Reflections from RGS 2025 on authoritarian neoliberal urbanisms

This post was written by Ebru Kurt Özman.

In our Birmingham session at the Royal Geographical Society (RGS-IBG) Annual Conference 2025, we found ourselves immersed in one of the most compelling questions in critical urban research today: How does authoritarianism reshape urban life under the long shadow of neoliberalism? And what can we, as geographers and urban scholars, do about it?

The session was based on the Urban Studies special issue titled “Authoritarian Neoliberal and Illiberal urbanisms: Towards a research agenda”, which brings together empirical and conceptual work interrogating how today’s urban regimes blend authoritative governance, market logics, and state legitimation in deeply paradoxical ways. Our shared point of departure was clear: today’s neoliberal urban order is often authoritarian in form and illiberal in substance, yet full of contradictions that demand careful unpacking.

The roundtable was organized and chaired by Güldem Özatagan (University of Exeter) and Gareth Fearn (University of Manchester) and included contributions by Leonardo Fontes (Universidade Estadual de Campinas – UNICAMP), Jason Luger (Northumbria University), and myself, with Güldem and Gareth also co-authoring and curating the special issue.

Variegated Urban Authoritarianisms: Notes from the Panel

Opening the session, Güldem and Gareth emphasized a central argument of the special issue: authoritarian neoliberalism is not a singular regime type, but a variegated constellation of practices, institutions, and discourses – often shaped by local histories, legacies of domination/power/control, global exchanges and policy mobilities, and shifting political moments/currents. Authoritarian power does not always appear as overt repression; it also works through planning rules, zoning decisions, infrastructure investment, emergency laws, and institutional bypasses, quietly reconfiguring how cities are governed and contested.

The panel was structured around two focused rounds of discussion, each organized around a shared question rather than individual responses. This format allowed the conversation to move across cases and concepts while keeping the analytical stakes clear: the need to think in plural terms and articulate the variegated and evolving forms of authoritarian neoliberal urbanism.

Round 1 asked: How can geographers theorise the practices of control, discipline, authority, commodification, and resistance under authoritarian neoliberal urbanism?

The discussion foregrounded how power operates through both formal regulations and informal practices, combining rigidity with strategic flexibility, while positioning urban development as central to authoritarian political imaginaries. Rather than being imposed solely from above, authoritarian neoliberal urbanism emerged as a negotiated and contested process, partially shaped from below through community mobilisation, selective privilege, and entrepreneurial rationalities. A key takeaway was that resistance is not inherently transformative. While often understood as a hopeful force capable of challenging authoritarian neoliberal reforms and opening space for progressive change, resistance may also reproduce entrepreneurial logics and thus paradoxically reinforce the very regimes it seeks to oppose.

Round 2 shifted the focus to method: What methodological approaches can uncover the dynamics of authoritarian power and exclusion?

The discussion turned to the limits of relying on official documents and legal frameworks, highlighting the gaps between law and practice and the difficulty of researching less visible or not-always-legitimate forms of governance. Participants emphasised the value of ethnography, qualitative methods, policy tracing, and adaptive research strategies, particularly in contexts where access is restricted, actors are reluctant to speak, or research itself becomes subject to political pressure.

Each contribution explored these dynamics through different empirical and conceptual lenses:

Gareth Fearn presented housing and planning reforms in England, showing how deliberative democratic processes are increasingly displaced by state intervention. Drawing on Gramscian theory, he framed this as a moment of crisis in neoliberal legitimacy, where authority is consolidated through planning rather than consent.

Leonardo Fontes shared ethnographic insights from São Paulo’s urban peripheries, revealing the coexistence of progressive and conservative political orientations among Brazil’s urban poor. His work challenges binary understandings of popular politics and highlights how moral and social capital shape political alignment under authoritarian conditions.

Jason Luger proposed a powerful conceptual lens for understanding illiberal urbanism through three themes: density, emergency, and virality. From pandemic governance to digital surveillance, he argued that cities have become key sites where authoritarian control and resistance are simultaneously intensified.

Ebru Kurt-Ozman, drawing on their co-authored paper[1] with Tuna Taşan-Kok, returned to Istanbul’s Fikirtepe Urban Regeneration Project, examining how authoritarian and entrepreneurial forms of governance intersect through instruments such as the Disaster Law and the two-thirds majority rule. These mechanisms transform residents into quasi-developers operating within intensified market logics. What emerges is a form of entrepreneurial citizenship that is neither fully oppositional nor simply co-opted, but shaped by competing imperatives of profit, risk, and survival. Methodologically, this research emphasized the importance of tracing everyday politics and contested policy networks to understand how exclusion and adaptation operate together.

Why These Conversations Matter

What stood out most was not only the conceptual rigor of the discussion, but the emotional and political intensity of trying to understand the present we are living through. These were not distant case studies. Contributions from Brazil, England, Istanbul, and beyond spoke directly to the lived consequences of authoritarian urban transformations, and to the responsibility of scholars not only to diagnose these processes, but to think seriously about alternatives.

Importantly, the session, together with the Urban Studies special issue, has begun to open a renewed channel for debate on authoritarian neoliberal urbanism. Seeing this conversation extend beyond the conference room, take shape across collaborative platforms, and grow through ongoing scholarly exchange feels both timely and promising.

These debates are already resonating in wider academic publics. The Urban Political Podcast, for instance, has been hosting a series of conversations that critically engage with authoritarian populism, urban government, and the limits of neoliberal urbanism, further enriching this emerging dialogue. The following episodes offer valuable entry points into these discussions:

• Authoritarian Populism and the City: https://urbanpolitical.online/101-authoritarian-populism-and-the-city/
• Authoritarian Practices in Urban Government: https://urbanpolitical.online/102-authoritarian-practices-in-urban-government/
• Beyond Neoliberal Urbanism: https://urbanpolitical.online/103-beyond-neoliberal-urbanism/

For us, this session reaffirmed why we need more spaces: these places should allow us to think across contexts and disciplines, to hold complexity without simplifying it, and to imagine forms of urban scholarship that are not only diagnostic, but transformative. We hope to continue these conversations through UGoveRN’s comparative dialogues and future collaborative work.

Special thanks to:

• Nufar Avni for her editorial work on this UGoveRN blogpost
• And to the entire session contributors for a sharp, generous, and deeply engaged exchange

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[1] Kurt-Özman, E., & Tasan-Kok, T. (2025). Community politics in urban regeneration under authoritarian entrepreneurial governance. Urban Studies, 62(15), 2935-2955. https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980251345701 (Original work published 2025).