urban studies

Austerity Urbanism – Scotland Style?

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In today’s post Annette Hastings discusses ‘austerity urbanism’ in the Scottish context.

It’s hard to counter the view that contemporary austerity is being realised to a large extent in and through what is happening in cities. Jamie Peck developed the ‘austerity urbanism’ thesis to explain the dimensions and significance of austerity in US cities. He argued – in a nutshell – that in the US some of the worst impacts of austerity were targeted on city governments and that, by targeting cities, austerity was effectively being targeted on the most vulnerable. Recent research suggests that the thesis developed for the US, holds for England. It confirms that the unprecedented cuts to local government budgets have impacted most heavily on poor cities. It also suggests that despite the intention of many city governments to shelter the poor and marginalised from the worst effects of austerity cuts, that cuts were beginning to harm the services relied on these groups – such as housing, social care, social work and advice services. The work also showed that it was poorer people and places that suffered more when cuts were made to the ‘universal’ services used by the broader population such as libraries, leisure centres and street cleansing.

But does austerity urbanism hold in Scotland? To the same degree? In the same kind of ways? Anti-austerity rhetoric and a sense of resistance is palpable in Scotland. It comes from politicians, from urban managers, from the mainstream media and from citizens and civil society. But does this lead to a distinctive austerity urbanism – Scotland style?  Some differences do stand out.

The Scottish Government has had less of a tendency than its Westminster counterpart to try to protect some public services while sacrificing others to the worst of austerity cuts. So whereas in England, local government has been subjected to much higher rates of cut than some other services such as Health, giving flesh to the austerity urbanism thesis, in Scotland cuts have been shared more equally across public services. While Scottish councils have experienced  big reductions in what they have to spend on key services – an 11% real terms reduction between 2011 and 2015  (which equates to about £100 per head of population) –  this is not as severe a picture as in England, where the reduction was on average about twice as big. However, this sense of protection in Scottish local government relative to England has now come to an end, with a much more severe local government settlement in place for the current financial year – with Glasgow City Council, for example,  facing a real terms cut of over £63million, and Edinburgh and other urban councils implementing cuts of £30million and more.

The targeting of poor cities for grant cuts has not been as stark in Scotland as in England either. Poorer councils have lost a little bit more than better off ones and, like England, there is a post-industrial and urban skew to cuts, but in Scotland these patterns are more to do with population loss than the policy design. It is important to note though that historically in Scotland, the deprivation premium built into the local government finance system to compensate more disadvantaged councils for higher levels of need was historically less generous in Scotland than in England. That situation has been reversed since the onset of austerity.

But despite these differences, it is also clear is that austerity in Scotland has been harsher than it needed to be. Since 1999, the Scottish Parliament has had the power to vary the rate of income tax by 3p in the pound – a power which has never been used despite the anti-austerity rhetoric of successive Scottish Governments. Moreover, a new Scottish Rate of Income Tax has been in place since April 2016, giving the Scottish Parliament even more capacity to vary levels of income tax. In early 2016, the SNP Government proposed (and had agreed) a Budget in which a clear commitment not to vary income tax levels was made, a position maintained in their Party’s manifesto in the recent May 2016 Scottish Parliamentary elections.  And the ‘winners’ of these elections, the SNP alongside a resurgent Scottish Conservative Party, stood alone amongst mainstream parties during the election campaign in that they did not argue for increased personal tax rates to ‘pay for public services’ . This would suggest that it is not only in Scottish polity that the desire to counter austerity agendas with increased taxation is controversial, but that this agenda is also controversial with the Scottish public.

So yes, we can perhaps detect some ‘Scottish style’ aspects of austerity urbanism, but the extent to which these differences are durable and more than rhetorical is debatable.

Annette Hastings is Professor of Urban Studies at the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow

Governing Austerity in Athens

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In today’s post our colleagues Ioannis Chorianopoulos and Naya Tselepi report the findings from the exploratory research in Athens, 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, and led by Prof. Jonathan Davies.

Local authorities in Greece have limited collaborative governance experience, despite persisting national authority attempts towards this direction during the last three decades (Chorianopoulos, 2012).  A legacy of authoritarian administration for the most part of the twentieth century and clientelistic politics since return to democracy (1974), arrested the development of local relational dynamics, shaping instead a centralized governance mode heavily dependent on the national level.  More recently, formal collaborative responsibilities in EU Structural Funds were met by local authorities halfheartedly.  Regulations were followed to the letter in order to avoid penalties but collaboration was largely symbolic, consisting of roundtables in which local socio-economic groups and organisations were consulted to provide their informed consent to municipal proposals.  Examples of more dynamic collaborative stances did surface, but they were treated in the literature as contextually defined responses, challenging a centralized type of administration.  It is in this frame that the City of Athens was approached in an attempt to explore the traits of collaboration, this time in austerian conditions.

Meanwhile, the latest local authority Act (2010) attempted to infuse a collaborative logic to local affairs by obliging municipalities to set up new participatory platforms, and by widening their degree of discretion to launch partnership schemes with local businesses and civil society groups.  Our initial “access point” to the research field was the “Deliberation Committee”, a mandatory collaborative governance initiative foreseen in the local authority Act.  Concurrently, we also investigated municipal mobilization in other policy areas, as it was becoming known that the City Hall is actively initiating collaborative schemes.   As preliminary research suggests, mandatory schemes followed the pre-austerity route of rubber stamping City Hall plans.  The volume and the traits of collaborative schemes launched by the municipality on its own initiative, however, defied expectations.  The gravity of the sovereign debt crisis and the impact of concomitant austerity measures on municipal finances and local socio-economic realities were key to this development.

Austerity and social need

Contractionary fiscal policy preoccupations shifted the attention of the national authorities to the local level, seen as a tier capable of absorbing a share of cuts to public spending.  Faced with reduced central government grants and real falls in tax revenues, the municipality was forced to reduce its budget by over 20 per cent since the onset of austerity (see Figure 1).

