Creating Public Alternatives: New Public Banks, Economic Democracy, and Neoliberal Urban Governance

We argue that recent US-based public banking coalitions, and the potential public banks formed in consequence, challenge financialised logics while promoting local forms of economic democracy. The paper critically interrogates the emergence of the local public banking movement in the US, with particular reference to Los Angeles, San Francisco, and East Bay coalitions. These initiatives articulate forms of community-led local development aimed at tackling deeply rooted social, racial, and ecological injustices. Through a conjunctural lens, drawing on the work of Antonio Gramsci and Stuart Hall, we position the public banking movement in relation to the ongoing mutation of financialised forms of neoliberal urban governance. Amidst neoliberalism’s financial, environmental, and public health crises, the paper explores how the formation of public banking coalitions is generative in bringing together diverse groups to construct concrete economic alternatives. Importantly, the emerging public banking movement in the US goes beyond earlier moments of protest, such as Occupy Wall Street and Divestment initiatives, to engage with the local state and to create actually-existing spaces for alternative economic practices for local and regional development. However, the paper also highlights a series of multi-scalar constraints from powerful actors, vested interests, and established institutional practices. The paper concludes by discussing public bank coalitions as part of a broader transformative politics which articulates alternative economic values and more democratic public forms of finance.