Scrubbing the Economic Body “Clean”: Business Improvement Districts, Economic Oppression, and Spatial Regulation

• In Event: 379 - Student Forum Paper Session. Choice, Morality, and (Neo)Liberalism

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce and develop the concept of economic hygiene to discuss parallel manifestations of oppressive tactics in programs of racial hygiene and economic discrimination. Specifically, we discuss how neoliberal ideology is enforced micropolitically through the use of place and its features. This includes the creation of a binary between consumers and non-consumers; “pseudo-private” space as physical and spatial microcosms of capital rule; and the translation of the consumer/non-consumer binary into bios as a politically qualified life. As such, we argue, using Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) as the ideal of neoliberal space, that the economically disadvantaged are actively dehumanized, de-victimized, and removed from public space colonized by capital interests. While we do not make any claim that such forms of economic hygiene are as brutal as the horrors of genocide, we wish to make a novel contribution by highlighting the similarities in the tactics between both regimes. We conclude that the concept of economic hygiene is useful in order to capture how space and place are used to translate wide-scale programs of inequality into everyday practices.

Authors

• Matthew Daniel Sanscartier, University of Manitoba

• James Richard Gacek, University of Manitoba