The politics and possibilities of inclusive urban planning in the post-crash neoliberal capital world-system: A comparative study of semi-peripheral urban transformations in Amsterdam and Manchester in 2019

Abstract

This thesis aims to explain the politics and possibilities of inclusive urban planning in core Western cities of the post-crash neoliberal world-system and, more specifically, how (and to what extent) that politics was reproducing that system in 2019, post-2015, and thus limiting the possibilities for inclusive urban planning. Its contributions to critical studies are fivefold: conceptual, methodological, empirical, theoretical, and political. It views the politics and possibilities of inclusive urban planning from a post-positivist, critically materialist perspective, combining post-millennial advances in critical urban studies with post-crash advances in capitalism studies, including studies of the capital world-system, of hegemony, of neoliberalism, of financialisation, and of gentrification. It engages in a critically grounded and extended comparative theorisation of the politics and possibilities of inclusive urban planning in Manchester and Amsterdam, focussing on plans for the transformation of semi-peripheral urban areas: specifically, Northern Gateway, on the north-eastern fringe of Manchester city centre; and Hamerkwartier, on the northern bank of the IJ, close to the centre of Amsterdam. It explains the history of urban development and planning in those cities; the plans for the development of those cities post-crash; the plans for Northern Gateway and Hamerkwartier; the planning systems; and the political challenges in realising those two projects in 2019. It explains the dominant theories of inclusive urban planning in practice; their social construction; and what was really going on in that theoretical regard, from a post-positivist, critically materialist perspective. And it explains the corresponding limits of inclusive urban planning in those two cities. In sum, it finds that the politics of inclusive urban planning in core Western cities was generally focussed on forging (and often forcing) real-world programmes of neoliberal restructuring “in dialectical tension with inherited social and institutional landscapes, and through an array of situated political struggles and strategic manoeuvres” (Peck, Brenner and Theodore, 2018, p. 5): including, forming assemblages that would maximise potentials in certain directions, socio-spatially and institutionally; exercising the social power of planners and investors (public and private) and the economic power of capital; and, contradictorily, opening up possibilities for radically democratic inclusive urban planning. More specifically, it finds that: the alignment of residents’ and investors’ interests in Northern Gateway and Hamerkwartier required the active reconstruction of urban planning institutionally, to make those projects work financially; and that the corresponding double movements between more-or-less inclusive plans post-crash were bound up with the interests of capital. It shows thus how the inclusivity of the Northern Gateway and Hamerkwartier projects was limited financially, with regard to private investment; socio-spatially, with regard to existing disparities in Manchester and Amsterdam; and politically, with regard to the governance of urban planning in those cities. It argues thus for further research, to work out the possibilities of democratically inclusive urban planning in practice.

Date of Award	4 Jun 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Graham Haughton (Main Supervisor) & Philip Black (Co Supervisor)