Rentierism or entrepreneurialism? Value, governmentality and politics in the age of urban techno-monopoly

Ugo Rossi (Gran Sasso Science Institute), November 18 (15-16.30 at ICS-ULisboa, Sala Maria De Sousa)

In this presentation, I offer a critique of rentierist/re-feudalisation theses that have gained wide currency in heterodox economic thinking (Marianna Mazzucato, Yannis Varoufakis, Brett Christophers, Jodi Dean, Joel Kotkin), critical urban studies and the wider academic left. In critical urban studies, these theses maintain that a new type of land rentierism centred on value capture has supplanted previous forms of urban entrepreneurialism centred on the attraction of footlose capital that was typical of earlier stages of global city formation, as described by Saskia Sassen and others. In this view, urban rentierism leads local governments to act as vassals subjected to the unaccountable power of a global financial and real-estate oligarchy. In my critique of rentierist theses and their (disempowering) political implications, I present an alternative understanding of urbanised capitalism, of its contradictions and political possibilities. I argue that the intensification of land rent is symptomatic of the deeper economisation of life and society in the contemporary platformised urban economy and its governmentality based on the collusion of the state with monopolist corporations. In doing so, I identify the simultaneous exploitation and entrepreneurisalition of labour and its knowledge value as a key factor in economic value extraction in the social factory of contemporary urbanised capitalism. In the final part, I look at the political possibilities of this extended urban entrepreneurialism, particularly in the form of a renewed politics of place and community at the municipal level.

Urban governance beyond the state: cities and power regimes

Gabriel Feltran (Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics – SciencePo, France) – November 19 (17-18.30 at ICS-ULisboa, Sala Maria de Sousa)

Drawing on sociological theories of everyday life, my presentation argues that the governance of contemporary cities involves the coexistence of different power regimes that only occasionally challenge state sovereignty. I present three exemplary cases of how non-state actors – such as legal and illegal entrepreneurs, civil or even criminal organisations – actively intervene in the production of public policies with a strong urban impact. The reflection culminates in a conceptualisation of power regime that articulates a normative dimension (codes, norms, values) and a material dimension (money, means of violence). These would be relevant dimensions for a political reading of contemporary cities, going beyond state-centred analysis.