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Re-grounding the city with Polanyi: From urban entrepreneurialism to entrepreneurial municipalism

Thompson, M; Nowak, V; Southern, A; Davies, J; Furmedge, P; (2020) Re-grounding the city with Polanyi: From urban entrepreneurialism to entrepreneurial municipalism. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space , 52 (6) pp. 1171-1194. 10.1177/0308518x19899698. Green open access

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Abstract

Conventional approaches to local economic development are failing to address deepening polarisation both within and between city regions across advanced capitalist economies. At the same time, austerity urbanism, particularly in the UK, presents challenges for urban authorities facing reduced budgets to meet increased demands on public services. Municipalities are beginning to experiment with creative responses to these crises, such as taking more interventionist and entrepreneurial roles in developing local economies, generating alternative sources of revenue or financialising existing assets. Rooted in a Polanyian perspective and building on the concepts of the entrepreneurial state and grounded city, we identify an embryonic alternative approach – what we call ‘entrepreneurial municipalism’ – as a policy pathway towards resolving enduring socioeconomic problems where neoliberal urban-entrepreneurial strategies have failed. We situate entrepreneurial municipalism as one strand in an assemblage of new municipalist interventions, between radical urban social movements and more neoliberal strategies such as financialised municipal entrepreneurialism. Drawing on original research on the Liverpool City Region, we explore how local authorities are working with social enterprises to harness place-based assets in ways which de-commodify land, labour and capital and re-embed markets back into society. Finally, we draw upon Polanyi as our guide to disentangle differences in approach amongst divergent forms of municipalist statecraft and to critically evaluate entrepreneurial municipalism as a possible trajectory towards the grounded city.

Type: Article
Title: Re-grounding the city with Polanyi: From urban entrepreneurialism to entrepreneurial municipalism
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1177/0308518x19899698
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0308518X19899698
Language: English
Additional information: © 2021 by SAGE Publications. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).
Keywords: Entrepreneurial state, local economic development, urban policy, municipal statecraft, Polanyian economic geography
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment > Inst for Innovation and Public Purpose
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10135715
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