Cities, austerity and its discontents
We are delighted to publish our dissemination report for the Austerity Governance project. It is titled Governing in and Against Austerity and provides an overview and reports initial findings from our eight case studies of austerity governance in Athens, Baltimore, Barcelona, Dublin, Leicester, Melbourne, Montreal and Nantes.
We warmly welcome comments and feedback, you can download the document on the hyperlink above.
In this post Ernesto Ganuza and Gianpaolo Baiocchi begin our third instalment of CURA’s Book Debates series by outlining the main argument in their recently co-authored book “Popular Democracy: the Paradox of Participation” – where they trace the development of participatory governance, focusing specifically on the paradigmatic process of Participatory Budgeting, its origins in the Southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, and its subsequent globalization as it travelled to European and North American cities. In a forthcoming post, CURA’s Adrian Bua will write a response and Ernesto and Gianpaolo will close the debate with a reply.
No one can escape the fact that we live in an era where calls for participation are ubiquitous. Participation is seen as the solution to the failings of democracy and a weakened civic spirit. Today, political actors, from specialists to politicians and administrators, compete to bear the heraldry of participation. We are talking about a new political hegemony.
This participatory era rests on new kinds of participatory processes that are different in spirit to those in the 70’s. Participation nowadays focusses on the public in general, in the form of deliberative spaces in which individuals, rather than civic associations, are invited to reflect on public affairs, and, in many cases to make policy decisions. A direct form of participation is invoked that breaks with the tradition of relegating participation to a mere measure of public opinion.
However, viewed historically, this expansion of participation is somewhat paradoxical. Participation has ceased to be a counter-power like that of the 1970’s, and has become part of the functioning of administration and formal political power. It is a process of top-down democratization. Beginning with the revolts of the seventies against centralized bureaucracies, public administration has found in participation a faithful ally in its attempt to become more proximate to society, and realise the need for the public legitimation of politics. Participatory rhetoric has changed the hallmark with which it was usually presented – from prostesting, to proposing. Participation in the new spaces is not a matter of oppositional reclamation, but of constructive proposition.
Criticisms of this historical process have by no means been delayed. Both the content and context of this new political hegemony have been linked to the predatory spirit of neoliberalism. After all, participation’s logic is close to neoliberalism’s entrepreneurial spirit – do it yourself! This criticism is most forceful in a context in which the political impact of participation in cities is doubted. Just when there is no city in the world that does not invite citizens to participate, participation has lost its social justice focus, and provides spaces for consumerist disputes instead.
Faced with this all-engulfing neoliberal wave, the book explores the birth and journey of one of the most emblematic participatory processes; that of participatory budgeting. As a metaphor for this new political hegemony, we have seen how the travel of participation leads to its trivialization and disengagement from political processes as it lands on new shores. In this process, full of contradictions and popular struggles between lay citizens and elites such as experts, bureaucrats and politicians, the dilemma of participation’s neo-liberalization comes into view.
The problem of participation lies in thinking about the link between opinion and power only in terms of the relationship between citizens and representatives, without taking into account how political institutions work. Participation then becomes limited to a process for revealing public preferences. As good as that may be for some, it forgets all the second-order issues involved in politics: priorities must be defined in a (democratic) setting characterised by the equality of all and the existence of finite resources. It is therefore not enough to count proposals, nor to turn participation into a zero-sum game. You win, I lose. Information and debate are needed before deciding. A practical and material concept of the equality that offers everybody a real voice is needed. Therefore, it is not surprising that if we understand participation as an expression of individual preferences, in this context of finite resources, participatory processes become platforms for the selfish pursuit of individual interests.
Participation aims to build bridges between politics and society, but when it is disconnected from institutions it can degenerate into fatuous disputes. In other words, if participation is to claim a legitimate presence in contemporary society it will need to be linked to the workings of public administration. To achieve this, it is necessary to develop administrative reforms that envisage a participatory modus operandi. Otherwise participation will always be peripheral to both politics and social developments – and will thus fail to resolve democracy’s problems and the need for the public legitimation of political decisions.
Gianpolo Baiocchi is associate professor of individualized studies and sociology, as well as director of the Urban Democracy Lab and Civic Engagement at the, Gallatin School, New York University.
Ernesto Ganuza is a researcher at the Centre for Advanced Social Studies, Spanish National Research Council (IESA- CSIC) in Cordoba, Spain.
In today’s post, Professor Jonathan Davies explains the arguments developed in the introductory piece to a special issue of Urban Studies on the governance, contestation and critique of urban crises. The paper, co-authored by Jonathan, Mustafa Bayırbağ and Sybille Münch, is open access until 25th August 2017.
