Producing and contesting the neoliberal subject

Resumen

During the period of 2007 to 2009 I studied an urban conflict between the city government of Barcelona and the residents who live in a neighbourhood called la Barceloneta. The conflict centred on the cities plans to restructure the neighbourhood which included the construction of a new market, the renovation of the central plaza and the placement of elevators within the older buildings. I followed the debates between the city and several neighbourhood groups who were in opposition to the city's restructuring plans. I attempted to get both a historical perspective of the conflict through documents and statements by residents, as well as an overview of the points of contestation. I conducted a series of interviews with both city representatives and residents and attended a number of meetings, both formal and informal which the city conducted as part of its 'participation' campaign as well as the opposition groups conducted to strategize their approaches to the city. Along with more general city promotional texts, I gathered and examined historical and media documents surrounding the cities passing of a new civic law in 2006. This gave me a broader sense of the productivity of the city's discourses by considering them along side the more regulatory measures the city was taking to form the parameters and limits of political tolerance. These promotional texts were set against the oppositional texts to consider the co-created actualities of how power relations were being constructed and contested. This broader analysis also formed a background context to consider the more local debates in la Barceloneta. Due to the extended period of time I was involved I had the chance to consider the political strategies and rationales being utilized to support each side's arguments as well as how these debates developed in relation to the discourses being used and the actual urban decision making which occurred. I was interested in integrating two critical theoretical approaches to the study of how urban power relations were being produced and contested in the Western city context. One approach being urban critical geographers analysis as to how Western cities have been neoliberalized over the past thirty to forty years as articulated by writers such as Brenner and Theodore (2002); Harvey (2005); Jessop (2002); Delgado (2007); Massey (2005); and the other being Foucault's (1982) theorization of 'governmentality', subjectivity and resistance involving authors such as Rose (1991); Hook (2004) , Larner (2000) and Lemke (2000). In the end my primary focus became how the analysis of the production and contestation of political subjective positions could be used as a site for understanding better the forwarding and disruption of the neoliberal project itself. These subject positions constellated around what I considered to be accurately described as a 'neoliberal citizen' position, in other words a type of citizen subjectivity which is designed to function well in a market oriented privatized city structure.