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Figure 1: City of Athens: Overall Budget by Fiscal Year (2010-2016). Source: (City of Athens, 2016)

Meanwhile, the share of Athenians whose equivalent disposable income fell below the poverty threshold has more than doubled, reaching 26,1 per cent, while a further 8,1 per cent of the population experienced severe material deprivation.  Consequently, the latest census results registered a 16,9 per cent decrease of the city’s total population, amounting to a decline of 133.336 people due to falling birth rates and almost no net immigration.  The steep rise in municipal unemployment and poverty figures, and the clearly defined population decline trend, suggests that it is in the city that “austerity bites” (Peck, 2012).

Collaborative shift

The City of Athens responded to austerity-stemming impasses via the launch of collaborative governance initiatives.  Prominent examples of such schemes include, amongst others:

  • Rethink and Reactivate, a physical intervention project in the city centre, organized and funded by the Onassis Public Benefit Foundation.
  • INNOVATHENS, a public-private consortium that supports start-ups in the tech sector, engaging six associations of IT firms and co-funded Samsung.
  • Resilience, an attempt to define and address the key challenges the city is facing, guided by 100RC – a Rockefeller urban network.
  • synAthina, a new municipal unit facilitating community groups to implement and communicate their activities, funded by “Bloomberg Philanthropies”.
  • Solidarity Hub, a social assistance centre for 8000 registered people that face severe poverty problems. The scheme is funded by EEA grants, obliging City Hall to collaborate with NGOs.

The repositioning of the local governance centre of gravity towards collaborative grounds underscores a profound departure from the pre-austerity stance of centralized administration and limited policy-making interaction with the market and civil society.  Currently, almost all municipal policy areas engage sponsors, donors and partner groups, including community groups and activists.  In the social policy field, in particular, the City of Athens endorsed an overtly “enabling” role, facilitating NGOs to pursuit funding opportunities on its behalf.  As a result, social policy goals for the 2015-2019 period were fashioned on an ad hoc basis and appear in the respective blueprint underscored by the “subject to funding availability” annotation (City of Athens, 2015: 5).

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Food bags awaiting claimant citizens in the “solidarity hub”.

Informal collaborative vehicles and adversarial stances

Our next goal in this attempt to approach the changing matrices of  Athenian urban politics, will be to map and investigate key examples from the variety of grassroots collaborative initiatives that have sprung up in the city during the last years.  Cases in point include the large number of complementary currency systems and time banks, social pharmacies, medical centers, soup kitchens and farmers’ markets, all organized at neighborhood level by spontaneously formed solidarity groups.  It is the perceptions of austerity and collaboration of activists participating in this movement that we aim to explore.  Their degree of engagement in the corresponding municipal programmes, and their views on the collaborative example pursuit by the City will also be examined.  Municipality respondents reflected eloquently on this issue:

“I mean, you have the top down kind of consultation that most countries like the UK have gotten really good at doing.  So they know how to talk and they also have a strong civil society. Which we didn’t have. But then […] what you have here is bottom up collaboration.  You know what I mean? In a network kind of way. …this is the new organizing pattern. Right? … but there is no conversation with the top.  And the question is; does there need to be conversation with the top?” (Athens-UP2-F).

Dr Ioannis Chorianopoulos is Associate Professor and Naya Tselepi a PhD candidate at the Department of Geography at the University of the Aegean.

Barcelona: Crisis Austerity and Socio-Political Change

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This post summarizes the main findings of the case study of Barcelona from the collaborative governance under austerity project, sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council as part of its Urban Transformations Network, and led by Prof. Jonathan Davies. The case study was led by Ismael Blanco with help from Helena Cruz and Yunailis Salazar (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona).

The case of Barcelona is particularly interesting in the context of a study that interrogates transformations in the forms of relationship between the local state and civil society during crises. The interest of this case study lies, on one hand, in the strength of the participatory and collaborative tradition of Barcelona, which dates back to the early years of democracy (1980s). In this sense, it is interesting to analyse the extent to which this tradition constrains and conditions the possibilities of institutional change in the politics of urban governance, neutralising the effects of a crisis that has been particularly severe. On the other hand, Barcelona has become particularly important  since the local elections of May 2015, which led to the formation of a new radical-left government led by the Mayor Ada Colau, former leader of the social movement against housing evictions in Spain. In this context, Barcelona illustrates the strength of social mobilisation against austerity in Spain and the strategy of a significant part of this movement to occupy the institutional arena, generating profound changes in local and national politics. Our future research will be particularly concerned with how far a radical government can alter the power relations between the public, the private and the community sectors, enlarging the opportunities for citizens’ direct participation and overcoming the injustices of austerity.

The impacts of the crisis in the city of Barcelona have been intense in terms of unemployment, poverty and foreclosures. Such impacts have been distributed unevenly between different groups and urban areas, creating a more polarized social and spatial structure. The socio-spatial inequalities in the city have grown significantly since the outbreak of the crisis, reversing a sustained trend of inequality reduction since the 1980s. The intensity of the socio-spatial crisis stands in stark contrast with the good health of municipal public finances. The last municipal budgets of 2015, for example, closed with a surplus of 100 million euros – the textbook neoliberal budgeting strategy.  As part of the national austerity drive, Spain has witnessed as strong tendency for the  re-centralization of political power with serious consequences for both local (and regional) autonomy – for example deficit budgeting was prohibited in 2011.  However, the institutional capacity of the City Council of Barcelona remains relatively high thanks to the strength of municipal finances and the special powers conceded by the Municipal Charter of 1999. Such Charter, for example, allows the City Council of Barcelona to intervene in policy fields like housing, education and health through public consortia composed of the regional and the local government.

