Austerity Urbanism Research Articles

Migrant housing struggle and racial discrimination: The case of postsocialist Leipzig and Riga

The civic mobilisation welcoming Ukrainian refugees after Russia’s invasion in February 2022 has shown how housing is a social infrastructure based on care and solidarity. But it has also shown its discriminatory face. By drawing on our recent collaborative research in Leipzig and Riga and conceptual reflections from previous research, this paper elaborates on how practices of welcoming and housing refugees intertwine with state racism and everyday discrimination. It is grounded in two intersecting lines of inquiry. The first one focuses on migrant housing struggles in the context of increased financialisation, privatisation and austerity urbanism. The second expands on the intersection of race and discrimination with housing, asking how race and racial discrimination intersect and affect migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers’ access to and experiences with housing. The underlying argument is that while housing is the site where this type of discrimination becomes spatialised and visible (and thus can be challenged), there is still a missing discourse around discrimination in migration and housing policy.

Statecraft at the frontier of capitalism: A grounded view from China.

The death of urban entrepreneurialism is proclaimed surprisingly by opposite conceptualisations of austerity urbanism and radical municipalism. This paper argues that rather than seeing them as contrasting types, post-pandemic statecraft reflects the increasing tension and entanglement between capitalistic and territorial logic. From the ground of Chinese urban governance, we illustrate how Chinese statecraft maintains state strategic and extra-economic intention through deploying and mobilising market and society - to create its own agents and to co-opt those that are already existent or emerging. This statecraft is illustrated through community building, urban development, and regional formation.

Third place social infrastructure, after and in crisis: insights from a local case study

Following the 2008 global financial crisis, Digital Fabrication Laboratories (Fab Labs) have become a common feature of the urban landscape in cities throughout Europe. An emerging body of literature suggests that Fab Labs go beyond providing access to digital fabrication tools, and function as ‘third places’ as they enhance social connectedness. Drawing on a case study of a Fab Lab in the English city of Coventry, this article utilises the concept of ‘austerity urbanism’ to understand the changing nature of third places in England since the 2008 global financial crash. In doing so, we argue that a confluence of austerity urbanism and digital advancements has influenced both the emergence of new third places (such as Fab Labs) while simultaneously undermining long-established third places (such as libraries). As a result, vital aspects of social infrastructure are being shaped and reshaped in the contemporary era. The article reflects on what these changes mean for individual and community well-being.

Austerity Urbanism: From Redistributive transfers to debt based finance

Austerity urbanism is an explanatory concept that alerts planners, politicians and society. The tripartite explanation of the concept of Austerity: as a result, solution, or even as a cause is part of the knowledge of this research article. Austerity embedded in the political choices of neoliberalism. Austerity rooted in the liberal thinking. Austerity Urbanism intertwined with: destructive creativity, deficit politics and devolved risk. After years of Austerity (Urbanism), governments are still ill-prepared to deal with the current urban crisis. New democratic instruments are needed to regain control over capital and to reform, modernize economic and social redistributive efficiency and effectiveness.

Austerity urbanism, local government debt-drive, and post COVID predicaments in Britain

Abstract Conditions of local governance in the aftermath of the global financial crisis are often discussed as reflections of ‘austerity urbanism’. What forms of mutations have taken place in austerity urbanism after the initial years of spending cuts at the local level? This article investigates this question by focusing on the uneven geographies of post-austerity debt-drive in Britain. It is shown that austerity urbanism in Britain was somewhat peculiarly combined with debt-driven ‘entrepreneurialism’ several years after the introduction of extensive budgetary cuts. The local debt-drive was instigated by austerity-urbanism as a way of resolving the challenge of financing local services and development. The relatively low level of initial debt stock among local governments, very attractive borrowing terms and various regulatory changes facilitated the expansion of borrowing. Using debt stock data for over 300 local governments, it is demonstrated how debt build-up evolved to create financial difficulties for around 40 per cent of local governments. The Covid-19 pandemic, with its severe impacts on local revenues, exposed the debt-driven local development projects, leading to rescue operations and efforts to curb borrowing through new rules and regulations. For deeper international insights into the dynamics of debt-financing and urban development in times of crises, further research is needed to complement existing research in Britain and the USA, where relatively greater evidence exists.

