Krise und Hegemonie. Zur gegenwärtigen Kontinuität neoliberaler Rationalität am Beispiel der „unternehmerischen Stadt“ in Frankfurt am Main

Abstract

Since the 1980s entrepreneurialism has become the dominant and hegemonic form of urban governance. With reference to the materialist regulation approach as well as to the Foucauldian governmentality studies this article focuses on the relation between the current economic crisis and the stability of the neoliberal hegemony on the urban scale. A discourse analysis of the debates in the local parliament of the German city of Frankfurt am Main between September 2008 and May 2010 extended by interviews with local elites shows that the hegemonic order - regardless of the deep economic decline - remains intact: Despite of a short period of uncertainty and intensive hegemonic struggles the overall concept of the entrepreneurial city dominates the political order. To explain the preservation of the general consensus among the elites the analysis reveals that a broad majority of actors from different political parties is able to construe the crisis within a neoliberal rationality. Therefore, this paper argues that we will not witness ʻa new era of urban restructuringʼ (Soureli/Youn 2009, 35), but, rather, a further entrenchment of worldwide interurban competition and a continuous promotion of intra-local competitivness.

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