In analysing the role of collaborative governance in addressing the socioeconomic crisis, we must recall that participation and public-private and public-community collaboration have had a very important role in Barcelona since the 1980s. Collaborative governance in Barcelona precedes the “collaborative moment” observed in different parts of the world during the economic boom of the 1990s and early 2000s. Apart from various forms of public-private partnership such as joint ventures, structures of participation and public-community collaboration in Barcelona have been gradually built up, first under the 1986 Rules of Functioning of Districts and Citizen Participation and later under the Rules of Citizen Participation of 2003. It has contributed to developing a strong culture of inter-sectoral collaboration and a wide range of formal rules and institutions consolidated by the passage of time and the interests and habits they have generated.

Institutional path dependency in the field of collaborative governance in Barcelona is strong, as could be observed during the only period of conservative government the city has known in recent times (2011-2015). While the new government tended to be very critical of the participation model established under the leadership of the Socialist Party of Catalonia, changes in the formal architecture of participation in the city were minimal. Informal changes were more subtle, encompassing strategies such as residualisation of existing mechanisms, institutional layering  by creating mechanisms that overlap pre-existing ones , and the adoption of a  narrative influenced by neoliberalism around notions such as open government, social co-responsibility and social innovation. Some of our respondents thought that under this government there was a deep, though subtle, weakening of participation and incremental social welfare privatisation.

The 2011-2015 mandate coincided with a period of resurgence of social movements and alternative social practices in the city (and across Spain) stimulated by the outbreak of the 15M indignados movement. The 15M movement emerged spontaneously in different cities in the spring of 2011, although its origins were linked to the activity of previous movements like Real Democracy Now!, Youth Without Future, and the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages. The 15M also overlapped with a set of sectoral mobilisations (Mareas) fighting austerity in areas such as education, health and culture. The anti-austerity movement has retained great vitality in Spain, and polls indicate strong growth in the levels of interest and political participation among citizens. The de-centralized and urbanized structure of the 15M amid the growing disaffection of citizens with political and dominant economic institutions has favoured the emergence of a multitude of alternative social practices such as time banks, agro-ecological consumption cooperatives, ethical banking and urban gardens. Such practices – which experienced a strong growth since 2011 – have been particularly strong in Barcelona, ​​connecting with the cooperative and self-management traditions that existed in the city throughout the twentieth century.  A key lesson from our study is that the national anti-austerity movement is an urban movement, built in cities and neighbourhoods and rooted in longstanding urban traditions of organising and cooperation.

Barcelona en Comú – previously called Guanyem Barcelona – is an electoral alliance born in 2014 out of the confluence of anti-austerity social movements, alternative social practices, left-wing parties (such as ICV and United Left) and emerging political forces (like Podemos and Equo). The formation of this coalition stimulated a multitude of alternative candidacies at the May 2015 elections in Spain. The so-called “change candidacies” took office in 4 of the 5 largest cities in Spain (Madrid, Barcelona, ​​Zaragoza and Valencia) – as well as in many other small and middle-size cities with regional importance such as La Coruna in Galicia and Cadiz in Andalusia. The case of Barcelona is especially significant, as the new Mayor Ada Colau is not only the first woman to govern this city, but had a significant political role as the leader of the main organization of the anti-housing evictions movement in Spain (La PAH).

Our exploratory research shows that the new government has a strong commitment to radical change in the model of participation and collaboration between the public, private and community sectors in the city. One of the key ideas that it intends to promote is a form of co-production linked to the ‘commons’ (that inspires the name of Barcelona en Comú) and social innovation. Under Colau, the meaning of “social innovation” has shifted from entrepreneurship and takes a more radical meaning, linked to the ambition of transforming power relationships through community action. The notion of co-production involves, according to some respondents, taking a step beyond citizen participation towards generating more horizontal relationships between public institutions and citizens, increasing citizen empowerment and enabling citizens to take over the management of goods and services.

It is still too early to assess the accomplishments and limitations of the new government, though the evidence collected in this exploratory phase points to a significant continuity in the formal structures of participation after one year – perhaps due to institutional path dependency (by which we mean the constraining influence of past decisions, practices and actions) and the minority position of the new government, which faces significant challenges in getting its agenda and financial proposals approved by the City Council.

During the next phase, we will focus on analysing changes in the relationships between local political institutions and civil society in four key areas: the formal structures of consultation and participation (like neighbourhood councils); spaces of deliberative democracy (like the participative process for the elaboration of the Municipal Action Plan); community management practices (such as community management of public urban plots and disused buildings); and policy co-production (covering both pre-existing and emerging practices). A key question is whether the new government is able to undertake radical institutional change, despite barriers such as “path dependency”, institutional resistance, corporate and neoliberal opposition and the lack of a formal majority in the council.

Dr Ismael Blanco is Lecturer at the Department of Political Science and Public Law and Research Fellow at the Institute of Government and Public Policy (IGOP) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB)

 

Governing Austerity in Leicester

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This post outlines the main findings from the first round of research carried out by Prof. Jonathan Davies and Dr. Adrian Bua in Leicester as part of the collaborative governance under austerity project sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council as part of its Urban Transformations Network. It will be followed by a further seven publications relating to the comparator cities of Athens, Baltimore, Barcelona, Dublin, Melbourne, Montreal and Nantes.

Leicester has experienced several waves of industrial decline and restructuring over the past 40 years, leaving it with high long-term unemployment and income poverty. The crisis of 2008 and ensuing national austerity regime intensified these problems.  In 2013, ONS statistics suggested that gross disposable household income in Leicester was the lowest in the UK.  In-work poverty persists at very high levels with full-time workers earning less than 80% of the national average.  These conditions mean that many citizens rely on public welfare. However, our research suggests that benefit cuts, continuing policy reforms and the government’s sanctioning regime have hit the city very hard in the eight years since the crash, leaving many unable to meet their basic needs, and eroding the social fabric that people depend upon to participate effectively in social, political and economic life.