The conflictual governance of street experiments, between austerity and post-politics

Car dependency greatly contributes to the climate crisis and the corrosion of public space. In response, cities are introducing pedestrianisation, cycle lanes or tactical urban interventions aimed at repurposing streets for other road users. Framed as ‘experiments’, these reallocations of street space disrupt traditional transport planning procedures, often with promising results in promoting active travel. They are also associated with deep conflicts and criticism, especially by citizens defending the right to drive. Despite their ability to stop experiments, such conflicts have been little explored in the debates about experimentation and automobility. Similarly, street experiments have in most cases been uncritically embraced as a panacea for urban mobility problems, with little attention paid to experimentation as an expression of austerity urbanism. This paper aims to deepen our understanding of street experiments and their relationship to automobility by contextualising their conflictual unfolding as an expression of post-political planning in the age of austerity urbanism. Through a critical examination of the Torino Mobility Lab, a collaborative pedestrianisation experiment in Torino, we show how the governance-beyond-state setup of such projects masks a complex and contested coexistence of different meanings and processes for reimagining urban mobility and public space. We show how conflicts emerge embedded in the problematic and post-political governance of transport experiments. Nested within austerity urbanism, the experiment remains limited in its ability to create healthy spaces for participation. We conclude by highlighting the limitations and contradictions of attempts to overcome car dependency embedded in post-political frameworks and neoliberal-austerity planning practices.

Leveraging land-value capture in contexts of urban austerity: evidence from the Grand Paris Express (France)

ABSTRACT Austerity urbanism has emerged as a powerful concept to explore the political and socio-spatial consequences of cuts in public spending, but interrogations remain regarding public actors’ shifting role in urban production in times of increased budgetary constraints. This article focuses on Land Value Capture (LVC), a financing mechanism that has been gaining traction amongst scholars and practitioners alike. While LVC can be framed as a valuable tool to finance infrastructure provision in times of austerity, we argue that the existing literature has neglected its use by other public actors, for the funding of other urban projects. Indeed, we analysed how different public actors (public landowners, land developers, and local governments) sought to take advantage of the anticipated rise in land value around future stations of the new urban railway system surrounding Paris, the Grand Paris Express. Through an exploration of four case studies, we show that LVC can be a flexible instrument that allows actors to either play into, or mitigate austerity-driven urban policies in French cities.

Grassroots temporary urbanism as a challenge to the city of austerity? Lessons from a self‐organised park in Thessaloniki, Greece

AbstractThis paper traces the legacies of austerity through a focus on grassroots temporary urban interventions in public spaces. Drawing on a self‐organised neighbourhood park in Thessaloniki, Greece, it explores and analyses the politicising dynamics of these urban experiments that emerged as a direct response to state retrenchment but became a long‐term legacy of austerity with material and social consequences. The aim of the paper is to contribute to contemporary scholarly debates on temporary grassroots urbanism amidst austerity by uncovering the ambiguous nature of such urban experiments without reproducing dichotomising approaches that understand them as either a vehicle of neoliberalisation or an instrument of revolt. Through the case of Svolou I develop a twofold argument. First, regarding their social dynamics and legacies, grassroots urban initiatives that lack a politicising element of disagreement with (planning and governance) authorities result in creating parallel micro‐spheres of socialities and solidarities with a questionable long‐term impact against austerity urbanism. Although such socialities are important at the local level, they often risk reproducing neoliberal rationalities of individual responsibility and exclusions. Second, regarding their material legacies, I argue that grassroots urban initiatives produce temporary self‐organised spaces and experiment with innovative grassroots space‐making processes but they often remain entrapped at the local level without being able to develop broader contestations of the uneven urban development model emerging in and through austerity.

