WHY WOULD hISTORY NOT eND IN CITIES?:

At a time when all cities are struggling to come to terms with a new reality, in The Long Crisis: New York City and the Path to Neoliberalism, Ben Holtzman provides an important and timely analysis of how one of them was transformed by a concerted socio-economic project. New York City's current crisis may be shaped by COVID-19, but as Holtzman shows, it is defined by a long-term shift towards urban governance based on the neoliberal deification of the market, entailing the dismantling of public services and redefinition of public space.

In a compelling passage, Holtzman relates how a 21st century New Yorker might live in a market-rate condominium that was formerly a rent-regulated apartment, enter the subway through a privately owned "public" atrium, walk down a street policed by private security guards and managed by local businesses, then play basketball in a privately run "public" park. People in many other places will recognise this hegemonic grip of private commercial interests over daily city life.

In The Long Crisis, Ben Holtzman, an Assistant Professor of History at Lehman College of the City University of New York (CUNY) who studies the social and political history of cities, traces the advent of marketized urbanism to the socio-economic crisis of the 1970s when New York City was virtually bankrupt.

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