From Urban Entrepreneurialism to a “Revanchist City”? On the Spatial Injustices of Glasgow’s Renaissance

Abstract

Recent perspectives on the American city have highlighted the extent to which the economic and sociospatial contradictions generated by two decades of “actually existing” neoliberal urbanism appear to demand an increasingly punitive or “revanchist” political response. At the same time, it is increasingly being acknowledged that, after embracing much of the entrepreneurial ethos, European cities are also confronting sharpening inequalities and entrenched social exclusion. Drawing on evidence from Glasgow, the paper assesses the dialectical relations between urban entrepreneurialism, its escalating contradictions, and the growing compulsion to meet these with a selective appropriation of the revanchist political repertoire.