Vestiges, ventures, and visibility of the new private urban governance

Gated communities and business improvement districts are by now well-known forms of private urban governance. Our special issue on the New Private Urban Governance (or PUG) unearths other forms, spaces, and practices. The latter include everything from tourist sites to special architectures to underground pedestrian labyrinths to climate gating to hi-tech surveillance systems. The contributing authors from around the world examine PUG’s evolving means in global cities like Sao Paulo, Toronto, Washington, DC, and Guangzhou, thus overcoming the tendency to focus on PUG in the North or from North-centric perspectives.

Due in part to the influence of neo-liberalism, it is perhaps less than surprising that these PUG forms continue to grow in scope and influence, leading to profound transformations of the urban landscape. Yet, rather than completely new, the authors show that these private ventures often come with elements from the past. They reveal too their detrimental effects, including racial and class-based exclusion, exploitation, confusion and waste, sometimes at public expense.

Our special issue is based on themes of vestiges, ventures, and visibility that we think define the new PUG and expose its workings in new ways. Our theme of vestiges reflects the idea that PUG forms rely and build upon, rather than fully replace, earlier, more public governance practices, logics, and spaces. Ventures shows the private and market-oriented thrust of urban governance heavily dependent on the protection and extraction of value and the intensifying financialization of urban life.Private governing ventures have certainly reshaped how cities are managed, organized, and experienced. Visibility highlights how governing technologies make visible both PUG and the politics of space.

The articles in this issue also point us to necessary methodological innovations, as PUG practices become more hidden and complex. Scholarship must include attention to contestation and solidarities, resistances, and alternatives to new PUG forms that reproduce hypervisibility, intensified control, displacements, and dispossessions. Attending conferences and intentional walking consistent with urban ethnographies, are only some illustrated possibilities. These methods expose the multiple and infrastructural practices as well as improvisation, incrementalism, and political mobilization.

Beyond these themes, and while our special issue answers recent calls in urban studies for more scrutiny of urban governance, there is still more research to be done on wider PUG contexts. As PUG continues to mutate and adapt to shifting and uneven landscapes, critical governance studies of the urban remain paramount. By examining the little, uneven, and broad aspects of PUG, our contributors highlight the edges and convergence of these forms, actors, and practices. Echoing the calls from contributors, pathways forward and alternatives uncovered must be rooted in social, racial, environmental, digital, and community-driven justice.

Read the full article on Urban Studies OnlineFirst here.