The politics of owing: Accounting, water disconnection, and austerity urbanism in Detroit

With the rise of austerity urbanism, contemporary urban governance has been described as “rule by accountancy.” Yet the intricacies of accounting practice have been underexplored in the austerity urbanism literature. Drawing on insights from critical accounting studies, I interrogate accounting practices as political exercises that draw people and institutions into ties of obligation (accountability), shape social relations, and structure the conditions of urban life. Through this lens, practices of accounting can be understood not just as a technocratic tool of the financialized state, but as a contested terrain of urban political struggle. Examining the case of austerity-driven water service disconnections in Detroit, this paper chronicles how accounting practices are both deployed by the state to justify water disconnection and used by activists seeking to expand water access in unprecedented ways. I find that while the austerity urbanism literature is correct to identify accounting as a tool in the advancement of the austerity agenda, accounting is also a means to organize against the diminished expectations of life under austerity.

The policing of Black debt: how the municipal bond market regulates the right to water

ABSTRACT Through a comparative analysis of Baltimore, Detroit, and St. Louis, this paper examines the emergence of financialized austerity urbanism as a mode of governance through which racialized patterns of infrastructure inequalities are produced, particularly regarding water and sewer provision. Following the 2008 financial crisis, Black-majority cities have employed disciplinary financial rules and routines around debt collection when issuing loans in the bond market to make up for budget shortfalls, a process which has led to mass water shut offs, housing foreclosures and wage garnishments to collect on increasing household water and sewer debt. This paper explores the interactions of race, municipal finance and urban governance by providing case study evidence on the implications of racism and racialization embedded within credit ratings in the municipal bond market. I demonstrate how there has been a financial deepening of Black-majority cities through pressure to satisfy municipal bondholders and meet their debt obligations. Punitive methods such as mass water shut offs and other debt collection practices are the outcomes of downloaded debt onto local spheres following the 2008 economic crisis, and what happens when residents are squeezed to their limits. The innerworkings of austerity urbanism, I argue, is driven by the logics of financialization and operates through urban geographies of racial capitalism.

A vicious cycle: Fiscal intervention, pension underfunding, and instability in (re)making racialized geographies

The 2008 financial crisis had profound impacts on government finances across the United States, including a lasting decrease in public pension funding levels. Today state and local governments in the United States have trillions of dollars in unfunded public pension liabilities, and the financial condition of pension systems has material impacts on borrowing costs, service delivery, and taxation, as well as retirement security. Local governments have been tasked with shoring up their pension systems while also grappling with sluggish revenue recovery, a situation that compounds already existing fiscal issues. Building on extant scholarship on crisis, austerity urbanism, and pragmatic municipalism, we examine the practice of “shorting” pension systems among Illinois municipalities and a state law meant to strengthen the fiscal health of local pension systems by curbing that practice. Using the case of the City of Harvey, a suburb of Chicago, we show how municipal finance and seemingly neutral policies aimed at ensuring fiscal health can trigger austerity actions that deepen fiscal stress for racialized communities. By examining Illinois’ pension fund landscape and proposing avenues for further research, we contribute to larger conversations about how governance, property, and pensions are inextricably intertwined with persistent racial inequality.

Post-great recession municipal budgeting and governance: A mixed methods analysis of budget stress and reform

The Great Recession hit several U.S. cities hard. Facing large revenue losses, these cities undertook dramatic spending cuts and utilized rarely used restructuring tools. This led some to speculate that these were exemplars of austerity urbanism. Subsequent work has contested this interpretation, arguing instead that cities have generally pursued pragmatic, not austere, reform. This paper seeks to move beyond this impasse, developing a mixed methods longitudinal analysis of quantitative and qualitative municipal budget data. Quantitative data is drawn from the U.S. Census of Local Government (2006–2016) and is used identify statistical relationships between budget health and budget composition in a nationwide sample ( n = 1,449) of municipalities. Then follows a qualitative analysis of budget narrative data from the six most fiscally distressed large and medium sized U.S. cities. The paper therefore identifies commonalities in post-Great Recession urban governance (i) in a large nationwide sample of cities and (ii) within a small group of extreme cases. The research found weak nationwide trends in budgetary change and divergent budget narratives in cases of severe municipal fiscal distress. We argue this means three things for understanding U.S. urban governance. First, the tracing of superficially similar “local” budget reforms to a single political economic descriptor is misplaced. Second, U.S. municipal budgetary reforms are relational, outcomes of both local and extra-local diagnosis, interpretation, and mediation. Third, and finally, decisions to introduce local austerity policies stem not just from “outside.” This paper therefore shows the potential intellectual returns of in-depth, case-study research on U.S. urban governance and finance.