In this project, we are looking at different ways in which austerity is governed and contested.  Who gets to have a say and how?  The national context is that despite George Osborne’s “localism” agenda, English cities still have little financial room for manoeuvre – deficit budgeting has long been illegal and the power to levy taxes is minimal. Since the 1980s, UK authorities have largely avoided confrontation with government. One councillor quoted in the Leicester Mercury commented on the implications for austerity: “we are not happy making cuts but we cannot set an illegal deficit budget. If we do Eric Pickles will simply come in and take over the running of the council”.  This comment captures Leicester’s approach, which we call “austerity realism”.  By austerity realism, we mean that the city applies cuts regretfully, but diligently, because policy makers cannot see any alternative..

Leicester City Council estimated last year that by 2019, it would have lost some 50% of its budget over a decade. Its goal is to manage down demand for services and mitigate the impact of austerity for those worst affected, while trying to avoid dramatic headlines and conflicts with central government.  Anti-austerity activists have mixed views about this strategy. They mostly accept that it is impractical for local authorities to defy Westminster and set expansionary anti-austerity budgets, but argue that there is room for manoeuvre.  One commented on twitter in response to a CURA blog on localism, that Leicester City Council could agitate against austerity and plough reserves into sustaining services – ideally as part of a concerted national strategy of municipal resistance.

As we explained in the project overview blog, our exploratory research focused on the relevance of the “collaborative moment” for austerity governance, the idea that networks sustained through trust could be a new and exciting way of governing complex problems, ushering in a new era of empowered participatory democracy.  In Leicester, many respondents see working in partnership with others as good sense, but without any idealism.  As one VSO respondent put it, “the only way to compete is to collaborate”.  Collaboration was seen as a functional and practical tool for austerity management, and some respondents thought austerity had made collaborating easier by concentrating minds.  On the other hand, attitudes to collaboration were strongly influenced by austerity realism, lacking any optimism about the potential in networks for democratic revitalisation and social flourishing.  In practical terms, this means that while public engagement is a high priority for public authorities in Leicester, many of our respondents think that participatory governance is a pale shadow of the New Labour years – a period for which there was some nostalgia.

Within this broad ethos of austerity realism, we see four basic tactics and strategies: amelioration, rationalisation, co-production and development.  We explain each and highlight associated dangers and criticisms.  We conclude by looking at what the research suggests about the vexed problem of how to resist and exit austerity.

Amelioration: The Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) exercises a formidable grip on the lives of benefit claimants in Leicester under a regime that regulates, disciplines and punishes – what academics call “workfare”.  Those who fail to meet stringent work-search targets receive a “sanction”, which means a punitive cut in benefits.  While sanctioning has eased in the past year, it has affected many thousands of people in Leicester. National research shows that the workfare regime causes widespread destitution.  In Leicester, agencies from the statutory and voluntary sectors aim to pick up the pieces.  The capacity of public and voluntary organisations to work in partnership is seen as vital for plugging the gaps through advice and emergency payments. One danger is that while these networks do good work, they are under the constant and growing stress of having to do more with less.  With further cuts ahead, a priority for us is to explore whether the system of advice, discretionary and emergency payments will remain sustainable without either further rationing or a dramatic improvement in the local jobs economy.

However, our research draws particular attention to the “invisible” effects of destitution.  We know anecdotally that the welfare regime drives some people “off grid”. Young claimants in particular are prone to giving up on the benefits system, at which point they disappear from official records.  The numbers are unknown, and nor is there much evidence of what happens to them beyond the demand for emergency payments and food parcels. Do they fall back on family; do they find formal or informal work of some kind, resort to crime, or migrate out of the city?  Respondents suggested that some affected groups find support in family and friendship networks, while others – particularly in traditional working class neighbourhoods – lack those resources and are disproportionately affected. The critical question moving forward is whether communities in Leicester and across the UK can continue absorbing the costs of destitution and disappearance. Or, will a breaking point come, making the crisis “visible” once more in the form of angry protests?

Rationalisation: some critics of austerity nevertheless concede that the public sector could be leaner and work “smarter”, as one respondent put it, even after decades of efficiency measures.  The view is that rationalising services and delivering them in partnership is a way of implementing austerity while minimising cuts to the front-line. However, we heard from front-line workers in both the statutory and voluntary sectors that restructuring reduces the time they have to work with communities. Moreover, some respondents were critical of the rationalisation discourse, pointing to the impact of cuts on the front-line.  Debate about the city’s approach to homelessness exemplified the difference between those who believe reorienting the service from provision to prevention can deliver services more effectively, and others who think it hits client groups hard.  The message is that efficiency savings do not absorb the full impact of austerity.

Co-production is the idea that citizens and community organisations can run public services, with support from public agencies. This agenda is popular with organisations wanting to promote the “commons” – the expansion of “social” goods beyond the state and the market.  Leicester recently agreed a first-wave of asset transfers under the Transforming Neighbourhood Services programme. Facilities are leased to community groups on condition that they continue to provide for all.  A danger is that community groups have little time or expertise for facilities management and that such arrangements will not prove sustainable. More broadly, cash-starved community organisations have fewer opportunities to win ever-bigger government contracts and grants are now exceptionally scarce. Local voluntary organisations must form consortia to stand any chance of competing with outside bodies – big charities and corporations often with little or no connection with Leicester.  The danger for advocates of “commoning” is that austerity erodes the fabric of local civil society and “co-production” becomes a figleaf for privatisation instead of a vehicle for empowerment.

Development and growth:  Most of our respondents see Leicester as a city “on the up”, buoyed by a cultural and sporting renaissance and the proud heritage of multi-culturalism.  The role of the Mayoral system adopted in 2011 and the leadership style of the Mayor himself, were often cited as explanations for the renewed focus on urban development.  As in many cities, growth, investment and job-creation are seen as the only viable solutions to Leicester’s poverty and unemployment. But, this is not a win-win option for everyone.  The concern among critics of the Mayor’s approach is that if the city does achieve an economic renaissance, those in deprived areas will not benefit and become further marginalised.  Moreover, getting the right kind of employer into the city will remain a huge challenge, even in an improved investment climate.  Leicester needs many thousands of good quality jobs. International literatures suggest that urban “boosterism” rarely delivers for those most severely hit by austerity and neoliberalism.  Building a socially just city through economic competitiveness would require Leicester to buck this powerful trend.

