42 class families as well.
19
However, it should also be noted that both administrations, in light of the current global recession, continue to resort to neoliberal policies.
These include, among others, the implementation of quantitative easing to stabilize major banks and financial markets Mason, 2010, the lowering of taxes
on the wealthy, and the implementation of fiscal austerity measures that are cutting state funding for their welfare and education institutions McNihol et al.,
2010; O’Grady, 2010. In the final two sections of this chapter I describe some of the ways that neoliberalism has impacted the urban landscapes and cultural
spheres that are inhabited by contemporary UK and US young people.
1.4 Neoliberal Urbanization and Non-Profits
The implementation of the UK and US neoliberal policies that I have described thus far, have had a particularly noticeable and transformative effect on
the landscape, social structures, and economies of UK and US cities. Extolling the neoliberal virtues of ‘decentralization’ and ‘localism’ post-1980s UK and US
central governments, including the current Cameron and Obama administrations, have rolled back state funding in favour of decentralized approaches. According to
these discourses, local city and town governments have to make do and figure out their budgets with less federal monies, based on the theory that decreased federal
funding will generate civic enterprise and social responsibility Featherstone et al., 2012. In the UK, Featherstone et al., 2012, p. 177 describe the Coalition
government’s 2010 Green Paper as: A radical shift in the way in which the local is envisioned in UK policy
discourse and practice. This underlying agenda for a ‘truly radical localisation’ Conservative Party 2010, 14 lies at the centre of the UK
Coalition government’s political agenda, with decentralisation ‘described as the biggest thing that government can do to build the Big
Society’ HM Government 2010, 2. This articulation of localism is
taking place in a climate of pronounced austerity as the Conservative- led Coalition government has enacted a programme to dramatically
curtail government spending.
19
University tuition in the US has increased dramatically during the 1981-2005 time frame. For example, state universities have increased their tuition by 472, while private universities have
increased their tuition by 419 Adler, 2010.
43 Moreover, as industrial jobs were being outsourced from cities like Detroit
and Manchester to developing countries due in large part to neoliberal trade policies, city governments during the last thirty years have, nonetheless, turned to
neoliberal policy prescriptions to restructure their fledgling economies Harvey, 2005. For example, in an effort to attract financial capital, policies implemented
in major world-cities like London and Los Angeles neglected much of their industrial sectors, and instead offered tax breaks and subsidies to non-industry
based corporations, curbed their budget deficits to appease the bond and credit agencies, outsourced many of their municipal and increasingly their education
services to private companies, and instituted an elaborate system of private-public partnerships Brenner, 2006; Featherstone et al., 2011; Harvey, 2005. This has
led to the current division of maj or cities along class lines, where the city’s
wealthy residents enjoy extravagant and increasingly gated communities, private municipal services, and twenty-four hour armed protection. As Adler 2010, p. 70
describes in the US context, “ City governments across the country now provide packages of services and taxes in the form of Business Improvement Districts,
which are tailored to the means of the neighbourhoods that finance them, so that no subsidization of the poor by the wealthy occurs”. Meanwhile, the majority of
urban dwellers have to pay increasing fees and taxes to municipal services with declining quality, and deal with ever increasing rent, food, and transport costs as
their wages stagnate or decline, and as unemployment and crime rise. Incidentally, the discourses of responsibility, individualism, and freedom that neoliberals
invoke often obscure the more authoritarian and disciplinary arm of neoliberal policies, which have largely criminalized poverty and anti-corporate democratic
dissent Graham, 2011. For example, the US boasts the highest incarceration rate in both the developed and developing world, while the UK has, after the US, the
highest incarceration rate in the developed world.
20
Armed with the latest military technology and surveillance equipment, sold to them by private corporations,
police forces across UK and US cities monitor, track, and target urban dwellers of mostly non-elite backgrounds, and continue to militarize urban space Graham,
2010. As Davis 1992, p. 155 in describing Los Angeles argues:
20
Retrieved from: http:globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com20120330zakaria-incarceration-nation-2
44 We do indeed now live in “fortress cities” brutally divided into
“fortified cells” of affluence and “places of terror” where police battle
the criminalized poor. [..] The old liberal attempts at social control, which at least tried to balance repression with reform, have been
superseded by open social warfare that pits the interests of the middle class against the welfare of the urban poor. In cities like Los Angeles,
on the hard edge of postmodernity, architecture and the police apparatus are being merged to an unprecedented degree.
In between these militarizing enclaves exist a number of non-profit organizations that have proliferated since the onset of neoliberalism. Strapped for
funds, and preoccupied increasingly with security, the non-profit sector has stepped in where the state has rolled back. Offering services ranging from
healthcare to youth gang prevention, the demand for the services that non-profit organizations offer has increased as the effects of neoliberal policies become more
apparent. Increasingly, however, the non-profit sector has itself undergone neoliberal inflection, as in a constant struggle for funding, a significant number of
non-profit organizations have adopted the organizational methods and logics of for-profit corporate structures Dempsey Sanders, 2010. This includes, for
example, the use of excessive marketing strategies to secure funding from large corporate donors Frankiln, 2002; Kerlin, 2006, which for those non-profits
working with youth, often means touting their college prep and job training programmes that offer to prepare disadvantaged young people to compete in the
‘business world’. This shift to neoliberal market-based solutions to social problems positions the non-profit sector as yet another cog in the neoliberal
machine, which, as Demspey 2009 argues, takes our attention away from viewing social problems as structural problems in need of systematic and
collective solutions. While some non-profit organizations can resist this shift, and offer a space for community and non-market solutions to social problems, a
significant portion of the non-profit sector has yielded to market pressures. This trend is likely to be amplified by the ongoing economic recession and cuts to
public spending.
45
1.5 Contemporary Youth Culture Under Neoliberalism
