Institutions in the Integral State: What New York City’s Parks Signal for Contemporary Urban Governance

• In Event: 254 - Section on Community and Urban Sociology Paper Session. Transformations in Contemporary Urban Governance: New Theoretical and Empirical Directions

Abstract

Through a comparison of three types of nonprofit parks conservancy, this paper argues that a new kind of neoliberalizing local state has taken hold over the past twenty years in New York City. Drawing on Gramsci’s concept of the “integral state” and Tilly’s concept of “repertoires,” the paper explains how the variegated repertoire of park management nevertheless adds up to a coherent strategy to absorb the contradictions among the provision of public goods, the demands of local capital accumulation, and a politics of naturalized austerity and underfunding of public goods. These contradictions in governance lead to making invisible the reliance on unpaid and poorly paid workers for parks maintenance, redefining the “public” more narrowly toward those who can pay as consumers or philanthropists, and ensuring premiums on neighboring real estate from well maintained and secure parks. The flexible governance repertoire we describe remains durable, even in an era of increased concern for equity.

Authors

• John Krinsky, The City College of New York

• Maud Simonet, IDHE/CNRS Paris