If neoliberalism is everything, maybe it is nothing

The starting point of this comment is Juliana M. Zanotto’s (2020) recent paper in Planning Theory: ‘The role of discourses in enacting neoliberal urbanism. Understanding the relationship between ideology and discourse in planning’. It is one of many in a line of papers in the field of planning theory, and related fields such as political geography and political economy (e.g. Peck, 2004), that take neoliberalism as their focus of study or attack. This comment is not so much, or not only, directed at Zanotto’s paper (which contains a very relevant and interesting conceptual discussion of discourse and ideology), as it is at the general treatment of the concept of neoliberalism in planning theory and practice. According to Zanotto, neoliberalism is a dominating force. In recent decades, it has been ‘shaping planning practice and the production of space’ (p. 105). In a review article in Progress in Planning, Tore Sager (2011) identifies as many as fourteen different planning-related policies with a neoliberal rationale: city marketing, urban development by attracting the ‘creative class’, economic development incentives, competitive bidding, public-private partnerships (PPPs), private involvement in financing and operating transport infrastructure, private sector involvement in procuring water, business-friendly zones and flexible zoning, property-led urban regeneration, privatisation of public space and sales-boosting exclusion, liberalisation of housing markets, gentrification, privately owned and secured neighbourhoods, and quangos organising market-oriented urban development. Zanotto goes further by saying that neoliberalism is not only a set of policies but an ideology, a belief system, that shapes ways of thinking and acting. No-one I know calls himor herself (a) neoliberal, nor claims to be following a philosophy or ideology of neoliberalism. However, people and things (e.g. policies) may be, and are, qualified as being or doing such by others. And those who receive this