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+The hegemonic network, or bloc, initially shapes the debates and draws on appropriate policies of desired success, such as the needs of bohemians, knowledge clusters, or talented knowledge workers, as to what constitutes their desired enjoyment (cobblestones, chrome and cappuccinos at sidewalk cafes) and what is therefore lacking in local competitiveness. In tum, this defines what is blighted and dysfunctional and in need of economic, spatial planning, or other, remedy. Such an argument is predicated on a logic, or more accurately a rhetoric, that a lack of a particular defined type of enjoyment, or competitiveness (for surely they are one and the same) is inherently unhealthy for the aggregate social body. Lack and its resolution are generally presented as technical, rather than political issues. Consequently, technocrats in partnership with their "˜dominant stakeholders` can ensure the impression of rationally seeking to produce happiness for the many whilst, of course, achieving their stakeholders’ specific interests (Gunder and Hillier 2007a, 469). The current post-democratic` milieu facilitates the above through avoidance of critical policy debate challenging favored orthodox positions and policy approaches. Consideration of policy deficiencies, or alternative solutions, are eradicated from political debate so that while token institutions of liberal democracy’ are retained conflicting positions and arguments are negated (Stavrakakis 2003, 59). Consequently, the safe names in the field who feed the policy orthodoxy are repeatedly used or their work drawn upon by different stakeholders, while more critical voices are silenced by their inability to shape policy debates’ (Boland 2007, 1032). The economic development or spatial planning policy analyst thus continues to partition reality ideologically by deploying only the orthodox "successful” or "best practice” economic development or spatial planning responses. This further maintains the dominant, or hegemonic, status quo while providing "˜a cover and shield against critical thought by acting in the manner of a "buffer" isolating the political held from any research that is independent and radical in its conception as in its implications for public policy’ (Wacquant 2004, 99). At the same time, adoption of the hegemonic orthodoxy tends to generate similar policy responses for every competing local area or city-region, largely resulting in a zero-sum game (Blair and Kumar 1997). |