The central problematic addressed in our framing paper, is that the meaning and application of “urban crisis” is far too nebulous and imprecise. The paper seeks to address this problem by opening up the concept of urban crisis to critical scrutiny. We start by exploring how urban ‘crisis-talk’ tends to over-extend the concept in ways that can render it shallow or even meaningless. We then look at different ways in which the terminology of urban crisis is employed in the literature and throughout our collection of essays. We thereby disclose six framings of urban crisis, tabulated on page 2026. These framings are structure, alienation, politics, construction, boundaries and indeterminacy. We suggest that each framing is linked to a specific set of analytical and political problematics. We hope researchers find these framings and the problematics to which we think they give rise useful in developing refined approaches to urban crisis, particularly in studies of the governance and contestation of austerity urbanism.
The Interrogating Urban Crisis conference was funded through the Urban Studies/Urban Studies Foundation Seminar Series /Competition. http://www.urbanstudiesfoundation.org. We are very grateful for their invaluable support.
We are delighted to launch CURA’s “Urban Futures” podcast series with this edition on the “Grounded City
” with Karel Williams, Professor of Accounting and Political Economy at the University of Manchester.
If you use iTunes click here to listen and download the podcast, otherwise you can use soundcloud – and remember to leave a rating / comments!
Some more information below.
In his and his colleagues work on the “Grounded City” Karel argues that the dominance of theories of urban agglomeration in urban policy making reflect a belated recognition of “the urban” by neo-liberal economists. However, Karel and his colleagues argue that there are fundamental deficiencies in the agglomeration approach which rise from the imperialism, and hubris, of classical economics in social science. The “Grounded City” offers an alternative policy imaginary which is interdisciplinary in nature but draws principally on the urban historiography of Fernand Braudel and other scholars such as Charles Tilly – literatures which agglomeration theories simply fail to recognise.
Madeleine Pill and Valeria Guarneros-Mesa report on their research into hybridity and city governance in Cardiff, which was recently published in Policy and Politics.
Welsh Government is phasing out its (former flagship) Communities First tackling poverty programme from 2017/18. The Bevan Foundation, a think tank, has stressed that subsequent local action should be led by ‘community anchors’ – community-based organisations with a good track-record and strong community engagement. Our research using the conceptual framework of hybridity – conducted as part of the Transgob project in Cardiff, Wales – supports this recommendation, and highlights the need for local government to relinquish its former levels of control to give these organisations space to develop approaches which work for their communities.
The research explored what austerity means for participation in city governance. The optimistic view is that making governance more participatory can help overcome the hurdles of bureaucracy, with government ceding control to enable capacity to address complex problems. The pessimistic view is that city governance remains dominated by state elites, with third sector and community partners co-opted to compensate for the decline in state provision, compromising their ability to advocate for and ensure that communities get decent services. In Cardiff we uncovered attitudes and practices somewhere in between these two views.
We found that austerity had accelerated the city council’s use of its city governance structure, the Cardiff Partnership, to share the risk and responsibility of service delivery with other public organisations, but also with third sector organisations and neighbourhood-level community groups. Communities were certainly having to take more responsibility for delivering their own (formerly public) services, such as play and youth services and the maintenance of parks, sports grounds and streets. Those at the neighbourhood frontline faced tensions and power conflicts in trying to develop workable practice. But we did find that community-based organisations had some room for manoeuvre in developing forms of co-production that were rooted in communities as well as responding to the strictures of funding cuts. One example was time-banking, championed by a deprived community-based organisation in south Cardiff. The approach means that volunteers can exchange equivalent hours of providing a service such as kids’ school holiday activities for other services. The scheme was underpinned by the council offering access to facilities such as swimming pools, but the opportunities to spend credits earned within the community were expanding, indicating potential for it to become self-sustaining (and thus definitively community-led). But it was too early in our research to tell whether attempts to replicate it will be successful.
The city council was also seeking to transfer assets such as libraries and community centres to communities. The frustrations of this process – such as the need for willing community groups to become formalised organisations – showed the need for change in the council’s attitudes to risk. In the words of a Welsh Government officer, government needs to ‘recognise that the cheapest and best way to achieve real things is to spot what people are doing for themselves and support them’.
When the Communities First programme was reshaped in 2011, Cardiff Council innovated by contracting community-based organisations to manage the four deprived neighbourhood ‘clusters’ eligible for programme support. In so doing, the council downloaded risk and offloaded staff costs as the organisations took on responsibility for finance, HR and evaluation – thus becoming hybrid third-public sector organisations. Their staff had to navigate the tensions and dilemmas of implementing a (national) programme, engaging in the (city-wide) strategy overseen by the Cardiff Partnership, and the needs and demands of their communities. Doing this aligned with the demands of austerity, enrolling these community organisations into service delivery in ways that included voluntarism, thus increasing community self-reliance. But we also found, to an extent, that community organisation staff were able to innovate (such as with timebanking) – and in ways that maintained their community-focused mission.
