Disassembling cities: Spatial, social, and conceptual trajectories across the urban globe

A critical implication of Lefebvre’s insistence that space is socially produced and critically formed by the political economy of the time is that current neoliberal capitalist formations are generating their own spatialities. Economists point to Ronald Regan and Margaret Thatcher’s tenures in the 1980s as the moment when neoliberal economic models gained ascendancy. Neoliberal economic principles promoted in the United States and the United Kingdom stressed a reduction of social supports by the state as well as the deregulation of financial markets both in individual nations and between nations. For Stuart Hall and Saskia Sassen, much of the focus on economic and urban processes has centered on how neoliberalism has pulled all corners of the world into global markets. The divisive spatiality produced by the disassembling dynamics of neoliberal predatory formations are both an effect of and further cause of global gulfs - as well as bridges.