The new private urban governance: Vestiges,ventures and visibility

Abstract

Despite the growth, prevalence and influence of private urban governance, scholarship that explores the intimate workings of these manifold and mutating forms remains limited. While these private ventures carry forward elements from the past, the landscape of urban governance has nonetheless undergone profound transformation. Over the past few decades, the global expansion and influence of private governing ventures have reshaped how cities are managed, organised and experienced. This special issue on the New Private Urban Governance examines the constantly evolving modalities of private governance (i.e. business improvement districts/areas, condominium/strata corporations, gated communities, POPS and others) in a global context. Organised around new, interrelated themes of vestiges, ventures and visibility, this issue comprises case studies, syntheses of longstanding empirical projects and novel theoretical/conceptual interventions into political and spatial practices, knowledges and technologies of these privately governed realms. Focused on the spatialisation of politics, vestiges reflects the idea that while neoliberal forms of private urban governance continue to proliferate, they rely and build upon, rather than fully replace, earlier, more public governance practices, logics and spaces. Ventures emphasises that the private and market-oriented thrust of urban governance is heavily predicated on the protection and extraction of value and the intensifying financialisation of urban landscapes and life. Visibility highlights how governing technologies render private urban governance visible and in doing so highlight the politics of space. These three themes together expose the workings of the new private urban governance while invigorating further explorations of this complex phenomenon.

Introduction

The landscape of urban governance has undergone profound transformation. Over the past few decades, the global expansion and influence of private governing ventures – business improvement districts/areas (BIDs/BIAs), common interest developments (CIDs), condominium/strata corporations and homeowners associations, gated communities (GCs), retail shopping complexes, privately owned public space (POPS), special purpose districts, smart cities and entire private cities – have reshaped the way urban space is managed, organised and experienced. This special issue delves into the new private urban governance (PUG), exploring its multifaceted and evolving forms, practices, knowledges, technologies and implications. We seek to broaden understandings of PUG by bringing together multi-disciplinary scholarship that explores novel and emergent forms of private governance, spaces of convergence and common features and their theoretical or conceptual implications. In doing so contributors chart the vestiges, ventures and visibility of PUG while inspiring further explorations of this phenomenon.

The shifting terrain of private urban governance

Caught in an ‘unending crisis’ since the 1960s, private and public sectors have promoted various ‘solutions’ to urban governance (Graham and Marvin, 2001; Harvey, 1989). Focused on market-based logics of efficiency, growth, competition, profit and private ownership, PUG forms have rapidly spread across commercial and residential realms. New modalities for producing, organising and managing space have coincided with the increasingly polycentric and ‘splintered’ nature of contemporary global city-building (Graham and Marvin, 2001). This issue builds upon but, in many ways, deviates from some assumptions and implications of earlier, well-traversed debates about PUG animated by discussions of urban gating and secession and the private provision of exclusive ‘club goods’ (Atkinson and Blandy, 2013; Blakely and Snyder, 1997; Low, 2003; Woo and Webster, 2014).

BIDs and condominiums – among the most prevalent PUG forms – are found in nearly every urban region of the world. Initially a form of collective action to address free-rider problems, BIDs have circulated and mutated through trans-urban policy pipelines to become a global fixture for revitalisation and city-building (Cook and Ward, 2012; Kudla, 2022). Condominiums have developed similarly across disparate regions and arguably are the most common new-build residential developments in North America and far beyond (Lippert and Treffers, 2021). It is important to recall that ‘condominium’ first and foremost refers to a social, legal and spatial relationship and a form of private urban governance, rather than a physical structure (Lippert, 2019). Both governance forms have rapidly grown in number, size, scope of service provision and influence on urban life. From experiment to expectation (see Mackinnon, 2019), today some cities have upwards of 25–50 BIDs and thousands of condominium corporations or their equivalent. Yet, PUG forms have continued to mutate and adapt through further regulatory experimentation, producing new institutional arrangements and entities through which urban spaces are constituted and organised, such as ‘citizen-led, do it yourself’ urban infrastructural ‘patching’ (Bryson et al., 2023; see also Valverde and Moore, 2019) and ‘multifunction special districts’ and ‘special purpose bodies’ which McKenzie (2021) aptly refers to as ‘phantom governments’, all of which underscore the complicated, complicating and arguably fascinating features of PUG.

