Against accountancy governance: Notes towards a new urban collective consumption

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, power brokers of our urban system assumed other managerial roles, other controlling roles more market-driven, more fiscally prudent. They started to recede from public view, dabbled with privatization, with contracting-out service delivery, doing it at minimum cost. After a while, this dabbling with the public budget became damn right babbling: entrepreneurial managers turned into managerial entrepreneurs and soon into middle-management technocrats, each with their own private hegemony of meaning. Before long, a new nobility assumed the mantle of political and authoritative power, a para-state of accountants and administrators, of middle managers and think-tank ‘intellectuals’, of consultants and confidants who reside over our privatized public sector, filing the paperwork and pocketing the rents and fees, together with the interest payments and bonuses, in our ever-emergent rentier and creditor society. This paper critically investigates the sweeping changes that have transformed urban governance since the 1970s.