Therefore our Cardiff research shows how the ‘devolution, decentralisation and downloading’ of Peck’s (2012) ‘austerity urbanism’ encourages hybridity at a scalar, organisational and individual level. But our research also reinforces the need to understand local practices to provide insight beyond the dualism of empowerment or incorporation. The Cardiff experience of participatory governance demonstrates the potential for transformative alternatives in the everyday and the small-scale – and also highlights the need for state supports rather than constraints in these processes. In the case of Wales, the need to sustain the work of community anchors should be a priority.
The ‘Transgob’ project analysed the discourse and practice of participatory urban governance under austerity in two British (Cardiff and Leicester) and four Spanish cities. It was funded by the Spanish government’s National Research and Development Plan (reference CSO2012-32817).
Madeleine Pill is Lecturer in Public Policy at the University of Sydney, and Valeria Guarneros-Mesa is Senior Lecturer in Public Policy at De Montfort University, as well as a core member of the Centre for Urban Research on Austerity
In this post Andrés Feandeiro, Steven Griggs and David Howarth report the findings from a second round of research in Nantes, carried out as part of the collaborative governance under austerity project, sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council as part of its Urban Transformations Network.
When endeavouring to describe the style of governance in Nantes, it is commonplace to compare its form of collaboration to the passing game of the city’s famous football team. The team’s so-called ‘jeu à la Nantaise’, in which the ball moves quickly back and forth between players as they move up the field, seemingly fits for many of those key politicians and officials who aspire to encourage and embed citizen and community participation in the city. In the process of forging new urban development projects in Nantes, as one local senior policy planner typically informed us, ‘the ball circulates a lot between different actors, for a project that is a collective one.’ Or in the words of a policy officer, ‘participation: it’s in our DNA!’
In fact, the current Mayor, Johanna Rolland, has made the practices of co-construction and citizen dialogue one of the priorities for her first term in office. The city council has committed itself to renew participatory governance, which promises a ‘constant dialogue’ between local councillors and citizens. Framed in political terms, the commitments of the city council to co-production are best viewed as a response to the multiple crises facing Nantes and other cities in France, Europe and beyond. On the one hand, citizen dialogue is viewed as a means of countering the broader crisis of politics and social exclusion within communities. On the other hand, it is claimed that participation offers a better way of capturing the expertise of citizens as service-users, thus offsetting the deficiencies of traditional models of public service delivery.
But how are we to make sense of such participatory engagements? How does such political rhetoric translate into practice? Who participates, over what issues, and who decides? What, for example, is the representative legitimacy of civil society actors? And how, ultimately, are we to critically characterise the everyday practices of collaborative governance across Nantes? Though these are necessary and crucial questions, which go to the heart of current debates about urban governance and collaboration, especially during conditions of fiscal tightening, our research exhibits the difficulties of answering them. We thus begin by problematizing the complexities of the Nantes model.
Problematizing participation and collaboration
It is worth noting from the outset that such exercises in participatory governance are not without their tensions and contradictions. Nantes seems unable to escape the charges that have dogged attempts to engage citizens and communities across numerous cities, whether they take the form of labelling participation a new mode of incorporation, or as little more than top-down information giving, or ultimately as an exercise in failed representation. Commenting on the analogy of Nantes’ governance with the passing game of its football team, one of our respondents thus suggested that ‘the question asked is: who do you look for when building a team, and when [do] you pass the ball? […] You may pass the ball, but in the final instance you are obliged to follow […] because the project is too advanced.’
Such criticisms were mirrored in other assessments, which characterised neighbourhood forums as an ‘inconsistent [form of] democracy’, which ‘do not change fundamental decisions’, or which ‘too often… put [communities] in front of things’ that have already been decided. It was claimed, for example, that practices of engagement often remained far too concerned with information-giving, thus becoming little more than ‘pedagogy’, that is, ‘an attempt to explain the project.’ And perhaps more importantly, it was argued that such forums were said not to engage with those people most in need, challenging efforts to combat social exclusion; for ‘people who are truly in vulnerable positions are not in the know, or do not keep themselves in the know, or are not free, for these types of things… they do not go to these meetings…’
Indeed, questions were repeatedly asked about the legitimacy of civil society actors involved in participatory forums and their capacity to represent communities across Nantes. Civil society actors were charged with being ‘apolitical’, non-contestatory and deeply embedded in practices of ‘top-down’ urban governance. One neighbourhood officer commented that ‘we don’t invite organizations (such as unions) that we don’t know, but they don’t come knocking on the door either…. The associations involved in citizen’s dialogue are generally socio-cultural (ones) without an advocacy role… there are none which seize on these occasions to re-orientate urban policy.’
