(Re)producing the city in the neolibral era : in search of urban value : cross-comparison of four former French (Caen, Le Havre) and German (Leipzig, Dresden) industrial districts ; (Re)produire la ville à l'heure néolibérale : à la recherche de la valeur urbaine : comparaison croisée de quatre anciens quartiers industriels Français (Caen, Le Havre) et Allemands (Leipzig, Dresde)

Open Access

Abstract

The past forty years have been deeply impacted by the triumph of the neoliberal doctrine on a global scale, as much on the political as on the economic level. Overall, the mechanisms of market deregulation and the reorganization of social compromises induced by this doctrine are well known. But urban geography is still struggling to identify and qualify their importance for the city's local production, particularly in France where the planning tradition and public institutions remain strong. Concomitant with the emergence of urban planning by project and with the dissemination, on a great diversity of local contexts, of generic urban models such as the "sustainable city" or the "creative city", etc., neoliberalization raises the question of a radical transformation of the production system of the city as a whole. This transformation does not only affect planning policies, but it concerns more generally a significant portion of the standards and values which preside over the design, the representations and the appropriations of the contemporary city. In other words, it has an effect on principles which serve as a guide for evaluating and legitimizing urban policies and the class compromises that allow them. By analyzing and articulating these local transformations in four former industrial districts of medium-sized French and German cities which have undergone an intense process of urban renewal for almost thirty years, this work questions the processes of urban revaluation in areas that were nevertheless strongly devalued at the beginning of the 1990s. This review, which covers a long period of time (1990-2020), aims to show that this revaluation takes the form of a process of recapitalization of the urban space which articulates symbolic values and Market value, according to a precise cycle of subordination of the first to the second, which appears typical of the neoliberal destruction / creative process; and in which a new class compromise is cemented between the real estate bourgeoisie and fractions of the ...