Social Policy: Targeting Women in Urban Policies – Producing Subject Positions

Abstract

This chapter considers the next generation of urbanites as one entry point for entrepreneurial urban strategies. It investigates the way in which cities aiming to redefine themselves imagine future populations and how in these efforts they design social policies that explicitly and particularly target women as mothers. It develops the concept of urban regeneration: efforts to regenerate the city by either investing in the children (the next generation) of the current population or replacing the current population of children by a new generation of better-suited children. Based on an ethnographic case study of parenting guidance policy practices, this chapter shows how a ritual-like practice of communication and reflection produces subject positions in parenting guidance that very much resemble what is expected of employees in the post-Fordist and arguably more feminine labour market.