Bob Lake, Rutgers University, Bloustein School of Planning & Public Policy
Urban redevelopment in the neoliberal city is frequently characterized in unitary terms of privatization and commodification producing iconic landscapes of festival marketplaces and gentrified neighborhoods. Against this generalized model, this project delineates the multiple redevelopment processes simultaneously unfolding in discrete neighborhoods of Camden, NJ, one of the poorest cities in the country and the site of prolonged political contestation over land development policy. The particular redevelopment process performed in each neighborhood reflects a unique assemblage of relations among state, market, and civil society actors engaged in complex webs of interaction situated at multiple scales; and each distinct network of relations in turn produces a highly specific neighborhood landscape that materializes a particular form of redevelopment at the local scale. The spatial structure of urban redevelopment across a city is often viewed as a horizontal map of discrete bounded neighborhood characteristics arrayed in what Iris Young has called a logic of identity. The alternative relational logic deployed here sees each urban neighborhood as continually enacted and (re)constructed through a transitory relational dynamic that, because it is performed, offers continuous possibilities for contesting the hegemony of neoliberalism.
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