ABSTRACT

In Europe, recent decades have witnessed the dismantlement of the welfare state and the restructuration of states that plays a crucial role in spreading and implementing neoliberal urban policies (Pinson 2010). Yet, far from disappearing or weakening, the state currently acts as an entrepreneur in favour of particular interests and asks cities to transform into spaces of economic attractiveness. The “remaking of cities”, according to neoliberal perspectives, seems to be a global injunction nurturing local urban growth agendas (Harvey 1989). These changes are part of the overall increase of neoliberal strategies to entrepreneurize cities. Here there is a kind of build-on from a regime of Keynesian accumulation long replaced by a regime of flexible accumulation (Amin 1994). In this global neoliberalization of urban policies, public housing policies now occupy a central place. They seem to be one of the last pieces of a larger movement of urban neoliberalization and reordering that is fundamentally changing European cities.