Viewed in an international context, especially our comparator cities of Athens and Barcelona, resistance to austerity has been very muted – certainly since the brief national upsurge of spring 2011.  There have been lively anti-austerity protests in Leicester, with unions playing an important role alongside local campaigns against national welfare reform and local cuts to hostels and community centres.  However, no durable anti-austerity movement has yet emerged on any scale in Leicester, or in the UK.  The research points to multiple inter-related explanations, including lost traditions of struggle linked to the legacies of industrial and trade union decline.  Another possibility is that low mortgage rates and low inflation afforded some protection against stagnating incomes for those in stable employment, muting protest and isolating people trapped in the workfare regime.

Austerity has a seemingly vice-like grip on England and it is not easy to see beyond it. At the same time, several respondents mentioned Jeremy Corbyn’s election to the Labour leadership as a weathervane of change and foresaw potential tipping points ahead.  The next phase of our research will look in more depth at how different actors in cities govern and organise around crises and social change. In Leicester, we hope to extend our study to explore the impact of austerity on the governance of migration and multi-culturalism, neighbourhood services, local economic development and adult social care and health.

Professor Jonathan Davies is Director of CURA and principal investigator on the collaborative governance under austerity (CGA) project, Dr. Adrian Bua is a core member of CURA and research assistant on CGA.

How is Austerity Governed in Cities? Our First Reflections on International Findings

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We are pleased to launch a series of 8 further publications outlining the findings from exploratory research the 8 case study cities – Athens, Baltimore, Barcelona, Dublin, Leicester, Melbourne, Montreal, Nantes and Sydney – of the collaborative governance under austerity project, sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council as part of its Urban Transformations Network. In this initial post, Professor Jonathan Davies provides an overview of the emergent findings from exploratory research across the 8 cases.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, intellectuals, policy makers and activists all became enthused by networks.  They reasoned that at a time of greater prosperity than ever before, conflicts along the lines of class, race and gender could be broken down and a social consensus sustained through trust. Networking could coordinate a public sector fragmented by new public management and foster partnerships across state, market and civil society.  For the most idealistic thinkers, it could transcend social cleavages and usher in a revitalised participatory democracy, overcoming the limitations of market competition and government hierarchies. We use the term “collaborative moment” to capture this wave of excitement about networks, which emerged in the aftermath of communism and waves of neoliberal restructuring.

Is the collaborative moment still with us? The first phase of our research explored this question in eight cities – Athens, Baltimore, Barcelona, Dublin, Leicester, Melbourne, Montreal and Nantes.  We were particularly interested in whether it influences governing philosophies and practices after the 2008 crash, a conjuncture in which many cities face degrees of austerity budgeting with public service and welfare cuts, spiralling fees and charges, privatisation, foreclosures and severe unemployment and poverty. Over the next few weeks, we will post blogs from each of the research teams telling the story of their city, so far. The following paragraphs highlight some key messages.

First, it is clear that austerity bites very unevenly in time and place.  The perceived economic and political significance of the 2008 crisis varies widely. It has far greater impact in European cities than in Baltimore, Melbourne or Montreal. And, while 2008 was a crucial moment for Athens, Barcelona, Dublin and Leicester, it was not in Nantes.  Equally, some cities have been exposed to the full force of the economic crisis and turbo-charging of austerity urbanism, while a sense of business as usual persists in others, albeit with risks and threats on the horizon. Governing strategies differ too, depending for example on local political traditions and the powers and resources (or lack thereof) invested in public institutions at the urban scale. For example, where deficit budgeting has long been strictly prohibited in UK local authorities, it was commonplace in Spain until the austerity regime prohibited it in 2011 and it still is in France.

Concerning our core question about the resonance of the “collaborative moment”, the research shows that cooperation between government, business and civil society organisations remains very important, as has always been the case.  However, the politics of collaboration bear little resemblance to the idealised model of network governance.  It is not that the idealism of network governance has disappeared altogether – it is prominent among local elites in Nantes.  The problem is that even when the ideas retain some influence, they become subsumed in state-centred practices, enmeshed in realpolitik or overtaken by political activism against austerity. For example, we found instances where activists distance themselves from dialogue with the state, questioning its relevance and purpose – notably Barcelona, Dublin and Montreal. So far, our inquiries do not suggest that the “collaborative moment” is a critical theme in the urban politics of 2016.

In the second phase of our research between now and summer 2017, we will take a step back from the immediate questions of austerity and collaboration, developing a broader focus on the urban governance of rolling welfare state crises. We ask how different social actors organise around the multiple waves of dislocation and restructuring, experienced in different ways and at different times in all our cities, since the heyday of welfarism in the 1950s and 60s.  The research will endeavour to show how some strategies and alliances succeed and others fall by the wayside, and draw lessons about the future of urban and local politics.

Jonathan Davies is Principal Investigator on the Austerity and Collaborative Governance Project, as well as Director of CURA and Professor of Critical Policy Studies at De Montfort University

Blazing the Neoliberal Trail: Timothy Weaver

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In this post Timothy Weaver begins our second installment of our ‘book debates’ series, by outlining the main argument of his recent book ‘Blazing the Neo-liberal Trail‘, where he charts the development of neo-liberal hegemony in the UK and the US through urban politics and policy making perspective. In a forthcoming post Jonathan Davies will share his thoughts on this work, and Timothy will then publish a reply.

During the 1970s, the US and the UK grappled in strikingly similar ways with a set of economic problems that American liberalism and British social democracy failed to counter: stagflation, rising unemployment, and the corresponding erosion of elite consensus over economic policy. Out of this morass, neoliberalism emerged as an ideology and set of policy prescriptions that became adopted by a series of governments, beginning with the center-left administrations of Jimmy Carter and Jim Callaghan, and then in full force under governments of the right led by Margaret Thatcher in the U.K. and Ronald Reagan in the U.S. In Blazing the Neoliberal Trail, I use urban politics and policymaking to chart the rise and effects of the neoliberal embrace both in the realm of national urban policymaking and through case studies of Philadelphia and London Docklands.

