Vandalismo cívico. Control y mercantilización en la recreación neoliberal del espacio público

The advance of neoliberalism in urban policy is largely identified with the expansion and ubiquity of market logics. This type of urbanism does not supress public sector, but tends to redirect it from redistributive practices to functions of market support, surveillance and control. This chapter focuses on two apparently opposite type of political practices in the neoliberal production of space. On the one hand, tactics for the integration of degraded strategic spaces in commercial circuits, in parallel to their rise in value and commodification. On the other hand, control policies in spaces without immediate strategic potentials are noted. This neoliberal recreation of space implies public policies, commercial interests and citizen practices, which in this work are analysed from the consideration of urbanism as an ideology. The argument is based on the presentation of the case of the recent restructuring of the city of Seville, specifically in the northern sector of the city, which includes strategic areas close to the central areas of the city and residential sectors of little or no interest for its commercialization, but also subject to strong recent transformations. Through an ethnographic approach, the observable transformations in the public spaces of this sector are analysed, as well as the uses they receive in the framework of the reorganization of the city from a neoliberal point of view.