Transatlantic city, part 2: Late entrepreneurialism
本文以美国大西洋城为案例，研究其长期的企业家主义历史，从共和党机器控制到1970年代中期的合法赌博实验，分析这一增长机器失败后引发的财政和政治危机，揭示晚期企业家主义的特点。
The first installment of this two-part paper made a case for a conjunctural approach to urban studies, reserving a special place for the provisional formulation and ongoing revision of midlevel theories – from the entrepreneurial city to austerity urbanism and financialised urban governance – while positioning abstraction and contextualisation as simultaneous, dialogic practices. It follows that such arguments can be developed only so far in the absence of concrete cases, where conjunctural accounts actually gain traction, direction and purpose. Seeking to operationalise some of these methodological principles by way of a situated, single-city case study, this part of the paper returns to the financially challenged casino capital of Atlantic City, tracing its long (and notorious) history of entrepreneurial dealings, from Republican machine control to the ‘experiment’ with legalised gambling that was launched in the mid-1970s, and positioning the structural crisis that preceded the casino pact with the existential crisis that has been generated in the wake of the failure of this distinctive local growth machine. Atlantic City made a very large wager that did not pay off, the unravelling of its much-emulated model of entrepreneurial urbanism dramatising a distinctly ‘late-entrepreneurial’ moment of fiscally mandated governance and political crisis.