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130 chapter five The Bloomberg Way This, then, was the Bloomberg Way: the mayor as ceo, the city government as a corporation, valued businesses as clients, citizens as customers, and the city itself as a product. While corporate language and management practices in government have become more common in recent decades, the Bloomberg administration was more than inflected or influenced by the corporate experience of the mayor and his key economic development officials. Instead, corporate rationality was pervasive and foundational, the dna of the Bloomberg Way. This gave economic and urban development policy a coherence and comprehensiveness lacking in the past. There were integration and coordination of processes of producing knowledge of the city, managerial techniques and a strategy for physically remaking the city. The corporate rationality of the Bloomberg Way, and the development agenda that emerged from it, clearly reflected the experience, underwrote the power, and furthered the interests and desires of the city’s postindustrial elite. Yet the Bloomberg Way was represented as serving the interests of the city as a whole, as providing a path to shared prosperity, as “preparing all of New York to compete, and to win, in the future” (Bloomberg 2004, emphasis added). Inherent in this approach to urban governance was an insistence that a single, overarching interest of the city could be not only identified but also achieved if the right policies were pursued. These results could be obtained, the mayor promised, if New Yorkers kept “the good of our whole city ahead of any narrow ideological or political interests” (2003b). Thus the Bloomberg Way constituted a denial of the legitimacy of “groups and their struggles” (Isin 1998, 55) even as it was itself a product of such struggles. It was simultaneously deeply antipolitical and deeply political. This was the crucial and constitutive contradiction of the Bloomberg Way. the antipolitics of the BloomBerg way Bloomberg’s refusal to participate in the glad-handing, back-slapping, babykissing theater so often described as “politics” received much attention. But The Bloomberg Way • 131 the Bloomberg Way attempted a more profound submergence of politics, a denial of the inevitability, let alone the desirability, of conflict in a city teeming with diversity and inequality. This approach was aligned with a broader shift in American society since the mid-1970s. The period of neoliberalization has been marked by a “national ethos of . . . antipolitics” (Boggs 2000, 12), characterized by the withdrawal of many citizens from political and even electoral participation as well as the denigration of the political sphere as inauthentic, ineffectual, corrupt, and divorced from the needs and desires of the citizenry (Boggs 2000; Frank 2000). This shift has been bolstered by the valorization of “the market” and all things corporate, as the ineptitude of the state and the political system are contrasted with the private sector’s ability to get things done —to “perform .” This corporate-inflected antipolitics is both linked to and reinforced by a concomitant technocratization of public policy, as the ostensibly apolitical application of expertise toward the solutions of clearly defined problems has become more and more influential in a number of policy realms, including those of “development” and antipoverty policy (Ferguson 1990), environmental policy (McAvoy 1999), and welfare reform (Lyon-Callo and Hyatt 2003), as well as entrepreneurial urban policy (Gough 2002). In its intermingling of corporate and technocratic antipolitics, the Bloomberg Way provides a unique example of this antipolitical ethos; it also demonstrates its spatial dimension. corporate antipolitics The antipolitics of the Bloomberg Way were deeply rooted in its corporate nature . By casting the city government as a corporation, businesses as clients, and the city as a product, the administration made the implicit claim that the fundamental aim of economic and urban development policy was as clear and well defined as the fundamental aim of a firm.1 Whereas competitiveness in the name of profit is the overriding objective of corporate management, the Bloomberg Way posited urban competitiveness toward the end of economic growth as the overriding objective of urban management. Such growth would supply increased tax revenues that the mayor argued represented the only longterm solution to the city’s recurrent budget crises and the only way in which high-quality city services could be maintained (Bloomberg 2003b). Economic growth would also provide more jobs, which Bloomberg was wont to call “the most effective social policy” (Bloomberg 2003a).2 This transposition of corporate logic into urban governance, and the antipolitics it represented, had two important implications. The first was the radical reduction...

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