Criticisms, messiness and marginal voices
Yet counter-narratives are also evident and have been readily voiced in our encounters across Nantes. Criticisms of the inability of communities to exercise powers of decision-making were repeatedly countered by the value of keeping such powers in the hands of locally elected politicians. The Nantes model clearly embeds decision-making in the hands of locally elected representatives, while downplaying claims for participatory decision-making below those of representative democracy. In other words, councillor or politically-led decision-making is deemed to be no ‘bad thing’ as ‘it is their [local politicians] job after all.’ Indeed, the basis for judgements on the governance of the city quickly shifted ground, moving from input to output forms of legitimacy, validating practices of coproduction with the assertion that in any case ‘most people are happy with what has been done.’
Such judgements bring out the messiness of practices of participation, co-production and the politics of urban collaboration. They contrast the top-down governance of coproduction with the capacity of communities to challenge dominant policy framings and transform such arenas. It was repeatedly argued by key actors that there are no neat readings of such participatory initiatives in Nantes, for ‘each time that you put a debate into the public arena, there are always those people who seize it and manage to construct some counter-power.’ Forms of resistance were thus deemed to be part and parcel of the governance of participatory forums across the city.
But it is difficult to ignore that much of the resistance and challenge to socio-economic crisis and austerity within civil society tend to exist in parallel to the formal participatory apparatus of urban governance. Civil society actors who advance counter-hegemonic, anti-austerity projects have, on the whole, chosen not to engage in the formal structures of citizen dialogue across the city, especially in relation to the crisis of available and affordable housing in the city. Indeed, these actors see little strategic value in investing in such arenas: ‘Because we have a very militant position, they do not want to see us everywhere. There is … a roadblock… We always have this dialogue where they (the city council) do not want to hear certain things. So (the dialogue) becomes completely stuck in these meetings’. At the same time, their legitimacy and ‘political’ motives are questioned by elected representatives and urban policymakers. As one such policy actor explained: ‘you know the people… (and) unfortunately behind (them), there is often a political party or a political opinion or ideologies… So the guy says ‘I’m a citizen’, but in fact behind (him) there is also a political party that expresses itself…’
Characterizing governance in Nantes
What does this mean for the characterisation of the governance of Nantes? In many ways, our field research has encountered the ‘messy realities’, contradictory readings, and ill-fitting narratives that typically characterise urban regimes. Arguably, parallel forms of ‘dialogue’ appear to be one of the defining contradictions of the Nantes model of participation and these idiosyncrasies of urban governance ‘à la Nantaise’. As if to sum up such difficulties, one of our respondents argued resolutely that while community participation across Nantes could not be dismissed as ‘mere communication’ and ‘display’ – it was not ‘just illusion or propaganda!’ He was, however, quick to add that this did not mean that it had ‘the value of an exemplar, as it is often said.’ At least for this respondent, the truth, sat somewhere in the ‘messy’ middle.
Of course, countless interventions have grappled with the dangers of subsumption, or of forcing complex differences across cities into the constraining frameworks of national, city, or even neighbourhood regimes. Urban theory is replete with references to convergence and divergence, spaces of hybridisation and adaptation, and how local traditions mediate national programmes and broader forces. Do we thus conclude, rather simply, that collaborative governance is in a rather ‘messy’ state of flux? Although tempting, such judgements, like those that either summarily dismiss or endorse practices of governance in Nantes, do not get us very far. In fact, they beg a further set of questions. More precisely, our fieldwork has led us to recognise how collaborative governance under austerity requires a careful deconstruction that exposes the tensions and contradictions of the underlying assumptions of the dominant regime across cities, while enabling their critical evaluation and re-inscription.
Put differently, we need to understand the conditions that over time make possible specific hegemonic coalitions across cities like Nantes, as well as the forms of resistance to dominant coalitions and the potential for the construction of ‘counter-powers’. In so doing, we avoid the temptation to squeeze collaborative governance into pre-determined or over-simplistic categories, while foregrounding the situated judgements of researchers engaged in the field. In short, in claiming that collaborative governance in Nantes is ‘messy’ and in a state of flux, further questions have to be raised. Why does the ‘mess’ take this form? And what alternative spaces and prospects for ‘bottom-up’ change does such a ‘moving target’ offer? It is the answers to such questions that will ultimately shed further light on how ‘metropolitisation’, multi-level governance, and political instability in France impact on urban ‘participation’, citizen dialogue and co-production across Nantes.
Andrés Feandeiro is a research assistant on the Collaborative Governance under Austerity project at De Montfort University, Steven Griggs is Professor of Public Policy at De Montfort University and David Howarth is Professor in Social and Political Theory at the University of Essex.
In today’s blog post, Victoria Canning introduces her new book Gendered Harm and Structural Violence in the British Asylum System.
Recognising structural violence is no easy feat. In his seminal essay, Violence, Peace and Peace Research, Johan Galtung argued that, ‘Violence is here defined as the cause of the difference between the potential and the actual, between what could have been and what is’ (1969: 168). This sets up a tricky task as far as research goes: how can we practicably and empirically evidence the difference between the potential and the actual, if we can never know what the potential could have been?
