If those were some of the outlines of one dominant model of urbanisation that followed the last decade’s global financial crisis, what seems to be percolating in today’s emergency? It is far too early to determine the outcome of the multiple crises of 2020. There has always been a repressive element of neoliberalism, but post-2008 its authoritarian dimension became increasingly prominent. And the institutional drive towards transborder mobility began to confront a resurgent territorial nationalism that violently repudiated many elements of globalisation even as it took for granted other aspects of it. Platformisation and other emerging forms of digital connectivity began to significantly reshape corporate strategies as well as techniques of urban governance (see Barns 2019). Aided by state policies and new technologies, speculative global investment was channelled into any available cranny in the hyper-commodified and financialised urban landscape-including housing at multiple scales and morphologies, from single-family suburban homes, tiny houses and trailer parks to central-city high-rise flats, co-living ventures, and district-sized megaprojects. Cities became sites of increasingly punitive austerity that was at once generalised as well as targeted at specific classes, social groups, racialised populations, housing tenures, and migration statuses. Following the global financial meltdown of 2007–2008, cities in Britain, America, and elsewhere turned, in various and variegated ways, towards a distinctive expression of neoliberal urbanisation (Beswick et al. Recent urban history has been punctuated and periodised by crisis. And it appears to have already inaugurated a new phase of urban political-economic recomposition, realignment, and restructuring. Yet covid-19 has made it impossible to deny the fundamental brittleness of neoliberal urbanism. Urbanisation is not coming to some kind of lugubrious end, as many commentators were arguing earlier in the year (see Madden 2020). From housing and health care to social infrastructure and basic working conditions, the political-economic status quo has been revealed as incapable of meeting the needs of everyday life.
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