The Bloomberg Way: Development Politics, Urban Ideology, and Class Transformation in Contemporary New York City

This dissertation explores the links between a development project, a particular urban ideology, and processes of class transformation in contemporary New York City. The city\u27s postindustrial transformation, especially since the 1970s fiscal crisis, has created a newly dominant corporate elite consisting of executives and high-level professionals. This ruling class alliance has begun to supersede the city\u27s older, real estate-centered traditional growth coalition, as emblematized by the political rise of billionaire ex-CEO Michael Bloomberg. Mayor Bloomberg, along with other ex-corporate executives in his administration, implemented a private-sector inspired corporate, technocratic, and antipolitical approach to governance in general and urban and economic development policy in particular. The Bloomberg Way, as I call this approach, entailed an embrace of competitiveness and conceptualized the city government as a corporation, businesses as clients, and the city itself as a product to be branded. The centerpiece of the development strategy inspired by the Bloomberg Way was the Hudson Yards plan, a comprehensive plan for the far west side of Manhattan originally developed as part of the city\u27s bid for the 2012 Summer Olympics. I explore the effectiveness of the Bloomberg Way in generating political support and governmental approval for various elements of the Hudson Yards plan. While portions of the Hudson Yards plan were approved, others, most notably a far west side Olympic stadium, were not. To the degree that the plan did gain support and approval it was in spite of the antipolitical Bloomberg Way, which proved ill-suited to the contentious realities of New York City development politics; more important were pre-existing reservoirs of political support among the members of the city\u27s traditional growth coalition and efforts at constituency-building by administration allies. I conclude that while this plan was largely a political failure, the Bloomberg administration learned important lessons from this failure, which actually allowed Mayor Bloomberg to expand his political support and consolidate his position of leadership. This dissertation has implications for broader understandings of urban neoliberalism and governance, especially in cities in which corporate elites are assuming positions of political leadership and are drawing on their corporate experience in governing

The Work of 9/11myth, History and the Contradictions of the Post-Fiscal Crisis Consensus

9/11 has been used in New York City politics to both explain the current fiscal crisis and justify certain economic development policies. Such use of 9/11 obscures the long-term historical roots of the current fiscal crisis, which in fact lie in the contradictions of the set of economic development policies implemented in the years since the city\u27s last major fiscal crisis in the mid-1970s

The Ghost in the Machine: The Neoliberal Urban Visions of Michael Bloomberg

This paper discusses the role of grand urban visions in neoliberal urbanism by drawing on ethnographic and other research into the administration of New York City\u27s ex-CEO Mayor, Michael Bloomberg. It argues that such visions illustrate the cultural dimensions and power of neoliberal urbanism, of which Bloomberg\u27s approach to governance and development was an example. It describes the details and development of such visions in the Bloomberg administration, their role in the administration\u27s ambitious development agenda, and the ways in which they affected the politics surrounding this agenda

Re-Scaling Patriotism: Competition and Urban Identity in Michael Bloomberg\u27s New York

This article responds to Akhil Gupta\u27s 1997 call for the exploration of spatialized commitment operating at scales besides that of the nation. It analyzes the attempts of the administration of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to mobilize urban patriotism in support of development proposals for Manhattan\u27s west side by portraying its opponents as insufficiently committed to the city\u27s future. Not just urban development policy was at stake in this debate, but the meaning of being a New Yorker. The urban identity that the administration and its allies espoused portrayed the city as a home for the ambitious, the innovative, the cosmopolitan, and above all the competitive, and was related to the local emergence of a new, globalized corporate elite. Other New Yorkers had different understandings of the city and their place in it, which ultimately doomed efforts to mobilize urban patriotism. The intersection of class-related identity and the fact of increased interurban competition created the conditions for urban identity to emerge as an issue. Finally, it is argued that urban identity must be distinguished from boosterism, and the likelihood of urban patriotism being mobilized in other global cities operating in a competitive environment is appraised

Bloomberg\u27s New York : Class and Governance in the Luxury City

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Mine your data: open data, digital strategies and entrepreneurial governance by code

Investment in the release of open data has become increasingly central to the implementation of smart city programs by governments around the world. Though originally arising out of a push towards “open government” and the pursuit of more transparent decision-making by public authorities at multiple scales, open data programs have more recently been adopted by municipal governments to support entrepreneurial goals of enhanced competitive positioning and attracting investment. As urban scholars now subject the smart city project to critical scrutiny for its role in advancing urban entrepreneurialism, this article considers the relevance of the open data agenda as it shapes wider understandings of the smart city. In particular, I address the collection of policy practices, aspirations, stakeholders and entrepreneurs active in framing the opportunities and values of open data for urban governments. Both the momentum of support for open data, along with a recent shift in the rhetorical aspirations of the open data movement away from the values of openness and transparency and towards a more confined focus on value generation, raise important critical questions for urban geographers concerned with the nature of urban governance in an age of big data