This is precisely what the book Gendered Harm and Structural Violence in the British Asylum System has aimed to do. By drawing together analyses of policy with domestic and international legislation relating to refugee status and torture, alongside the lived experience of women seeking asylum, my research has addressed what is supposed to exist with regard to sanctuary and support, and what actually exists in reality. Using activist participation over a ten year period in the North West of England, alongside scores of interviews, multiple focus groups, and an oral history project, this book challenges the myth that Britain is a broadly ‘friendly’ or supportive environment for people seeking asylum.
Using Social Harm as Social Evidence
As the title suggests, a central argument I am making is that the structural conditions set for people seeking asylum create a harmful environment, and this environment has gendered implications. Hillyard and Tombs argued social harm can be divided into a number of categories – physical harms, emotional harms and economic harms to name but three. As the book argues, these can come in many guises for people seeking asylum and range from a lack of medical or psychological support, specifically for survivors of violence or torture; extreme hunger or malnutrition; or illness induced from poor housing conditions. People seeking asylum receive around £36 per week to buy food, clothes, transport. Every week in a group I work with, women and children seem to arrive worse off – food prices have increased significantly in Britain due to inflation, but welfare allowance remains a pittance. Travel can be a no-go since a bus ticket eats around 2/3rds of the daily allowance, which affects women’s capacity to engage in sexual or domestic violence services. Women regularly walk miles to shop for groceries, prams and children in tow, to make sure their financial scraps can stretch to basics.
For people whose application has been refused and are submitting an appeal and do not receive Legal Aid, this is supposed to cover extortionate legal fees. The most recent quote I have seen for a solicitor to appeal a negative decision was £1600 – around 44 weeks of saving, if you opt out of eating altogether. Whilst this might seem an exaggerated comment to make, it is actually happening – I recently asked a woman awaiting an appeal how she planned to pay her legal fees. She told me, ‘you just eat less’. The alternative option is illegalised and precarious work (people seeking asylum have no right to employment, so are forcibly dependent on state welfare) which, for women, is often sexualised. Housing – one of the biggest problems people face – is usually in the poorest areas of the most deprived cities in the UK (as I have also argued elsewhere). As this book shows quite clearly, xenophobic and Islamophobic abuse is common place and housing conditions range from acceptable to dire, with heating problems, infestation (rats, slugs and cockroaches), and chronic damp being the most common problems research participants faced.
Autonomy harms, relational harms and temporal harms
Whilst these forms of harm are quite visible, they are not all necessarily experiences which are confined to life in asylum. Similar aspects have long been the staple diet of many of the poorest people in the poorest areas of the UK and as Cooper argues, the violent financial decisions taken in the aftermath of the so-called financial crisis have compounded many people’s experiences of hunger, destitution and housing. To consider the peculiarities of asylum, the book expands this lens to include three further harms: autonomy harm, relational harm (see Pemberton) and temporal harm.
Autonomy Harm
The first of these, autonomy harms, affect a person’s self-worth or esteem, and can result from role deprivation and the absence of available opportunities to engage in productive activities. People seeking asylum are structurally limited on what they can do with their lives for the period of time in which they seek asylum. From the offset, people are dispersed to areas of the UK over which they have no choice. Working is legally prohibited, Higher Education is not affordable and the limitations on welfare allowance – half of that of Jobseekers Allowance – means options for most social activities are not actually an option. More insidiously, the threat of detention – a proliferating confinement estate in the UK – or further dispersal hang like a spectre of social control, increasing fear and anxiety amongst people at every Home Office signing.
Relational harm
The second example, relational harms, include enforced exclusion from social relationships, and harms of misrecognition (such as misrepresentations of particular social groups in society, as Pemberton also showed). When women, men or unaccompanied minors leave their countries of origin, many of their relationships and friendships are affected or dissolved completely. Other relational harms are, however, directly the result of policy and practice. Within Britain and the UK more generally, the impact of spatialised controls outlined above is perhaps the most obvious form of relational harm, since the climate of such controls has the capacity to limit an individual’s relationships, friendships or support networks outside of their immediate living vicinity. Relational harms are also strongly connected to emotional harms: support networks, friendships and activist involvement are impeded by some of the many barriers women seeking asylum face and yet each of these can be particularly important for women’s mental and emotional wellbeing. Deportation – a unique aspect of life for immigrants, and one which is central to the control of people seeking asylum – is perhaps the ultimate embodiment of relational harm, holding the potential to pull people from families, networks and communities on a permanent basis.
