Wither the Neighborhood? Education Policy, Neoliberal Globalization and Gentrification

This paper is part of broader ongoing attempts to demonstrate that shifts in educational policy can be understood as mutually constitutive with the changing nature of contemporary cities, including changes in urban policy. In this paper, the author wants to explore one aspect of these broader attempts, namely the relationships between education policy, globalization, and the notion of the neighborhood. To do this, the author briefly proposes that the neighborhood has been deemed as relatively insignificant within certain discourses of globalization, and then uses this paper to try and argue that the neighborhood retains significance not despite but through neoliberal globalization as played out in the connections between gentrification and education markets. In the first part of this paper, the author identifies how globalization, as pertaining to cities and education policy, has come to be represented by the political economy and philosophy of neoliberalism. In the second part of this paper, the author sketches out the rationalities of neoliberalism relating to education and urban policy, noting for the purposes of illustration the phenomena of education markets and neoliberal urban policy underpinning "third-wave" gentrification. Based on the connections between gentrification and education markets, the author concludes by suggesting that the neighborhood is not "withering" in the face of neoliberal globalization; rather, it is being "reconstituted" according to the logics of the market. It is this idea of reconstitution that also provides the possibility of thinking about the neighborhood through a politics of place, and as such as a site of contestation and potential reinvention.