The Neoliberal Production of Urban Space and Urban Subjects in India and Bolivia

This paper explores the nuances of processes of neoliberalization in two empirical contexts in the present-day urban Global South: an international initiative to reterritorialize the urban periphery of Bangalore into an environment suitable for foreign investment, and the spatial economy of an informal market in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Through an analysis that ranges from the materialstructural to the discursive, the paper critically interrogates the assumed universal applicability of ‘neoliberalism’ as an analytic to describe and explain contemporary urbanization processes beyond the paradigmatic Euro-American post-industrial city. The two cases analyzed here demonstrate the necessity for a conceptualization of neoliberalism cognizant of the local contingencies of its imposition and reproduction, as well as its subjective dimensions. Neoliberal subjects play complex yet meaningful roles in instantiating the dynamic, multidimensional processes of social, spatial, and economic transformation involved in producing neoliberal space.