Speaking on “Urban Governance and the Production of New State Spaces in Western Europe,” Neil Brenner, Ph.D., said that new state policies of industrial development in European urban areas tend to be “deeply contradictory.”
Brenner, the director of the Metropolitan Studies Program at New York University, spoke at the inaugural lecture of the Urban Studies Program’s “City Series” lectures on Feb.28 at the Lowenstein Center, Lincoln Center campus. Tracing the history of state strategies for development from the 1960s, he said industrial development was spread evenly across national territory in European nations, much like a knife spreading butter evenly across a piece of bread. By the 1980s, there was policy shift toward concentrating development in specific cities and, by the 1990s, development policy targeted large-scale metropolitan regions.
“Urban locational policy strategies are contradictory, however,” he said. “They try to promote growth but they undermine the conditions needed for future growth.”
The lecture series came about through the support of a Dean’s Faculty Challenge Grant, said Rosemary Wakeman, Ph.D., director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program. She said that the “City Series” hopes to be a named lecture series in the near future.
