The Rhetoric and Reality of Urban Policy in the Neoliberal City: Implications for Social Struggle in Over-the-Rhine, Cincinnati

This paper explores the disparities between the ideological discourses and material outcomes of three key urban policies, contextually grounded within the neoliberalised social and institutional spaces of Over-the-Rhine, Cincinnati. Whilst the rhetoric of neoliberal doctrine presents an emancipatory urban imaginary based upon individual freedom and the beneficent role of free markets, the embedding of the policies discussed accentuates the political and economical disenfranchisement of the most marginalised neighbourhood inhabitants. Moreover, the ability of this group to politically mobilise against hostile neoliberalisation and gentrification is undermined by the facilitation of out-migration of stable low-income families and community leaders, and the reproduction of the negative, criminal, and blighted aspects of Over-the-Rhine's environment. Neoliberalisation is seen to operate through material and discursive moments of social exclusion and in perpetuating sociospatial structures which justify the continued implementation of repressive political and regulatory projects. In concluding, I suggest neoliberal hegemony may be undermined through exposing the ways in which it reproduces and exacerbates the phenomena it condemns.