While making these earlier PUG forms look mundane if not quaint in comparison, rapidly proliferating smart urban environments, urban mega projects and master planned cities reflect implosions and explosions of PUG ventures. This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in cities of the Global South, where predominantly private-led development has eclipsed state-sponsored, master planning. Such development is exemplified by Gurgaon and Lavasa in India (see Cowan, 2018; Datta, 2012; Doshi, 2016; Kichanova, 2022), Eko Atlantic City in Nigeria (see Ajibade, 2017; Titilayo, 2023), Forest City in Malaysia (see Moser and Avni, 2024) and the Line in Saudi Arabia (see Murakami Wood, 2024). These projects, driven by private developers and investors, conjure the usual corporate stories of ‘innovation’, ‘sustainability’, ‘resiliency’, ‘efficiency’, ‘freedom’ and ‘multiculturalism’. Like other PUG iterations, these developments reproduce dispossession, displacement, fragmentation, privatisation, surveillance, environmental degradation and authoritarianism, among other cognate processes and outcomes. However, rather than reading and understanding the empirical urban realities of the Global South through ‘theory built elsewhere’ (Bhan, 2019: 641), scholars have increasingly positioned the Global South as a locus for new urban theorising traditionally dominated by northern-centric perspectives (see also Lawhon and Truelove, 2020; Roy and Ong, 2011). This issue explores PUG in selected cities of the South with an eye towards context-specific modalities as well as the potential for new theorising of PUG in and beyond the South.

Although broadly discussed in Urban Studies, PUG forms are often treated as discrete entities or, increasingly, under new monikers. Given the prevalence, growth and mutation of these PUG forms, this special issue focuses on private urban governing practices, knowledges, actors and technologies and their circulation broadly conceived. In doing so, this issue brings together theoretically informed, empirical incursions into PUG forms, old and new, that often share key common features (e.g. governing boards), dilemmas (e.g. free rider problems) and effects (e.g. exclusion). Heeding McCann’s (2017) call for the continued development of urban governance studies, the authors explore these manifold and mutating forms across a range of PUG geographies and contexts. Together they revisit, update and complicate perennial questions and debates surrounding ‘private’, ‘urban’ and ‘governance’.

We seek to re-focus attention on these ‘private’ and self-regulating forms of urban governance while not assuming distinctiveness or separation from public (or state) influence. Indeed, the contributions to Urban Studies have long problematised easy, binary categorisations between ‘public’ and ‘private’ given the proliferation of complex, shared ownership and management schemes (see also Iveson, 2007; Németh, 2009) including forms of private security knowledges and techniques (see Walby and Lippert, 2015). With various PUG forms predating neoliberalism (Frieden and Sagalyn, 1991), we further challenge neoliberalism as the sole explanation of PUG. Earlier discussions of ‘urban governance 1.0’ (McCann, 2017) sought to add various qualifiers to neoliberalism (Brenner et al., 2010; Brenner and Theodore, 2002; Keil, 2009; Peck, 2010) to account for resistances, tensions and other messy realities. However, several urban scholars have recently argued that current developments are about more than neoliberalism in that they can elicit plural governing logics rather than a unitary one (see Gibson et al., 2023; Lippert, 2016).

To further discussions of urban governance 2.0 (McCann, 2017), we move beyond or augment arguments of ‘mass privatisation’ that situate property ownership as a defining characteristic of PUG (see Németh, 2009), instead foregrounding practices, knowledges, technologies and agents that make it possible. Influenced by the work of Valverde (2012, 2016), this issue highlights how governance bodies (e.g. agencies, associations and corporate boards) enact the practice of urban governing. We focus as much on practices as rationales and strategies, including how these vestiges transfer from one site to another and how governing ventures rely on knowledges and technologies, related visibility and an extensive reach into urban life. PUG forms range in the extent to which they self-label as ‘private’. Often declaring or, indeed, avoiding a ‘private’ moniker can be a strategic choice given the targets or nature of their governance. Claiming PUG forms are not always fully private due to some public influence, character element or enabling law, which therefore can be called ‘hybrid’, may be a step forward. Yet, ‘hybrid’ ultimately begs the question about the demarcating lines in the first place, since this term always implies existence of pure forms. For this reason, merely assigning a ‘hybrid’ moniker to a governance form may be somewhat unhelpful (Lippert, 2006).