Blazing makes two key arguments. First, I focus on policies such as enterprise zones and urban development corporations to suggest that the timing, extent, and character of neoliberal urban policymaking was shaped by the manner in which national and subnational institutional structures mediated the influence of neoliberal ideas and the policy entrepreneurs who promoted them. To echo Robert Lieberman’s (2011) formulation, while ideas provided the “motive,” institutions offered the “opportunity” for neoliberalization of urban policy. Thus, in the U.K., the ideologically motivated Thatcher government was able to exploit its institutional advantages—unified and centralized governmental structures—to rapidly transform urban policy. Hence, the enterprise zone policy bore a strong resemblance to the neoliberal idea that people such as Sir Peter Hall and Lord (Geoffrey) Howe had in mind. By contrast, neoliberal policy entrepreneurs such as Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp encountered resistance as Democrats, initially hostile to urban neoliberalism, exploited the institutional advantages afforded to them by the system of separation of powers and divided government. As such, the enterprise zone policy was stymied in Congress and could only gain a foothold at state and local levels where the program was often watered-down thereby sometimes deviating from the original neoliberal design.

The second central argument of the book is that, in part due to differing institutional contexts, neoliberalization has occurred by two distinct logics. The first, which I term neoliberalism by design, refers to the process by which political actors exploit the power of state institutions to impose a neoliberal blueprint. The case of London Docklands reflects this pattern of development. By contrast, the Philadelphia example reveals a logic of neoliberalism by default. In this case, neoliberalization takes a more serpentine path. Due to federalism, neoliberal designs could not be forced on Philadelphia by actors in Washington D.C. Rather, fiscal constraints—of local and national origin—the challenges of coalition building, and ideological constriction pushed the city in a neoliberal direction despite the fact that many of the key policymakers were not ideologically committed to a neoliberal program.

Dr Timothy Weaver is Assistant Professor in Political Science at the University of Louisville, Kentucky, USA

Social exclusion and labour rights in the banlieues of Paris: Part II

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In this blog, originally published by SPERI, CURAs Heather Connolly writes the second part of her blog series on social exclusion in Paris, and explains how trade union support for undocumented migrant workers is taking place in an atmosphere of growing stigmatisation and social tension.

Last month I returned to the banlieues of Paris on a research visit hosted by CRESPPA-CSU, four months after the November attacks, and during the week of the terrorist attacks in Brussels on 22nd March.  Whilst in Paris issues of social division and community cohesion inevitably dominated political debates and press headlines.

Anecdotally, reaction in the mainstream media in France in the days after the Brussels attacks suggested a lack of recognition of French immigration history and the citizenship status of ethnic minorities from the banlieues. Calls were made by some members of the public to send the terrorists, many of whom had French or Belgian nationality, ‘back home’. This sentiment has been somewhat fuelled by François Hollande’s proposals, as a direct response to the November 2015 attacks, to make controversial changes to the constitution to strip militants convicted of terror attacks of their French nationality (proposals which have now been dropped).

Other important contextualising factors feeding political debates and public perceptions around immigration and social exclusion include the current and emerging tensions surrounding the migrant and refugee crises in Europe, and restrictions of movement and increased police powers as a result of France’scontinuing ‘state of emergency’ (état d’urgence).

As was the case in the Paris attacks, the terrorists in Belgium grew up in the suburbs of Brussels, with high levels of unemployment, particularly amongst second and third generation youths of immigrant origin.

Immigration flows to France are often linked into debates on models of integration and patterns of social exclusion of migrants. France’s assimilationist model has in many ways failed in relation to the integration of past flows of immigrants. As a result second and third generations of immigrant origin find it difficult to access employment and often remain trapped in the banlieues of Paris.

I was in Paris to follow up on my research on trade union responses to immigrants and those known as thesans papiers (undocumented workers) (which Part I of this blog explored), and found a somewhat depressing picture emerging. Immigrants and especially the sans papiers are increasingly being stigmatised and placed under restrictions while trying to live and work in France.  This situation isn’t being helped by the current political debates mentioned above.

Signs initially looked better for the sans papiers when in 2012 the circulaire de regularisation, which sets out guidance and defined sets of conditions for administrators processing regularisation claims was introduced in response to growing unrest among sans papiers workers.  Trade unions, particularly the CGT, have been an important resource for the sans papiers in fighting for criteria for regularisation and in making sure they are applied, even though the circulaire has no legal status and doesn’t give automatic rights to work permits.  The strategy seems to be working and since 2010 the union has obtained some 10,000 regularisations of migrants.

At the same time there have been increasing sanctions on employers found to be employing undocumented migrants, with two circulaires in 2013 against illegal work and against irregular immigration.  Also, there are some who are critical of the circulaire de regularisation, claiming that there have been fewer regularisations per year since its introduction. During last month’s field work with my French colleague Dr Sylvie Contrepois, one undocumented Senegalese worker, who had found regular work in France for 24 years, suddenly found himself without work as a result of the greater restrictions on employers, and without recourse to any rights to unemployment benefit or state aid.

The CGT, one of the largest French trade unions has provided a ‘permanence’ (advice service) for the sans papiers in the banlieues of Paris since 2014.  The union has between 70 and 80 sans papiers attending the ‘permanence’ every week with the aim being to help the migrants to obtain work permits, and the immediate aim to protect them from having problems with employers and the police.

The advice given to the sans papiers demonstrates the uneasy nature of accessing labour rights as an undocumented worker in France.  One Senegalese union activist we spoke to (still a sans papier himself) explained that many of the migrants did not understand the process of accessing their rights in France.  There were heated exchanges between the sans papiers and the union activists advising the migrants, with some suggesting that it was particularly the Bangladeshi migrants who weren’t so aware of the process for obtaining papers.  In asking what the process was we discovered that it was important first to obtain fake papers, then find a job, stay in that job for a certain amount of time, collect some pay slips and then come to the union, who would then be able to help with their case for a work permit.  The union was able to draw on the conditions set out in circulaire de regularisation to make the case for regularisation, even where workers were working with fake papers.

