Neoliberalism’s Urban Fringe: On the Trail of Actually Imagined Free-Market Cities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Exploring and problematizing “neoliberal urbanism,” understood in this instance as an empirically traceable, recurrent, and actually circulating imaginary, the article is concerned with a small but determined group of de facto neoliberal visionaries, ideational entrepreneurs, and policy activists, who through dispersed but well-connected networks are purposefully engaged in schemes to visualize, design, and even plan for free-market cities. Centering on these “properly neoliberal” visions of the city, the article analyzes the paradoxical robustness of this largely unrealized but insistently circulating idea. It tackles the emergent project of free-market urbanism as an ideational matrix, tracing continuities and tensions between a deeply ingrained strain of antiurbanism in neoliberal thought (both in the Old Testament of ordoliberalism and in the New Testament of the Chicago School), which serves as context and counterpoint to a critical assessment of the recent promotion, propagation, and intensification of purposive models for free-market cities. This ideational project might still be correctly characterized as “fringe,” but neoliberalism’s urban fringe is neither what, nor where, it once was.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".