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At the current conjuncture of neoliberal urbanism, when more than 20 years have passed since scholars identified the retrenchment of the federal state from urban affairs and the shift from urban govern ment to urban govern ance, those of us engaged in questions of urban politics have much yet to learn about the power relations in American cities. At the same time, we must recognize those key concepts and frameworks that have shaped our ability to understand both the processes involved in urban politics and the expressions of those processes, as they are manifest in concrete places and often, literally, in places made of concrete. The urban regime, as explained by Clarence Stone a quarter century ago in Regime Politics, is one such concept, as illustrated in a very compelling empirical investigation, that has shaped the lexicon of how we understand cities. Stone's contribution came along at a time when geographers were grappling with understanding the local and the global and their relationship to capitalism. Geographers engaged regime theory in fits and starts with other conceptual innovations in the field, including the regulation approach, flat ontologies, and relational sense of place. If we apply these three conceptual innovations to the regime approach, as I argue we should, then we get a much more robust conceptual tool to understand the contemporary urban political landscape.

AbstractIn this article, we demonstrate the neoliberalism and multiscalar economic perspective of the charter school movement in Atlanta, Georgia, through examination of news articles and editorials about charter schools in the Atlanta Journal‐Constitution from 1998 to 2004. We posit three interrelated dynamics which explain the editorial board's interest in charter schools as part of a broader urban regime agenda. First, charter schools represent part of a neoliberal shift in education that parallels shifts in urban governance, emphasizing flexibility, public–private partnerships, and 'market'‐oriented consumer choice and accountability. Second, the newspaper is issuing a challenge to educational structures, to adopt more neoliberal policies and shed a bureaucratic, liberal governance framework. Finally, we find critical evidence that the charter school movement draws on a multiscalar discourse which simultaneously references responsiveness to local, neighborhood needs, and at the same time highlights the economic imperatives of a global, competitive city to differentially skill students/workers in order to capture mobile and fractured (global) capital.