Temporal Harm
The final focus relates to the impacts of control over time. Applying for asylum the UK can be an incredibly complex and daunting process. At a port or airport, it is deciding to who or where to tell a uniformed guard that you require refugee status, or – if you are in the country already – knowing where to even go. For survivors of sexual or domestic abuse or torture – disproportionality women – add to that the requirement to disclose instances of abuse. To a stranger. The odds can be stacked from the offset. As the diagram below shows (please click on the image to download a larger, clearer file), it can also be an incredibly long process, regularly taking years:
To give an idea of just how long this can take, in one focus group with five women from four countries in 2014, I asked how long each had been awaiting a final asylum decision. One had been in the asylum system since 2013, one since 2012, one since 2009, one since 2010 and one since 2002. That is an accumulation of 24 years of waiting in only one small group.
It is perhaps then the issue of time which is most difficult for people seeking asylum. Years of life can go by – as one woman told me, ‘the best years of my life are gone’ – and what sits in place of autonomy and rights is restriction and unknowing. The terms ‘languish’ and ‘limbo’ can seem over-used in this context, but the fact is that this is how asylum is experienced. Whilst emotional and physical harms might be experienced by broader groups in society, temporal harm can compound such problems for people in the asylum process: physical and mental illnesses are exacerbated by the constant sense of unknowing, and the multiple structural conditions which limit people’s quality of life can also increase feelings of isolation, fear and even suicidality.
It is between the structural conditions of asylum and the lived realities of those facing it that structural violence and social harm therefore join. To draw from the books’ preface by Mary Bosworth, Current policies are not inevitable, nor are they just. They are instead political choices that could be made otherwise.
Victoria Canning is a Lecturer in Criminology at The Open University. At present she is leading an ESRC Future Research Leaders project examining harmful social practices in asylum processes in Britain, Denmark and Sweden. She is an activist in Merseyside, and is also currently working with Migrant Artists Mutual Aid to develop a collaboratively produced book (with women seeking asylum) relating to mutual aid and resistance.
Her new book Gendered Harm and Structural Violence in the British Asylum System, (2017) published by Routledge is available to buy in Hardback or ebook: https://www.routledge.com/Gendered-Harm-and-Structural-Violence-in-the-British-Asylum-System/Canning/p/book/9781138854659
Preview available here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/Books/Gendered-Structural-Violence-Routledge-Citizenship/1138854654/ref=sr_1_2/261-3207680-5391316?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1491289959&sr=1-2
Pierre Hamel, Roger Keil and Grégoire Autin report on findings from a second round of research in Montreal carried out as part of the collaborative governance under austerity project, sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council as part of its Urban Transformations Network.
Montreal is renowned for its social and cultural dynamism. It is an important point to underscore as the city continues to struggle to improve its performance in terms of job creation and support for innovation in a variety of sectors, renewing hope in the improvement of working and living conditions for all citizens. It is necessary to remember that structural problems remain at the scale of the city-region. For example, the system of post-secondary education is less successful than elsewhere in turning out university graduates and Montreal’s labour market continues to struggle to integrate immigrants more than in comparable North American cities, as noted in a report released by the ‘Institut du Québec’ (IQ) in November 2015.
In some respect, a discrepancy has always prevailed within Montreal’s neighbourhoods, at least if we go back to the beginning of the 1960s, between, on the one hand, the dynamism of civil society – and more specifically community and voluntary sector organisations – and, on the other hand, the difficulty of the economy to offer well-paying jobs, especially for retaining new immigrants. Furthermore, this situation is no longer exclusively a major concern for new immigrants. Precarious working conditions have been rising almost in all sectors of activity since the beginning of the new Millennium. Nonetheless, among Canadian metropolitan regions, Montreal remains characterized by the quality of overall living standards due to the low social polarization and reasonable housing affordability.
In that respect, the city is demonstrating a dual character. This is due to a tension between social innovation and efficient economic activity. This challenge is anything but new. To some extent, all metropolitan regions are torn between, on the one hand, favoring adjustments to the international market place through, for example, promoting competitive clusters, and on the other, sustaining social solidarity. While those two strategies do not necessarily need to be incompatible, in capitalist economies they mostly are. What can a city do to overcome those contradictions? The answer can be found in local culture and political choices made by the local state and civil society alike.
Like in other urban jurisdictions in this research project and beyond, austerity has been on the agenda in Montreal. But, as we noted in our earlier blog post hard austerity policies have traditionally not been favoured by governments of the city, the province of Quebec and the recent federal government of Canada. Still there is repeated reference to rigeur in the policy landscape, the French term most often used when referring to austerity measures at all levels of government. The overall social consequences of austerity policies remain difficult to assess. But a large consensus prevails among the respondents to our investigation that those policies have been affecting the most vulnerable population groups. In this respect, an ambiguity exists regarding the time period of reference.