Renegotiating the city: refugee resettlement between surveillance, austerity, and activism in German urban communities

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the politics of refugee arrival and integration at urban level in Germany following the migration influx in summer 2015. How have cities redefined themselves? How have newcomers and residents with different subjectivities constructed their identity, social belonging, and justified their rights-claiming? What kind of changes can be observed in city’s social spaces? Supported by critical geography, securitization, ethnographic approaches, the paper aims to identify the grey areas of the urban social spaces and presents two accounts centred on: (1) city as sites of bureaucratic politics, austerity urbanism and surveillance; (2) city as sites of sanctuary/solidarity practices. It argues that the refugees’ arrival offers the chance for German cities to envision a social project through engaging a politics of ‘bounding’ which involves the re-framing of refugee displacement in relation to urban development by covering both the lived (camp) experiences of those on the move and local population's needs.

The Festivalisation of Edinburgh: Manifestations, Impacts and Responses

The Festivalisation of Edinburgh: Constructing its Governance was published in Scottish Affairs 30.1. It showed how the city council, Scottish Government and the events, festivals and tourism industries worked in partnership as a growth coalition. This follow-up article describes some of the results they achieved. It focuses on Edinburgh's August and Winter Festivals, as these are the largest scale festival events. It also analyses the project that sought to re-imagine West Princes Street Gardens. It explores the meaning of ‘festivalisation’ both through its direct impacts on the use of urban space, but also in its relation to the commodification of public space and austerity urbanism. Festivalisation has normalised the flow of value from local public spaces to geographically dispersed asset owners. However, opposition emerged from some local residents and community councils, with the long-established civic amenity charity, the Cockburn Association, playing a catalytic role. The Covid pandemic disrupted this process in 2020, opening up further debates about the role of festivals and tourism in the recovery.

Disparities by deprivation: The geographical impact of unprecedented changes in local authority financing on the voluntary sector in England

Over the last decade, the local government finance system in England has experienced ‘genuinely revolutionary change’: overall revenues have declined and councils are now more reliant on locally raised taxes. Importantly, the nature of change has varied geographically: urban councils serving poorer communities have experienced the biggest declines in their service spending. This paper considers the impact of these spatially uneven changes on the voluntary sector. We follow through time charities known to be in receipt of local government funding at the time of peak council budgets in 2009–2010 and describe trends in the income of these charities until 2016–2017. We show that, just as the pattern of change in local government financing has been spatially uneven, so the trend in charities’ income has varied geographically. Indeed the spatially regressive nature of recent change in charities’ income is remarkable: while the median charity in the least deprived decile of the local authority distribution experienced little change in their income, the median charity in the most deprived decile experienced a 20% decline. The results provide the strongest evidence to date that, in countries with a history of partnership between government and the voluntary sector, voluntary organisations in more deprived areas are particularly vulnerable to sizeable reductions in the level of local government spending. Indeed, by illustrating for the first time the sizeable reductions in the income of charities in disadvantaged communities, the results demonstrate an important mechanism through which ‘austerity urbanism’ becomes salient in the lives of individuals in deprived areas.