The issue seeks to extend the conversation about PUG in new directions and unravel what it means for the future of urban governance challenges ranging from pandemics to climate change to housing insecurity to the vacating of commercial urban strips to the proliferation of smart technology. By going beyond and inside GCs (see Low, 2003; Rosen and Razin, 2009; Rosen and Walks, 2015), this issue updates and connects forms of urban gating and secession, as well their myriad physical and virtual iterations that remain in many instances under-investigated or entirely neglected. Furthering dialogues of urban social justice (see Baumann and Yacobi, 2022; Guinand and Schaller, 2021; Roy, 2017), articles in this issue show how antecedents of public forms and arrangements sometimes remain and foreground the interplay of these privatising governance mechanisms with processes of gentrification and revanchism, racial and other kinds of exclusion, settler colonialism and climate injustice.

Vestiges, ventures and visibility of private urban governance

The issue comprises nine articles about key PUG forms and related practices found in various urban regions of the world, including in cities as varied as São Paulo, Vancouver, Washington, DC and Guangzhou. These articles are organised around three main, interrelated themes – vestiges, ventures and visibility – and highlight points of their thematic overlap and divergence across PUG forms.

Vestiges

The first theme, vestiges, reflects the idea that while forms of PUG continue to proliferate, they build upon and borrow from or rely on, rather than fully replace earlier, more public governance practices, logics and spaces. Thinking with antecedents and through a lens of medieval urbanism, Alsayyad and Roy (2006: 2) argue that ‘paradoxes, exclusion and segmentations have always been associated with city form and urban organisation’. Enclaves and extra-legal private systems of governance serve to order space (re)creating a ‘honeycomb of jurisdictions’, a ‘medieval body’ or ‘overlapping heterogenous, nonuniform and increasingly private membership’ (Holston and Appadurai, 1999, as cited in Murray, 2017: 224). This graduated sovereignty and administrative fragmentation furthers deterritorialisation, creating specialised assemblages of territory, authority and entitlements (Murray, 2017). Furthermore, the notion of vestiges holds out the possibility of resistance to and disruptions of dominant social–spatial imaginaries. Resistance and alterity may emanate from residual or past forms of collective organisation, practices or knowledges and reveal new emergent possibilities.

Vestiges of a 1960s anti-state localism have mutated into a fervent libertarian escapism (see also Graham et al., 2023: 30). Atkinson and O’Farrell (2024) advance the implications of this right-libertarian ideological thought on the built environment. Through the growing catalogue ‘libertecture’ – private cities, residential exits, portal spaces, fiscal lockers, pioneer exclaves, infinity spaces and necrotectures – they highlight vestiges of neoliberalism which have aligned and accelerated libertarian thinking. This catalogue of libertecture provides a precise way of understanding how developers and planning practices facilitate the secession of contemporary elites from the cities in which they invest. It also calls attention to the common language underpinning these PUG ventures, fuelled spectacles of wealth, tech-evangelism, atomised individualism, anti-collectivism and a desire to escape pressing social and environmental problems. By reframing and narrowing conceptions of freedoms, these ventures further amplify spatial divisions and social inequalities, and often signal development to come.

Reflecting on how ‘yesterday’s vestiges shape contemporary ventures’, Berg and Shearing (2024: 2714) chart the transformation of private urban security governance (PUSG) assemblages in the Global North and Global South. These transformations entail a shift from extant security assemblages and their concomitant features, which are largely focused on the governance of private space (PUSG 1.0), towards assemblages (or polycentric networks) that increasingly incorporate logics and discourses in response to climate-related ‘harmscapes’ (PUSG 2.0). Through the case of climate gating, they highlight how PUSG 2.0 solutionism repurposes older logics, rationalities, mentalities, practices and discourses. While the types of risks, threats, fortification and gentrification have changed, relying on these old solutions further entrenches ‘segregation, inequality, escalating vulnerability, and racialized forms of social ordering’ (Berg and Shearing, 2024: 2714).

