Cam,
urban space and urbanity are important concepts and any republicanism that is worth its salt needs this built into its conception of freedom.

American republicanism, for all its emphasis on freedom is anti-urban.It's a ruralism and so stands in opposition to the tradition of Greek origin: The City of civilisation, culture and art, maintained through Roman influence and, later, Spain

Neo-liberalism in relation to ubanism simply means submitting everything to circulation and finance.

The city -is a place where different groups can meet, where they may be in conflict but also form alliances, and where they participate in a collective oeuvre based on individual freedom. The city has an autonomous reality. It has a life, an existence which cannot be reduced to the distribution of land or space, the street, the square, meeting places, fêtes.

The complexities and richness of urban life, especially of everyday public life orders itself principally around exchanges of all kinds: material and non-material, objects and words, signs and products. Exchange and commerce are never reduced to a strictly economic and monetary aspect, but the life in the city is an essential domain of liberty.

Gary, Jeffersonian Republicanism certainly was. It was moral strength in a yeomanry nation of small enterprise farmers and militia. Massachusettes Republicanism, especially the revolutionary republicanism of Sam Adams was urban. Support for the revolution and opposition to the Tea and Stamp taxes was popularised through Town Hall meetings. Adams developed a sophisticated mechanism for gathering and distributing information through those meetings. They were quite raucous too. You also see modern Presidential candidates try to revive that Adams style - however, they tend to close down all debate and rather than a loud and noisy town hall meeting with people yelling stuff from the upper tiers down it is a staged and managed play.

Gary, Explored your comment a bit deeper on ssr.

Cam,
I concur that the core of Jeffersonian Republicanism was the liberty in a yeomanry nation of small enterprise farmers and militia--- fo raall Jefferson' support for free-market capitalism and for the United States to change from being primarily an agricultural nation and embraced manufacturing and industry.

Maybe there are two Jefferson's as I do associate with Jefferson with agrarianism and agrarian democracy.The political ideal of a democratic and self-governing nation, as Thomas Jefferson saw it, could best be entrusted to a society that was predominantly agrarian--more specifically, a community of small, self-sufficient family farms. Like Roman Republicans some two millenia earlier ("... it is from the tillers of the soil that spring the best citizens...") Jefferson held that the moral security of a nation rested in its agricultural community:

This agrarian democracy was very strong in nineteenth century Australia and the early 20th century with the settlement famers of the returned soldiers. This agrarianism regards the city as unclean and as a vile place to escape from.