Video abstract - 'The Adaptative Nature of Neoliberalism at the Local Scale: Fifteen Years of City Improvement Districts in Cape Town and Johannesburg'

We’ve just sent issue one of 2013’s volume to the printers, and – though we say so ourselves – it’s a good one. Among many other things, there’s Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann’s tremendously provocative paper ‘Climate Leviathan’ (the subject of a recent symposium); the winner of the 2012/13 Graduate Student Scholarship, Teo Ballvé, discussing his doctoral research ‘Territories of Life and Death on a Colombian Frontier’; an engagement with the thorny concept of ideology which argues that the thing itself works through what it makes available to the senses and what it makes to make sense (ideology as ‘an aesthetic affair‘); an investigation of how residual state apparatuses may be leveraged in support of an explicitly resistive, progressive agenda (arguing that resistance to the state is too narrow a conceptualisation of progressive resistance); a mobilisation of the Gramscian concept of passive revolution to unearth some of the contradictions of participatory development within neoliberal governance systems in the global South; an examination of the emergence, and recent resurgence, of gang labour in the UK and the privileging of the reproduction of some workers over others; and an exploration of the contradictory nature and unintended consequences of workers’ efforts to defend their communities against the ravages of capital restructuring (focussing on pulp and paper mills in two British Columbia towns).

Here we’re pleased to be able to present an insight into one of the papers, Sophie Didier, Marianne Morange and Elisabeth Peyroux’s ‘The Adaptative Nature of Neoliberalism at the Local Scale: Fifteen Years of City Improvement Districts in Cape Town and Johannesburg‘. Sophie and colleagues have prepared an excellent video abstract, explaining how their paper unravels the adoption and adaptation of the North American ‘Business Improvement District’ model in South African cities, considering the way neoliberal principles are making their way in post-apartheid Johannesburg and Cape Town. Their paper analyses the tensions and conflicts surrounding the implementation of the model and unpacks its curious resilience.