Using a strategic action field perspective, Yip and Zheng (2024) explore the complex interplay of diverse actors and interests that shape condominium and neighbourhood governance in urban China. Emergent forms of private residential governance have become increasingly popular since market-oriented economic reforms of the 1980s and the introduction of private ownership of housing in the 1990s. The authors explore the tensions between homeowners’ desires for self-governance, the economic incentives of the property management industry and the political imperatives of state control over these privately governed realms. Symbolising vestiges of the socialist past, they highlight how forms of localised, state surveillance and influence operate through relations between local state authorities and property management service providers and how they intersect with new realities of market-based and privately governed housing. In this context, homeowners’ wishes to govern their condominiums more directly, for example, by hiring their own property management staff may be viewed as politicised actions that challenge the authority and control of the Chinese state. The case study paints a more complex portrait of how private residential governance emerges and evolves in geographies beyond the Global North and how homeowner activisms contest state influence in PUG.

With proliferation of PUG forms and logics, Flynn and Stevenson-Blythe (2024) underscore how public and quasi-public bodies – quasi-nongovernmental organisations, quasi-autonomous national government organisations (Quango) and special governance zones – have adopted private-like practices. Examining one vestige and Quango in particular, Flynn and Stevenson-Blythe (2024) trace the changing governance of a federal space in Canada – Granville Island. This is a long-standing tourist and arts destination owned and managed by a federal government agency. This examination of law in practice, with a focus on accountability, transparency and engagement, makes visible how governance is enacted, impacted by institutional form, and subject to change. The short comings of this vestige – when institutional form limits democratic potential – is of key import for discussions of PUG and other alternatives that may be more accountable and responsible (see also Valverde, 2022).

Ventures

The second theme, ventures, emphasises the private and market-oriented thrust of urban governance forms heavily predicated on the protection or extraction of value and the intensifying financialisation of urban landscapes and life (Martin, 2015; Weber, 2010). It seeks to interrogate the variegated corporate-business practices and emerging industries implicated in the growth, splintering, remaking and governing of urban space geared towards private profit – including developers, real estate, property management, legal, accounting, transportation, security, sanitation, engineering firms, etc. (Graham and Marvin, 2001; Treffers and Lippert, 2020; Woo and Webster, 2014). The idea of venture also resonates with the entrepreneurial logics of local governments seeking to lure investment by maintaining good business climates (Ward, 2007) and operating more in line with principles of efficiency and fiscal restraint. Relinquishing delivery of public infrastructure and services to the market, whether through public–private partnerships and BIDs (see Mackinnon, 2022) or through residential private governments, befits this theme.

Advancing multi-scalar and multidirectional urban entrepreneurialism, He and Cai (2024) examine the packaging of education arrangements in GCs and accompanying grassroots neighbourhood-level, entrepreneurial practices and homeowner activism. These semi-private urban governance ventures highlight the interplay and negotiation of multi-scalar entrepreneurial actors, including the local state, developers, investor-citizens and homeowners aligned through promised high investment returns. Using cases from Guangzhou, China they identify models of how GC homeowners negotiate exclusive rights to establish, access and govern public schools. The conversion of public education into a club good, further imbricates cultural and economic capital into housing property values and solidifies logics of private property rights, shareholder values and corporate governance. Rather than being accountable to broader stakeholders, communities and the public, the authors argue that GCs intensify housing and education inequalities through education-led gentrification.

Also exploring the compounding of PUG ventures, Rogers et al. (2024) examine how both physical and digital property is leveraged in new ways for capital rent extraction. Synthesising discussions of housing studies, rentier and platform capitalism, they analyse the private rental landscape through the growing market for private rental property-tech (property assets management technologies) in Australia. Through interrogation of new arrangements of large property developers, landlords, real-estate managers and the prop-tech sector, they highlight how these efforts are used to create and maintain value. As with other forms of solutionism, rather than address pressing social problems in the sector, these additional and compounding corporate layers further strategically manage tenant experiences (from securing property to eviction; see also Fields, 2022) and ultimately land rents to corporate advantage. Some contributions to this issue straddle several themes. Thus, here one can discern a new visibility, the increasing digitisation of both private rental practices and rental/rentier data, that forges new governing relations and questions.