Since their return to power at the provincial level, the Liberals adopted a series of austerity measures in order to reduce the Quebec public debt, the most significant one among Canadian provinces after Newfoundland and Labrador. This has been used as a the main rationale by Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard, elected in April 2014, to go forward with drastic measures: cutting expenses in health care and education systems, welfare programs and salaries of government employees. Severe damages in service provision in those areas for some specific social groups have resulted from that. The children living in deprived areas and/or in need of specific educational support, poor people waiting for access to social housing, or recipients of social assistance are among the groups who have been the most affected by those measures.
This said, austerity policies are not an invention created by Premier Couillard in 2014. As a number of our respondents mentioned, this goes back to the Fordist crisis of the 1970s and its repercussion on welfare policies. From this moment onwards, the social compromise between economic elites and workers as managed by the state was put aside. In its place, social policies were managed increasingly through contracts with the private sector and/or community-based groups.
In that respect, above all, austerity has become a public issue that necessarily involves a rebalancing of relations between the various internal components of the state, and new relations between state and society. From a sociological perspective, the question of social cohesion is expressed in different terms compared to the Fordist era. As public action gains legitimacy from expertise, and proposes diverse partnership mechanisms for managing public services, the democratic deficit is growing. Henceforth, solidarity among citizens cannot rely exclusively on a blind faith in state capacity to manage solidarity and reduce inequalities. Democratic crisis and the legitimacy deficit of the state (at all levels) are necessarily on the agenda again.
This is why the coalition ‘Main rouge’ – opposed to pricing and privatisation of public services – supported by several groups active in the community sector but also by some trade unions, student and women movements, organized rallies to oppose the Couillard’s government austerity policies. In November 2016, 1200 community groups even organized a two day strike in order to contest the chronic underfunding of their activities while serving a continuously increasing clientele..
Building a coalition against policies and programs managed by the state has proved to be a difficult task in Montreal for two reasons. First, the vast majority of community groups continue to rely mainly on the state for financing their internal operations. For that matter, mobilization against the state cannot be taken for granted. In addition, when governmental specific resources are available for dedicated projects, a competition over subsidies can occur among groups. Second, the collaboration between the community sector and the trade union world is not self evident. This is not new, of course. The objectives of those two categories of actors are not always on the same page. Sometimes, it can be the case – one can recall, for example, the political project of the trade union left in the 1960s and 1970s in Quebec when, among other things, political action around urban and municipal issues was encouraged and supported by major labour federations in the Montreal region. But divergent interests also exist. In the past, as it is still the case nowadays, the community sector is concerned about the most vulnerable populations that are confronted with social exclusion, which is normally not the case for the members of trade unions. Constructing a politics of solidarity is difficult under these circumstances.
In regards to the crisis of democracy and the definition of new paths for overcoming this crisis, fighting against poverty and exclusion remains a central issue in OECD countries. For that matter, initiatives coming from civil society provided a source of innovation and a played a forerunner role in coping with a lack of social cohesion. The case of Community Development Corporations (CDCs) is a good example. At the beginning of the 1980s, these corporations were introduced by community-based groups in Montreal’s old working class neighborhoods in response to de-industrialising processes underway since the 1970s. Not only did these actors promote a social vision of economic and urban development, they also defended an integrated vision of the urban, so to speak, a vision that can be associated with the idea of a just city or with the spirit of the urban as conceived by Henri Lefebvre. On the terrain of Montreal neighborhoods, what they have achieved has paved the way for the project of social economy (Chantier de l’économie sociale) launched by the Quebec government through the Chantier de l’économie et de l’emploi in 1995. The activities underway with the Neighborhood Tables as well as the experiments with local programs of urban revitalisation (Revitalisation Urbaine Intégrée) initiated by the municipal administration in cooperation with community groups are also indebted to their action.
However, if these initiatives are welcome for overcoming sectoral biases ingrained in traditional governmental programs, their visibility and the support received by the state remain very weak. They are lacking resources and institutional support to cope with the contradictions underneath social and economic exclusion.
In Montreal, the picture of socioeonomic poverty is far from the key element when we are trying to grasp the city image. Nonetheless, social movements and community actors cannot forget that dimension. As they mobilised against the neo-liberal vision of social policies management, or struggled over economic and social issues, they explored new avenues for building social solidarity. Without all the answers to improve the living conditions of the general population, they revealed however being essential stakeholders. In many ways, fighting against austerity measures was also an occasion for exploring a new approach in defining social solidarity.
Pierre Hamel is Professor of Sociology at the Université de Montréal; Roger Keil is Professor and York Chair in Global Sub/Urban Studies at York University, Toronto; and Gregoire Autin is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the Université de Montréal.
Since mid-2000s theories of network governance in public policy have been criticised for overlooking power relations and conflict in everyday practice. The workshop seeks to build upon these criticisms through the discussion on urban/peri-urban infrastructures. This topic is timely as several world regions are facing continuous pressure generated from clashes between global capitalism and the environment across urban and quasi-urban localities and which involve continuous relationships between state and non-state actors throughout several stages of the policymaking process. However, local specificities have rendered these relationships diverse despite the first impressions of similarity that global contextual factors portray.
