Our topic will be addressed through an examination of case studies, theoretical interventions, and representational analysis of neoliberal urban planning projects. Professor Nigel Hatton’s presentation addresses town and gown relationships at the University of California, Merced. Caught in the middle of utopian and dystopian narratives are first-generation college attendees who find themselves powerless in the face of how the confluences of war, technology, and incarceration connect to the development of university curriculum, departments, and landscapes. The visible status of the human being amid neoliberal narratives of university progress shows up in the relationship between the university and its city. The campus and the surrounding prisons literally compete for bodies and resources to fuel specters of justice, civilization, and self-preservation in a shared geography of stark economic, labor, and legal status disparities. Neoliberal narratives of progress, futurity, and savior provide administrative and faculty elites with the mandates of status-quo institution building through mission statements that address the imagined, yet waning possibilities for transformation, justice, and revolutionary action. Professor Hatton demonstrates how the interrelated flows of capital, confinement, and conservatism can be utilized to transform university spaces, learning methods, and human agency in university/community relationships.
These town and gown relationships extend to international scales as we see the word ‘campus’ functioning to conceptualize new global corporate geographies. The headquarters of the top IT companies involve planning projects that mark the rise of unique urban forms strategizing ideal workplace practices and identities fitting of a ‘knowledge-economy’ discourse. The disciplines of Human Resources and Humanist Management have shifted to spatial innovations as practitioners seek to design workspaces that generate and commodify educative principles of cooperative labor that foster new subjectivities based on unifying worker self-development with labor productivity. Professor Simpson traces Marx’s analysis of the composition of capital in order to examine how ‘higher’ social relations are developed as the expressive value of collective social labor and function as a new productive force emerging both as private property and as sets of ideologies, education, and science. By identifying the locus of this transformation though urban forms, this analysis articulates new social relations, needs, and demands of collectivity, even within the private property system. Professor Simpson’s demonstrates ways of approaching the function of these pedagogical practices as part of the longer history of capitalist reproduction, and ultimately, as vital to the recognition of counter-hegemonic interventions within their unique iterations today.
Such neoliberalism spatial forms carry implications regarding what conceptions of human agency will be possible in the future. Thus representations of the future found in mass culture are grasped as forms of political struggle in Professor Alfredo Carlos’ presentation, which examines the means by which neoliberalism has changed the way Americans collectively think about the future and, specifically, the role of public investment in creating that future. As we witness neoliberal policy usher in an era of doom that has all but erased the positive visions of humanity’s future in the public imagination, it remains important to historicize how quickly this vision has arrived. Engaging Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, and Edward Said, Professor Carlos utilizes the theory of hegemony to analyze the ideological antinomies of futurity from the late 20th to the early 21st century. Significantly, visions of futurity were historically based on the presumption of massive public investment to develop the technology that would deliver urban advancement in the public sphere. Professor Carlos argues that we not only need to revitalize these positive visions of technology, but we also need to assert ways of being human that improve the actual 'living' part of our lives. He demonstrates that the Humanities can play an important role in not only deconstructing late stage capitalism, but in envisioning what new possibilities are available toward creating a future that allows everyone to ‘be human.’
The varying scales of analysis represented in this panel of the way in which neoliberal spaces function through combining narratives of human development and material practices will readily generate a vibrant discussion. In order to ensure significant time for this discussion, each of the three panelist will limit paper presentations to 18 minutes. As a unit, these papers elucidate the urban, educational, and imaginative qualities of an economic internationalism embedded within new spatial forms and initiate a much-needed discussion of the way neoliberal narratives function to identify emergent social formations characterized by futurities of naked capitalism.