Bloomberg's New York: Class and Governance in the Luxury City

New York mayor Michael Bloomberg claims to run the city like a business. In Bloomberg's New York, Julian Brash applies methods from anthropology, geography, and other social science disciplines to examine what that means. He describes the mayor's attitude toward governance as the Bloomberg Way--a philosophy that holds up the mayor as CEO, government as a private corporation, desirable residents and businesses as customers and clients, and the city itself as a product to be branded and marketed as a luxury good.

Commonly represented as pragmatic and nonideological, the Bloomberg Way, Brash argues, is in fact an ambitious reformulation of neoliberal governance that advances specific class interests. He considers the implications of this in a blow-by-blow account of the debate over the Hudson Yards plan, which aimed to transform Manhattan's far west side into the city's next great high-end district. Bringing this plan to fruition proved surprisingly difficult as activists and entrenched interests pushed back against the Bloomberg administration, suggesting that despite Bloomberg's success in redrawing the rules of urban governance, older political arrangements--and opportunities for social justice--remain.

Author: Julian Brash
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 02/15/2011
Pages: 344
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.16lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9780820336817

Review Citation(s):
Choice 09/01/2011

About the Author
JULIAN BRASH is an associate professor of anthropology at Montclair State University. His work has been published in Urban Anthropology, Critique of Anthropology, Social Text, Cultural Geography, and Antipode.