Business Improvement Areas (BIAs) are a domain of urban governance that has been aptly characterized as a form of neoliberal urbanization aimed at improving the business climate of downtowns. This paper engages with a growing body of literature on contingent neoliberal urbanisms to consider BIAs as an assemblage of coevolving projects and actors. It focuses specifically on two ‘community’ BIAs in Toronto's downtown West, where recent actions of differently positioned stakeholders effectively reveal how multiple agendas can inform BIA practices. Our objective is twofold: (a) to draw attention to the practices of smaller, community-based BIAs that predominate in North America; and (b) to explore the analytical and political openings that arise when institutions commonly identified as neoliberal are investigated as an assemblage of related but distinctive and sometimes disjunctive projects.
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