Surplus to the city: Austerity urbanism, displacement and ‘letting die’

Urban scholars have traditionally associated displacement in cities of the global North with gentrification, generally understood as a class-based process of neighbourhood change. This article expands this scalar focus and adopts the larger scale of the local authority district (in this case the London borough) as its epistemological starting point to study the displacement of homeless people by the local state. Participatory action research was undertaken with housing campaigners in the East London borough of Newham to explore who is being displaced, their experiences of displacement and the impacts of displacement on their lives. Empirically, the article argues that displacement in this case is a product of national welfare state restructuring – or ‘austerity urbanism’ – implemented through a localised regime of ‘welfare chauvinism’ in which some groups are framed as economically unproductive and therefore undeserving of access to social housing. Displacement has the effect of reinforcing the surplus status of these groups by separating them from employment, education and care networks and eroding their physical and mental health. The article draws on research on the biopolitics of surplus populations in the global South to develop an original theorisation of the relationship between welfare state restructuring and displacement. This theorisation reveals that displacement is the spatial expression of a biopolitical shift away from the logic of ‘making live’ associated with the post-war welfare state towards a logic of ‘letting die’ more traditionally associated with postcolonial contexts.

Down and out in Dhaka: understanding land financialization and displacement in austerity urbanism

ABSTRACT This paper examines how high levels of eviction and displacement of the urban poor have arisen due to the financialization of land in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Focusing on the Meradia neighborhood of Dhaka, it employs a historical materialist framework to explore the ramifications of the financialization of land and resulting land grabbing. It is argued that the historical transformation of land into fictitious capital in Dhaka has led to heightened displacements and evictions of the urban poor, which have occurred largely through processes of land grabbing by land and real estate development corporations in Bangladesh. Further, it is argued that the municipal and national states play key roles in the displacement of the working poor in Dhaka by facilitating private land development, failing to enforce existing rules on land grabbing, and by having a paucity of urban housing policies and plans for the urban poor.

Barcelona’s housing policy under austerity urbanism: a contribution to the debate on degrowth and urban planning

ABSTRACT The housing policy of Barcelona, the Plan for the Right to Housing (2015–2020), implemented by the anti-austerity local government of Barcelona en Comú, relates closely to degrowth imaginaries and norms. It incorporates vacant housing to the public housing stock, develops a special unit for attending evictions and other residential emergencies, and introduces support for promising yet marginal tenure forms such as co-housing or leasehold estate. However, a critical analysis of this policy reveals strong contradictions and limitations. Given the existing uneven socio-spatial dynamics of a global city such as Barcelona, the well-established power relations in the production of urban space, and the still-dominant discourse of austerity, the local government’s actions remain precarious. However, albeit both promising and contradictory, Barcelona’s housing policy proves to be a useful case for developing degrowth planning principles and tools for urban housing policy and beyond.

Austerity urbanism and recreation restructuring: insights from recreation workers and participants

This paper focuses on the period 2009 to 2019 and is principally concerned with two objectives: first, to determine how austerity urbanism has affected municipal recreation workers' conditions and quality of employment and, secondly, to asses how recreation restructuring has affected accessibility for users and whether there has been a differential impact for low-income and racialized communities. Drawing from interviews with both recreation workers and participants, we argue that urban austerity has intensified the pressures and precariousness faced by recreation workers, while simultaneously compromising inclusive and accessible services for historically marginalized groups.

Gentrificación turística en Lisboa después de la crisis capitalista 2008-2009 y rent gap: Evidencia reciente

El turismo urbano en sus diversas formas ha experimentado una gran expansión a principios del siglo XXI, pero la turistificación como fenómeno de masas, hegemónico y dominante en las grandes ciudades portuguesas de Lisboa y Oporto es un fenómeno reciente. Antes de la pandemia, Lisboa vivía un pico de proyección internacional como destino turístico, registrando considerables incrementos ininterrumpidos en llegadas de turistas, pernoctaciones e ingresos diarios, así como en número de hoteles, hostales y alojamientos turísticos de alquiler corto, pero el turistificación como un fenómeno de masas, hegemónico y dominante en el centro de la ciudad, con drásticos impactos en el tejido social y económico de los distritos históricos del centro de Lisboa es reciente. Este artículo se centrará en las fuerzas impulsoras del urbanismo de austeridad y el giro neoliberal en la política urbana que impulsa el proceso de gentrificación turística, en la última década, en los barrios históricos de Lisboa, especialmente la enorme expansión del alojamiento de alquiler a corto plazo para turistas, combinada con la alta rent gap y el elevado número de edificios vacíos en la ciudad.