Transatlantic city, part 2: Late entrepreneurialism

Jamie Peck

Urban Studies, 2017, vol. 54, issue 2, 327-363

Abstract: The first installment of this two-part paper made a case for a conjunctural approach to urban studies, reserving a special place for the provisional formulation and ongoing revision of midlevel theories – from the entrepreneurial city to austerity urbanism and financialised urban governance – while positioning abstraction and contextualisation as simultaneous, dialogic practices. It follows that such arguments can be developed only so far in the absence of concrete cases, where conjunctural accounts actually gain traction, direction and purpose. Seeking to operationalise some of these methodological principles by way of a situated, single-city case study, this part of the paper returns to the financially challenged casino capital of Atlantic City, tracing its long (and notorious) history of entrepreneurial dealings, from Republican machine control to the ‘experiment’ with legalised gambling that was launched in the mid-1970s, and positioning the structural crisis that preceded the casino pact with the existential crisis that has been generated in the wake of the failure of this distinctive local growth machine. Atlantic City made a very large wager that did not pay off, the unravelling of its much-emulated model of entrepreneurial urbanism dramatising a distinctly ‘late-entrepreneurial’ moment of fiscally mandated governance and political crisis.

Keywords: Atlantic City; emergency management; entrepreneurial urbanism; fiscal crisis; urban governance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0042098016683859 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:urbstu:v:54:y:2017:i:2:p:327-363

DOI: 10.1177/0042098016683859

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Urban Studies from Urban Studies Journal Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().