On Theory and Method: Critical Ethnographic Approaches to Urban Regulatory Restructuring

Abstract

This study positions urban ethnography as a powerful methodology for the investigation of neoliberal regulation, urban governance (governmentality), and urban informality. State regulation theorists have assumed a prominent role in mapping the local exigencies of institutionally inherited landscapes as well as the uneven rescaling and activation tendencies of regulatory change. Governmentality theorists emphasize the ways in which urban policy knowledge forges links between fiscal austerity projects and the capillary systems of consent operating at the level of conduct and ethical subjectivity. Urban informality theorists focus on how contemporary urban restructuring operates increasingly within the realm of street-level poverty survival mechanisms, enacting sociospatial transformations negotiated through elaborate legal and extralegal systems of neoliberal regulation. The purpose of this paper is twofold: (1) to consider how the theoretical insights of these three leading analytics can be mobilized for ethnographic analysis at the urban scale, and (2) to suggest at a cursory level the ways in which ethnographic analysis can be deployed, in turn, to problematize and recast each camp's prevailing arguments. Ultimately, I argue that ethnographic research can be positioned as part of a theory program by enabling an empirically driven strategy to make general claims about the state and fate of urban theory.

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