Similarly, approaching the compounding and alignment of various PUG ventures – BIDs, condominiums, POPS, public–private partnerships –Mackinnon et al. (2024) advance a relational and assemblage-based approach to understanding PUG through the case of Toronto’s PATH, a complex, subterranean, downtown pedestrian network. This approach underscores the various conflicting, fragile, provisional socio-material associations that co-constitute urban life and space. They trace mutating public and private governing vestiges and ventures that seek to render visible, and therefore governable, this complex underground privately managed urban consumer pathway. Rather than discrete singular enclaves, such as a key BID or condominium corporation, they highlight the accumulation of heterogenous, yet interconnected private realms, ventures and visions woven together through complex legal agreements, delimited by shifting boundaries of governance and responsibilities. At times unstable, fragile and frail, this PUG form also opens new ways of assembling urban space.

Visibility

The third theme, visibility, highlights how governing practices, technologies and knowledges render PUG visible. Understood through the lens of PUG, knowledge and information are more than ‘quantification’ ‘datafication’ and ‘smartification’ and are fundamental to governance (see Scott, 1998; Valverde, 2011). For example, both BIDs and condominiums have been shown to rely on a considerable level of knowledge production and brokering to function (Lippert and Sleiman, 2012; Lippert and Steckle, 2016), in the forms of specific agents and particular technologies that predate and cannot be reduced to technological framings (Murakami Wood and Mackinnon, 2019). Extending discussions of securitisation, surveillance and platform urbanism, this theme explores the relations of visibility that surround PUG and their resulting politics of visibility (Brighenti, 2022; Crang and Graham, 2007). PUG casts particular lines of sight. And while assets, targets and interventions may vary, these ways of seeing, (un)knowing and controlling stabilise spatial configurations and ontological politics (Mackinnon, 2019).

Exploring reconfigurations of socio-spatial control in São Paulo, Brazil, De Biaggi (2024) highlights how the conventional ‘centre–periphery’ model fails to capture the increasingly fragmented and multicentric nature of these urban landscapes. The development of new corporate centralities in São Paulo blurs traditional boundaries and simultaneously reinforces and updates racialised segregation and repressive methods through heightened security and surveillance with considerable involvement of private sector actors. Ventures, made possible through increased visibility, create ‘safe’ business zones, while further marginalising ‘unsafe’ peripheral areas. Reworking previous forms of socio-spatial control, the spread and concentration of surveillance in premium areas furthers racial segregation, gentrification, criminal spatial divides and the production of ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’.

Drawing together discussions of vestiges, ventures and visibility, Schaller et al. (2024) shine critical light on the power of PUG to transform urban landscapes. Tracing the development and prominence of BIDs in Washington DC and BID urbanism (see also Schaller, 2019), they map its racial, cultural and political contours. Based on vestiges of 19th-century local governance and racial exclusion, BIDs decontextualise, sanitise and yet further reproduce these renewal practices and anti-Black governance. In doing so, BID urbanism deploys ‘creative placemaking’ to emphasise and market the value of neighbourhoods (and Whiteness) while silencing, displacing and ultimately erasing poor, racialised populations in the process. By contextualising BID urbanism’s foundation in racial capitalism and the deployment of ‘[B]lack aesthetic emplacement’ (Summers, 2019), they stress the need for new anti-racist approaches centred in justice and inclusion.

Moving forward

This special issue returns to, and we hope, re-invigorates discussions of private urban governance. Rather than focusing on discrete PUG forms, our approach has been to see through the interrelated themes of vestiges, ventures and visibility. Below we chart several new research directions emerging from this special issue in relation to each theme.

