Liberating the City: Between New York and New Orleans

The paper develops a critical analysis of the intellectual project of the “new urban right, ” highlighting the role of conservative and free-market think tanks in the formation, elabo-ration, and diffusion of market-oriented or “neoliberal ” urban policy in the period since the late 1970s. The discussion is organized around a comparative analysis of the right’s narration of urban crises in post-1975 New York City and post-Katrina New Orleans, during which time welfarist modes of urban governance have increasingly given way to an alternative—but hardly stable—regime, based on the invasive moral and penal regulation of the poor, together with state-assisted efforts to reclaim the city for business, the middle classes, and the market. But there is a complex geography to this process of ideological diffusion and transformation. If the shift in the ideational climate was, for all intents and purposes, a slow, incremental, and some-what endogenous one in New York City, it roared in from out of town, with violent intensity, in New Orleans. The neoliberal makeover of the Gulf Coast is being guided by an ideational pro-gram manufactured on, and managed from, the East Coast—a first-world form of structural adjustment. [Key words: think tanks, neoliberalism, Hurricane Katrina.]