Abstract
The neoliberalization of educational policies in the United States is transforming the educational landscapes of large metropolises, where educational markets are being recomposed and participate in the construction of urban territories. The process of accumulation by dispossession finds in the educational sector a new field of expansion, giving rise to multiple political, economic, social and spatial processes, which intersect with the major contemporary urban dynamics of both the marginalization of certain peripheral neighborhoods and the gentrification of other more central ones. This thesis questions the place of education in the mutations of the new neoliberal urban order. Through two case studies—Atlanta, Georgia and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania—this qualitative investigation is based on a varied collection of field data and on the construction of new cartographic databases that lead us to draw a picture of school territories and their transformations. An approach that is at the crossroads of social and radical geographies allows us to adopt several notions to explore this field. The rise of educational political stakes within neoliberal urban agendas can be read through the structuring of urban educational regimes that carry the policies of reterritorialization through the privatization of education. Resistance to the different forms of dispossession (political, economic, educational, memorial) gives rise to a new order in which the hybridizations and solutions of the different actors construct new school territories within increasingly complex and fragmented urban landscapes.