By offering a service to undocumented workers, in spite of its service-based appearance, the union aims to identify and call out poor employer practices and force them to apply regulations. The broader political goal is to fight illegal work, prevent social dumping and to encourage self-organising and future mobilisations of sans papiers.  The union also hopes for the greater integration and involvement of thesans papiers within the wider union.  Whether trade unions are able to build and sustain this kind of solidarity and action remains a key challenge, but an important one in such uncertain times.

Dr Heather Connolly is Senior Lecturer in Leicester Business School at De Montfort University, and a member of CURA

PhD Opportunity at CURA: Securitisation in Urban Policy Making

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CURA are delighted to offer a PhD scholarship on Securitisation in Urban Policy Making. The scholarship is available for up to three years full-time study starting October 2016 and provides a bursary of £14,296 PA in addition to University tuition fees. It is available to UK or EU students who are suitably qualified and have outstanding potential as a researcher. Deadline for applications is 29th March 2016.

In offering this scholarship the University aims to further develop its proven research strengths in urban governance, austerity and crises. It is an excellent opportunity for a candidate of exceptional promise to contribute to a stimulating, world-class research environment. The post holder will be contributing to CURA’s interest in crisis and securitisaton in urban policy-making. Interested candidates need to submit a 1500-word proposal addressing one or more of the following issues:

• Are subnational levels of government impacted by national security policy and what are the implications for urban governance?

• How do different ‘modes of governance’ incorporate coercive strategies in urban policy-making process?

• What power relations are developed between state and non-state actors in the securitisation of urban public policy?

• To what extent do community cultural practices infuse meaning to government practices in contexts of violence and insecurity?

Proposals with a focus on countries in Europe and/or the Americas will be preferred, but proposals conducting research in other world regions will be considered.

For a more detailed description of the scholarship, the subject area at DMU and an application pack follow this link. Completed applications should be returned by 29th March 2016 with two supporting references and an academic transcript. Applications are invited from UK or EU students with a Master’s degree or a good first degree (First, 2:1 or equivalent) in a relevant subject. Please quote ref: DMU Research Scholarships 2016: BAL FB1.

Please direct academic queries to Dr Valeria Guarneros-Meza on +44 (0)116 2577038 or by email on valeria.guarneros@dmu.ac.uk. For administrative queries contact Morgan Erdlenbruch at Morgan.Erdlenbruch@dmu.ac.uk

Application deadlinePlease quote ref: DMU Research Scholarships 2016: BAL FB1.

Workshop on Resistance and Alternatives to Austerity

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The new Centre for Urban Research on Austerity (CURA) at De Montfort University (Leicester) is holding a workshop on Wednesday 18th May 2016 (9.30am-4.30pm) to discuss strategies for resistance and alternatives to austerity in urban settings across the globe. See registration details at the end of the post, for a copy of the programme see here.

“…our rage will be relentless…” Petros Constantinou (Guardian 12/11/15)

Across the globe the deepening of austerity has exposed urban populations across Europe, North America, Latin America, and beyond to worsening living and working conditions, reduced access to public services, and persistent insecurity. As these deleterious effects have become more apparent, so too has the functioning of austerity as a set of policies and practices aimed at deepening and consolidating the discipline of neoliberal capitalism.

This growing clarity – in academia and the public sphere – has led to the tentative emergence of various forms of resistance and alternatives. Mainstream political parties – and even some governments – have gained growing public support from Greece to the UK to Portugal through the adoption of anti-austerity platforms. Traditional trade unions, new social movements, and activists across countries most deeply affected by these new measures have begun to mobilise in new and increasingly combative ways. From mass strikes to everyday acts of refusal, the trend of urban resistance to austerity is growing. To offset the worst of its impact or as a means to overcome the entrenched power and privilege austerity supports, some involved in these resistance(s) have begun to discuss the possibilities of alternatives to austerity – and even to capitalism. How these are manifested and how effectively they can provide tools for thinking about and acting on post-austerity and “post-capitalism”.

It is the aim of our workshop to bring together cross-national comparisons on these themes focused on local urban settings, to explore the similarities and differences in acts of resistance by urban actors, to understand the power and innovativeness of these resistance(s), and to ask how these can offer potential alternative forms of urban governance challenging austerity.

Speakers: Lisa McKenzie (LSE), Phoebe Moore (Middlesex), David Bailey (Birmingham), Saori Shibata (Leiden), Nick Kiersey (Ohio), Lefteris Krestos (Greenwich), Desiree Fields (Sheffield), Lucia Pradella (Kings), Stuart Price, Heather Connolly, Adam Fishwick (DMU)

If you are interested in attending please send an email to Suzanne Walker (swalker@dmu.ac.uk) to register your place.

CURA’s Launch Conference: some reflections

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Valeria Guarneros-Meza and Adrian Bua report on CURA’s inaugural conference

Last week we held our two day launch conference. Throughout the four panels there were significant discussions that we need to consider in developing our understanding and study of austerity. Many of these ideas were circulated via twitter (@CURA2015) but we think it is worth expanding on 140 character-selling headlines. The points listed below are not exhaustive; they are our impressions of issues that drew people’s attention and therefore worth considering in developing CURA’s future events and research agenda.

