LAUSR

approaching the question of Paris’ transformation through the literature on neoliberalization, for example, my idea was to frustrate readings looking for neoliberalism in the abstract, so as to focus on the differential manifestations of late capitalist power. In this context, I found the concept of neoliberalism useful for tracking the multifaceted regularization of market relations in France. And it was especially important for disrupting the narratives of France’s social exceptionalism and Paris’ municipal progressivism. In this sense then, neoliberalism was both a tool to decipher empirical changes and a lived set of norms and practices being re-formed through Grand Paris’ production. Similarly, grand urbanism as a novel paradigm for planning and policy assembles a range of learned and inherited activities and ideals. I use it to capture an amalgam of ideas, projects, and repertoires that are highly visible in twenty-first century Paris but that are observable in a wider set of urban phenomenon. Grand urbanism, like neoliberalism, might best describe an ideology that in its operational practice is never pure, coherent, and stable, but always polysemic, contradictory, and contingent. Grand urbanization (a term I do not employ in the book) might well describe the aspirational processes of regulative change and speculative regional planning taking place in so many contexts around the world today. All the commentaries in this forum delve into deep questions about the complex geographies and genealogies of urban political change. Most certainly this entails attention to the on the ground struggles over spatial processes, and to the definitional, descriptive, and analytical traction of the concepts we employ to understand these. These are enduring concerns of urban research. Continued dialogue on these themes is essential for apprehending the ever-shifting ground of global urbanisms.