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The author examines the relevance of racial discourses to neoliberal urban development occurring in older, former industrial cities in the United States. Rather than treating the production of new development spaces as separate from the adjacent inner-city neighborhoods, the author focuses on the significance of race to "making sense of," and, in turn, legitimizing the stark contrasts between revitalized enclaves and the inner city as a central component of contemporary neoliberal urban development. The concept of legibility is introduced and developed to demonstrate how ideological and discursive strategies simultaneously promote middle-class urban development enclaves and strategically account for—or make legible—the presence of minority, poor communities adjacent to them. The process of legibility is explored in waterfront developments in Camden, New Jersey, and Chester, Pennsylvania. The methods involved extensive fieldwork and semistructured interviews with city officials, employees of economic development authorities and public-private partnerships, leaders of community development organizations, and local residents from each city, conducted between 2009 and 2015. The study's key findings incorporate an ideological dimension of race into an analysis of uneven urban development.

AbstractNeoliberal urban redevelopment is often represented as consensual, socially‐neutral 'local economic development' with a positive effect on both a city's overall economy and its level of racial and ethnic diversity. The purpose of this article is to focus specifically on the key ideological premises of color‐blind racial discourses that help facilitate and provide necessary legitimacy (and ideological cover) for neoliberal urban redevelopment in a mid‐sized US city. Color‐blind racial discourses facilitate the agenda and mandates behind tax abatements, enterprise zones, public–private partnerships and new forms of urban consumption. Despite efforts to the contrary, neoliberal urbanism does not retreat from race — rather, racial dynamics are reconstituted to accommodate processes of capital accumulation and uneven urban development in poor and minority cities. Drawing on the case of Chester, Pennsylvania, this article focuses on how color‐blind racial discourses influence exclusionary urban redevelopment policies and practices, facilitate their implementation and legitimize their outcomes.RésuméOn présente souvent le réaménagement urbain néolibéral comme un 'développement économique local' consensuel et socialement neutre, dont bénéficient à la fois l'économie générale et le degré de diversité raciale et ethnique de la ville. Cet article s'intéresse en particulier aux grands principes idéologiques des discours racialisés de type color‐blind (littéralement, aveugle aux couleurs) qui contribuent au réaménagement urbain néolibéral d'une ville américaine moyenne et fournissent la légitimité (et la caution idéologique) au projet. Ces discours facilitent les objectifs et missions que soutiennent crédits d'impôt, aides à l'installation dans certaines zones d'activité, partenariats public‐privé et nouvelles formes de consommation urbaine. En dépit d'efforts contraires, l'urbanisme néolibéral ne renonce pas à la dimension raciale. Plus précisément, les dynamiques raciales sont reconstituées pour s'adapter aux processus d'accumulation du capital et d'aménagement urbain inégal des villes aux populations pauvres ou minoritaires. À partir du cas de Chester (Pennsylvanie), ce travail montre comment les discours raciaux color‐blind influencent des politiques et pratiques d'exclusion au sein du réaménagement urbain, facilitant leur mise en place et légitimant leurs résultats.

Neoliberal urban development, as a set of governance practices and regulations intended to valorize cities as sites for capital accumulation, has increased social polarization and produced enclaves or "cities within cities." Local governments have relinquished administrative and legal control to private corporations over how certain areas in the city are developed and used (or "consumed") and by whom. In this article I examine the emergence of governance strategies around urban fragmentation in Chester, an older, former industrial city in southeastern Pennsylvania. My analysis focuses primarily on modes of state (de)regulation and intervention in privatized urban redevelopment, emphasizing how common patterns in governance have surfaced despite changing definitions of "urban redevelopment" over different time periods. In doing so, this analysis fits within critical studies of actually existing neoliberalism, in which the forms and practices of neoliberalism are examined as historically contingent and geographically specific.

The author uses poststructuralist advances in discourse analysis to examine the ways the circulation of symbolic representations and characterizations of the city are useful to understanding urban restructuring. He defines the relationship between discourses about the city and the material or spatial practices that transform the built environment, and then he examines how stake-holders translate, adapt, and employ discourse about the inner city to facilitate changes in its social and physical environment. The employment of urban discourses serves to define urban restructuring as normal and beneficial, to legitimize the process of urban restructuring—especially its accompanying social costs—and to facilitate a new place identity.

Globalization of the production, distribution, and consumption of culture has affected the identity of locale or neighborhood. In many instances, local cultural forms, such as music and art, are appropriated for international consumer markets. The author analyzes the effect of global appropriation on urban form. The emerging global cultural economy creates new opportunities for place entrepreneurs to redevelop poor neighborhoods and challenges the traditional means of local resistance for residents and community groups.

In the process of gentrifying or redeveloping inner city neighborhoods, race figures prominently not only with regard to demographic changes but also in how places are represented by key stakeholders, such as city leaders, developers, and residents themselves. How is race used to justify certain kinds of neighborhood change and not others? How do residents respond to representations of their neighborhood and even themselves? This process of racialization--the strategic employment of racial discourses to define, legitimize, and resist social and spatial changes related to gentrification--serves as an adaptive and strategic means for city leaders, developers, and community-based organizations to control, plan, implement, and contest efforts to reshape impoverished neighborhoods. By examining the vast ways community change is represented, we can detect and analyze the significance of race and racial narratives to the contested process of gentrification. In the ongoing redevelopment of the Regent Park community of Toronto, Canada, the deployment of racial tropes and narratives, such as diversity and "social mix," organize and make legible gentrification and its consequences of displacement for communities of poor minority residents. To understand the historical context of the redevelopment of Regent Park and demonstrate how racialization may influence the trajectory of neighborhood change, we conducted a socio-historical meta-synthesis whereby a wide range of existing qualitative works and documents became our data. We amalgamated articles, reports, laws, and planning documents to create a historical timeline and to complete an integrative review of the data.