Austerity and Urban Boosterism

Urban infrastructures such as Heathrow’s proposed third runway (addressed by papers delivered by David Howarth and Steven Griggs), nuclear plants (Francis Chateauraynaud), HS2 in London (Daniel Durrant) and Medellin’s Teleferico and Reyes de España Library (Kate Maclean) were the examples addressed by the speakers. In the case of London it is striking to see estate development and the type of urban infrastructures mentioned above while the great majority of the city’s population are struggling to make ends meet. In Medellin the concept of ‘social urbanism’ was developed in an era of financial extravagance. Extra spending was targeting national and foreign investment into the city while addressing  basic service needs (access to water and electricity) that marginalised neighbourhoods required. Kate Maclean argued that although the approach had succeeded in attracting investment, upgrading urban space and integrating some marginalised neighbourhoods, urban boosterism has not been enough to tackle levels of crime and violence (measured by homicide rates) in particular pockets of the city. Moreover, it also been argued, in other work by Abello-Colak and Guarneros-Meza, that  the reintegration and disarmament programmes targeting the youth tend to favour those groups that belong to gangs as opposed to building a universal and comprehensive approach to youth development.  In other words, what Medellin’s example is showing is that social urbanism, at its best, or urban boosterism, at its worst, may help the city overcome visible spatial austerity but it will not be enough to tackle the social degradation that austerity of public welfare has caused.

Getting away with it: the socialisation of risk through technical obfuscation

This topic was raised in presentations by Daniel Durrant on HS2 in London and on the political economy of adult social care provision in the UK, by Karel Williams. Daniel’s analysis was based on the balance sheets of the HS2 corporation. He demonstrated that accounts show that cost calculations are based on the benefits for business infrastructure investment and potential business travellers, while wiping out any social costs that are related to the impact that the construction of the railway has on the destruction of community life, schools and other spill overs. Karel’s work on adult social care critiqued the financialisation of care provision by private providers. He argued that optimum returns on property speculation assured by a standardised kind of adult care home (60-80 capacity) with minimum wages and a casualised workforce with high levels of staff turnover. The requirements of quality care provision, and attention to the social and health needs of residents,  takes second place to debt and management strategies that split property ownership on the one hand and home management and operation on the other. These financial innovations provide parent corporations to extract any gain from subsidiaries passing all debt responsibility to the latter; what he called ‘malign performativity’. These two examples show the ability that corporations have in covering and disguising cost-benefit analysis by using sophisticated technicisms that reduce the ability of citizens to understand the model and ability to perceive these techniques as ‘daylight robbery’.

A similar point was made with nuclear plants in France and England (Francis Chateauraynaud), where the scientific and technical discourse of the environmental impact that these generate lead to the production of confusing and competing set of facts and narratives that disempower citizens and politicians (see also Xavier Auyero’s work).

Austerity invites ‘structural violence’

Annette Hastings’ presentation on the socioeconomic costs of local government cuts in England and Scotland argued that they constituted a clear case of ‘structural violence’ – because they put those individuals less able to exercise political agency in harm’s way, and accentuate their marginalisation in public service provision.  Drawing on findings from a recent report, Annette demonstrated the cuts to tax benefits addressing housing and social care have promoted local authorities to change their administrative processes to cope with impacts of the cuts on staff salaries and dismissals.  These practices are structural because they form part of the system that puts order and discipline to the way local authorities are organised and the relationships they build with citizen-users.

The concept of structural violence is relevant to other presentations: such as Robin Smith’s work on the role of ‘street outreach workers’ in tackling with the ambivalent pressures of caring but eradicating  homeless in cities such as Cardiff and New York, where urban boosterism is undoubtedly present as ways of ensuring urban competitiveness; and Robert Ogman’s talk on social impact bonds – another financial innovation that promote structural violence while helping local governments cope with the destabilisation of social and welfare initiatives produced by public fiscal austerity. These three presentations addressed Anglo-American cases, but it is equally interesting to see how structural violence can be found in contexts of crime and physical insecurity in cities in the United States and across different cities in Latin America (see Auyero et al ‘Violence at the Urban Margins’), whose national contexts deepen the complexity of the meaning of structural violence when enmeshed with broader debates on security and urban securitisation.  In cities, both in the north and south, the role of frontline bureaucrats was mentioned as agents caught in the cross road of the ambivalence of everyday governance practice.

Resisting and countering austerity

Both keynotes – Erik Swyngedouw and Karel Williams – addressed the need of agency by academics, insurgent social movements and organic intellectuals to enhance and speed up social innovation in the UK. Erik called for system de-stabilization through insurgency whereas Karel drew upon the concept of social innovation as a potential source of alternatives. These strategies differ in so far as one aims to engender rupture through direct confrontation, and the other pursues an agenda of interstitial change. The modality of the former is agonistic, the latter more collaborative. However, these modalities are by no means mutually exclusive. Paraphrasing Romand Coles critical social theorists should focus on the mutually enabling relationship between agonistic and collaborative forms of participation. Absent agonism, collaboration is in danger of governmentality. This much is evident, we think, in the co-optation and trivialisation of the concept by neoliberalism, resulting in constant innovation without change. On the other hand, absent collaboration, agonistic ruptures can fail to sustain the change that, in Ricardo Blaug’s words, a ‘democratic moment’ opens up opportunity for. In sum, both modalities are necessary to achieve a transformative environment. CURA has a good opportunity to start building on this through its association with the New Economics Foundation (NEF). Rachel Laurence (from the New Economies in Practice team at NEF) and Adrian Bua (NEF and CURA) explained NEF ambitions to sustain and expand activities that make the foundation a hub for research and action that delivers socio-economic change. They also highlighted some areas where CURA and NEF could join forces to shape such an agenda. This could, for example, be around current policies such as devolution and regional economic development. This is also an area which, as Matt Dykes of the Trade Unions Congress explained, is being targeted by organised Labour movements for its potential to create new government tiers that are more amenable to trade union influence. It will be important to bring in other social movements into this agenda also.

It is perhaps it is worth considering how doctoral students can become a generation of organic intellectuals as a strategy to help them find employment that academia seems increasingly incapable to provide. Building professional links between CURA and progressive policy and advocacy organisations such as NEF might be one way to proceed. This could go some way towards breaking down barriers between policy research that seeks political influence, and academic research focussed on making contributions to knowledge.

Valeria Guarneros-Meza is Lecturer in Public Policy at the Deparment of Politics and Public Policy; Adrian Bua is Research Assistant the Centre for Urban Research on Austerity