Regarding vestiges, new forms of PUG are sometimes superimposed or built upon pre-existing organisations of spatiality and governance. Far from private, examining the public vestiges of PUG highlights how this is often by design. Connections to the public realm serve as built-in parachutes resulting in the further capture of public services for private interests. This capture may, as seen in Flynn and Blyth-Stevenson’s study of Granville Island, be accomplished by unique laws. BIDs similarly have public vestiges, including municipal representation on their boards, access to special publicly funded grants unavailable to other agencies and some priority when requesting calls for public service (see Mackinnon, 2022). More broadly, PUG drives a type of solutionism that increases inequality (e.g. spatial or educational) rather than social, environmental and/or data justice. One potential pitfall of studying vestiges is to assume that an older aspect will soon be eliminated and fully replaced by the new. On the contrary, vestiges, such as neo-liberal aspects, may well continue and indeed be necessary but not sufficient for the sustenance of PUG forms. Indeed, racialised governance made possible by PUG forms, perhaps most apparent in the studies of São Paulo (De Biaggi, 2024) and Washington, DC (Schaller et al., 2024), respectively, are troubling vestiges that remain securely in place. What is required now are more granular explorations of the frictions, contestations, resistances and contradictions that emerge from these collisions of new and old ‘urban things’ (Lippert, 2014) in both the Global South and the Global North.

These ventures are neither discrete nor isolated. Rather, as foregrounded by contributors, PUG logics continue to mutate, align, exploit and further embed surveillance, libertarianism, authoritarianism, rentier capitalism and (neo)colonialism/imperialism. In Berg and Shearing’s study we see new problems and targets emerging – the climate crisis – but several old tactics are reappearing to address them. From mega private developments such as NEOM, which includes ‘planned’ cities like the Line and Trojena, to ‘smaller’ private parking contacts, understanding the commonalities of these ventures is imperative. So is the need to draw connections and discern overlap between extreme and mundane practices (Mackinnon, 2019; Valverde, 2012). Together the articles show a need for interdisciplinary theories and approaches (e.g. from discussions of ‘actually-existing’ to ‘speculative futures’). But we suggest that future research also must step outside pre-given frameworks where either the homogenising effects of capitalist dynamics or legacies of colonial rule are overdetermined. Roy and Ong (2011) argue for a more open-ended and nuanced analysis that sees global situations as always in formation, an emphasis not inconsistent with the foregoing articles’ focus on practices. More broadly, research must seek to explore logics and subjectivities, without assuming pre-given neoliberal governance logics and stability. Developing a newer set of concepts and theorisations regarding PUG is vital in broader attempts to globalise urban theories not entrenched in northern frames of reference.

Visibility fuelled by desires for ubiquitous surveillance is central to PUG. Articles highlight the politics of visibility and how it reinforces dehumanising logics. For example, the study of Toronto’s PATH, by Mackinnon and colleagues, shows a peculiar and precarious mix of new surveillance and old signage technology assembled in PUG space that unintentionally accomplishes this. Similarly, Di Biaggi as well as Berg and Shearing call attention to PUG’s practices of looking.

A related need in future research evident from this issue’s articles is methodological innovation, especially as PUG practices ironically become more black-boxed. Scholarship must include attention to contestation and solidarities, resistances and alternatives to new PUG forms that reproduce hypervisibility, intensified control, displacements and dispossessions. Attending conferences (Yip and Zheng, 2024) and intentional walking (Mackinnon et al., 2024) consistent with urban ethnographies are only some illustrated possibilities. Regardless, methods must seek to render visible the multiple and path-dependent infrastructural practices and their reconfiguration through improvisation, incrementalism and political mobilisation (see Graham and Marvin, 2022).

Beyond these themes, and while this special issue attends to McCann’s (2017) call for more scrutiny of urban governance, there remains more research to be done in still wider PUG contexts. As PUG continues to mutate and adapt to shifting and uneven landscapes, critical governance studies of the urban remain paramount. Our three themes are not exhaustive, and there are others, including verticality and vulnerability, and far beyond. By examining the granular, uneven and broadest aspects of PUG in this issue, contributors highlight the edges and confluence of these forms, actors, technologies and above all, practices. Echoing the calls from contributors to this special issue, the alternatives uncovered must be rooted in social, racial, environmental, digital and community-driven justice.