Governmentality: The new urbanism and the creative class within Atlanta, Georgia

Abstract

This study seeks to unearth how current urban growth machines mobilize governmentality as a political instrument. Specifically, this study examines two features of this mobilizing, the rhetoric of growth machines that speaks to what a space is and means, and the actual outcomes that creates a material, semiotic-infused space. Thus, I investigate both the offering of an elaborate, space-constructing rhetoric and the end product of this rhetorical usage. This spatial production activates governmentality by creating the preconditions necessary for a specific governmentality to operate (i.e. a governable space). As such, the activation of governmentality is the production of a meaning-infused space, both in practice and representation. In this sense, the mobilizing of governmentality is a political strategy that strives to create a socio-spatial milieu in which a specific governmentality can operate. In terms of the theory and literature on urban redevelopment, this research is significant because it addresses a gap in the current understandings of urban growth machines. Conceptualizing space and society as inseparable, and therefore requiring simultaneous management, fits directly into the growth machine thesis. In terms of policy, this research provides insight into the workings of the new urbanism and the creative class as problematic approaches to urban planning and governance. Rather than considering the new urbanism and the creative class as socio-spatial panaceas, I argue in this dissertation that they should rather be understood as the latest political strategy within the unending process of urban redevelopment.

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