Building upon debates from an interdisciplinary perspective (public policy, geography, anthropology, law, sociology), the discussion of the workshop will depart from a methodological framework that touches upon issues on participation and human rights, conflict, social movements, expertise-depoliticization and the role of the state. The workshop aims to bring together academics who study these topics in Latin America and Europe.
The workshop has two main objectives, to:
The workshop’s speakers aim to create a novel dialogue based not on the comparison of similarity but on the potential learning from comparing difference. Some questions which may be guiding discussion are:
To book a place please contact Valeria Guarneros-Meza valeria.guarneros@dmu.ac.uk by 1 May 2017. Catering will be provided on both days.
| WORKSHOP PROGRAMME | |
| Thursday 11th May | Location: Hugh Aston 2.32 & 2.33, DMU |
| 2.30pm – 2.45pm | Welcome/Registration
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| 2.45pm – 4.45pm | Session 1: Knowledge creation and infrastructures |
| Discursive constructions of noise and air: the environmental politics of airport expansion in France and the UK Prof. David Howarth (University of Essex) and Prof. Stephen Griggs (De Montfort University) | |
| Energy landscapes in peri-urban areas: notes on Concepción, Chile Dr. Vanesa Castán Broto (University College London)
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| 4.45pm – 5.30 | Wine reception |
| Friday 12th May | Location: Hugh Aston 2.32 & 2.33, DMU |
| 9.30am – 11.00am | Session 2: Re-politicisation and citizen participation in urban infrastructures |
| Re-politicisation and civil society expertise in the UK’s high speed rail megaproject, HS2 Dr Dan Durrant (University College London) | |
| Impact of citizen participation on drinking water and basic sanitation governance and management: Regional Analysis of Four Case Studies in Latin America Dr Ernesto Isunza Vera (CIESAS-Mexico/Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona) | |
| 11:.30am – 1.00pm | Session 3: Disobedience, conflict and violence (Chair: TBC) |
| Performing democratic engagement in climate disobedience actions in Europe Dr. Graeme Hays (Aston University) | |
| Conversing with Goliath: Participation, mobilisation and repression in neo-extractivist infrastructures, Mexico Dr.Gisela Zaremberg and team (Facultad Lationoamericana de Ciensas Sociales, Mexico) | |
| 1.00pm – 2.00pm | Lunch |
On Wednesday 3rd May 2017, the Centre for Urban Research on Austerity will be hosting a public roundtable entitled ‘From Protest to Resistance: Fighting Back in Hard Times’. This builds on our successful workshop last year – ‘Resistance and Alternatives to Austerity’ – bringing together speakers and contributors to our forthcoming volume, From Protest to Resistance: Fighting Back in Hard Times, with Rowman and Littlefield International.
There is a seemingly unstoppable consolidation of austerity, intensification of surveillance and exploitation at work, and creeping authoritarianism in Europe, the Americas, and Asia. In this roundtable, we observe new, radical forms of mobilisation directly confronting these new trends. It will bring together research from across a range of sites and spaces, including workplace occupations in Argentina and Spain, grassroots mobilisation in the UK and Ireland, migrant workers in trade unions in France and Italy, and new spaces of digital and virtual work. The aim is to draw out possible links across this range of sites, to identify the innovations emerging from a range of ostensibly ‘new’ actors and movements, and to ask what can be learned collectively from these diverse practices of protest and resistance.
Focusing on local, micro-level, and often hidden forms of resistance, this roundtable is an attempt to understand and to show how the new actors, sites, and struggles of resistance we have identified are central to constructing not only new ways of organising and of mobilising, but also of surviving and creating new ways of living in the face of what we identify as these ‘hard times’. In exploring new forms of workplace resistance and alternative workplace organisation, the role of migrant workers in resisting their exploitation, the significance of new and innovative forms of digitalised resistance, and alternative forms of grassroots mobilisation, our contributors aim to place the agency of the marginalised and the actions of the oppressed at the forefront of understanding the (re)construction of the world around us.
The roundtable will be held in Hugh Aston 3.95 from 14.00 – 17.00 and speakers include: Lisa McKenzie (LSE), David Bailey (Birmingham), Saori Shibata (Leiden), Nicholas Kiersey (Ohio), Phoebe Moore (Middlesex), Sylvie Contrepois (London Met); Rossana Cillo (Venice), Adam Fishwick (DMU), Heather Connolly (DMU)
All welcome please register in advance with Nisha Solanki (nisha.solanki@dmu.ac.uk).
For more information contact Dr Adam Fishwick (adam.fishwick@dmu.ac.uk) or Dr Heather Connolly (hconnolly@dmu.ac.uk).