Governmentalities of Big Moscow: Particularising Neoliberal Statecraft

In the summer of 2011, the Russian state initiated a project to significantly expand the size of its capital, Moscow, developing it into a polycentric urban formation and a ‘global city’. This article approaches the global city as a circulating form of governmentality by way of analysing discussions prompted by the plan for Big Moscow. It proposes that the logic of optimisation at work in the plan implies that it can be characterised as a neoliberal reform. The focus of the essay is on how neoliberalism becomes particularised in the context of the analysed discussions as it gains backing from constellations of authoritarian politics or historically rooted forms of cultural understanding. This does not render the examined case an anomaly but rather provides a paradigmatic example of how the productive entwinement of seemingly disparate governmental techniques is a necessary effect of the installation and functioning of the neoliberal regime.