) identified the speculative ventures of
public–private partnership as one of the hallmarks
of urban entrepreneurialism. In similar yet also dif-
ferent ways, the NUM is characterized by a blurring
of the boundaries between the public and the private
as urban managers operate alongside a range of new
entrepreneurial actors in all sorts of speculative
urban ventures. Phelps and Miao intimate that urban
speculation today is less likely to occur around the
provision of urban public services and more likely
instead to involve the capture of surpluses from the
redevelopment and exchange of land. Although this
is may well be true of cities in the United States,
where redevelopment agencies have accrued sur-
plus tax revenues otherwise earmarked for afford-
able housing and services from inner-city property
redevelopment (Althubaity and Jonas, 1998), there
is plenty of evidence that urban speculation contin-
ues to occur around the provision of basic services
and infrastructure.
Facing austerity measures, many public agencies
across the United States are turning to private
investment consortia to finance and deliver major
new investments in urban and regional infrastruc-
ture (Hall and Jonas, 2014; Kirkpatrick and Smith,
2011). The availability of federal government grant
funding is a key incentive for such speculation. In
order to access such funding, cities and regional model
transit agencies are encouraged to set up new kinds similar to
of global infrastructure public–private partnerships SPV
(GIP3s) designed to draw down private equity fund-
ing for major infrastructure projects (Jonas et al.,
2019). A GIP3 typically forms around a private con-
sortium of international construction firms, opera-
tors and investors, which enters into a long-term
contract with a city or regional public agency to
finance, deliver, operate and maintain an infrastruc-
ture project, such as a rail transit system or freeway
project. Such innovative infrastructure governance
arrangements can have significant benefits for cash-
strapped public agencies, which seek to extract
financial penalties should the consortia fail to
deliver projects on time and at cost. Yet they are
also risky undertakings that require complex and
extended contractual negotiations in which highly
territorialized matters of local funding and control
come to the fore. Despite the novelty of GIP3
arrangements, territorialized forms of knowledge
and modes of governance collaboration remain
Jonas
significant factors shaping efforts on the part of
public officials to look for extraterritorial solutions
to problems related to the delivery of urban services
and infrastructure (Jonas et al., 2019).
At the same time, GIP3 financing arrangements
further draw the NUM into the orbit of a ‘geopolitics
of capitalism’ (Harvey, 1985). Place-based infra-
structure assets are always prone to devaluation and
require a high level of urban and regional political
stability and a degree of accountability to the state in
order to attract global investors. One might even
argue that the negotiation of robust contractual
arrangements between urban managers and global
investment consortia necessitates a form of urban
diplomacy in which it is impossible to circumnavi-
gate questions of national security, risk and territor-
ial integrity. At the very least, such efforts to attract
private equity financing for urban infrastructure dis-
rupt the relationship between the ‘territorial’ and
‘extraterritorial’ interests of urban managers and
raise profoundly complex questions about where
to draw the boundaries around the public interest
in cities.
Conclusions
Phelps and Miao offer a number of interesting intel-
lectual avenues for exploring further Harvey’s orig-
inal concept of urban entrepreneurialism. Notably,
they argue that the geographies of urban diplomacy
involve policy networks that sometimes circumna-
vigate the nation state and at other times seem to
replicate arrangements in the international interstate
system. Nonetheless, they are forced to conclude
that the NUM ‘remains quite firmly located within,
and taking its cues from, its respective nation-state
frameworks’ (Phelps and Miao, 2020). In my com-
mentary, I have argued that the NUM is likely to be
drawn into a variety of geopolitical processes – city-
regionalism, environmentalism, global financing
and so on – operating both inside and beyond the
nation state.
If there is growing awareness among urban scho-
lars of the limitations of overly territorialized repre-
sentations of urban politics (Rodgers et al., 2014),
there is a corresponding concern that a rigid inter-
pretation of Phelps and Miao’s analysis of NUM
5
could result in under-territorialized representations
of urban politics. While their article opens up excit-
ing new ways of thinking about urban entrepreneuri-
alism, it also raises questions as to whether the
NUM can be so neatly detached from concepts of
the state, territory and geopolitics. In this respect, I
would argue that the NUM remains fundamentally a
territorialized political project in the state. That said,
where one ultimately draws the territorial and con-
ceptual boundaries around cities, nation states, and
the public interest remains an open research
question.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest
with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publica-
tion of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the
research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
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