Contingent Neoliberalism and Urban Tourism in the United States

Abstract

Academic debates regarding tourism 's ascendancy as key for urban transformation and revival in a post-industrial era have become increasingly popular for the better part of the last two decades (Judd, 1995; Hoffinan et al., 2004; Judd, 2004;Judd, 2006;Gladstone and Preau, 2008; Ioannides and Timothy, 2010).Nevertheless, the extant scholarship on urban tourism barely examines this phenomenon in tandem with the "critique of neoliberalism" (Hall and Page, 2012: 16; see other chapters in this volume), which currently preoccupies many human geographers.Highlighting this point, Hall and Page indicate just a handful of studies like Clancy's (1998) examination ofneoliberalism's inter linkages to tourism's development context.Hall (2006) himself discusses how urban entrepreneurialism 's marriage to neoliberalism ideologically valida tes "place-competitive re-imaging strategies including the hosting of sports mega events" (ibid.: 64).Though Hall's (2006) discussion on the inter-linkages of visitor-oriented mega events to urban neoliberalism falls within the realm of a broader political economy approach in tourism geography as advocated by Britton (1991) (see also Debbage anti Ioannides, 2014;Bianchi, 2012; Mosedale, 2011), recent writings on urban toUI'ism exhibit limited explicit awaren�ss of social scientists' strides relating to neoliberalism's contingent nature (Brenner and Theodore, 2002;Keil, 2002;Jessop, 2002; Peck and Tiekell, 2002;Wilson, 2004;Hackworth, 2007; Stemberg, 2012).If anything, mos! observers discussing tourism's phenomenal growth within cities only implicitly tie this to a generic form of neoliberal ideology, failing to account for the "contextual embeddedness of neoliberal restructuring projects insofar as they have been produced within national, regional, and local contexts defined by the legacies of inherited institutional frameworks, policy regimes, regulatory practices, and political struggles" (Brenner and Theodore, 2002: 351).This chapter focuses on urban tourism's evolution in the US since the beginning of the neoliberal era.Upfront, we remind the reader that over the last quarter century or so the transformation of cities -especially their central partsinto standardized tourism enclaves (Judd, 2004) has occurred in phases mirroring the shift from "proto" to "roll-back" and eventually "roll-out" neoliberalism as postulated by Peck and Tickell (2002).Thus, the late 1970s and 80s witnessed

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