Managing Cities In Austerity

Why are some of our cities going broke while others prosper? This study of the failures and successes of city management offers new insights into how to manage cities effectively in today's economic climate. The lessons from cities around the Western world are that innovative strategies can work, that fiscal management strategies such as privatization can be made politically feasible, that the national government's urban policy forms a vital component in success or failure at the city level. Managing Cities in Austerity fills a major gap in the literature on urban policy-making and comparative public policy. The product of one of the largest comparative social science research projects ever undertaken, the Fiscal Austerity and Urban Innovation project, it maintains a genuinely comparative approach. An international team of authors applies a coherent set of concepts about fiscal austerity to over 2,500 local governments in ten Western countries. Most significantly, survey and hard fiscal data are merged not only at city but at national level.

This accessible guide provides a stimulating analysis of the governance of the night-time economy in cities for practitioners and newcomers alike. Drawing on a wide range of case studies of after dark activity in cities around the world, it reviews labour, environmental services, healthcare, the role of leaders including night mayors, managers and commissioners, and the influence of both public and private sectors. Offering invaluable insights for the future of night-time governance during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond, this book deepens our understanding of the benefits, challenges and impacts of a neglected aspect of the economy.

What started as a mortgage crisis in 2007 and became a global financial and economic crisis in 2008, has transformed into a sovereign debt crisis since 2010. Throughout, cities all over Europe have been at the heart of the turmoil in multiple ways: indebted homeowners have been evicted, masses impoverished, public budgets tightened, municipal infrastructures privatized, and public services downsized. In short, austerity measures have been implemented. In view of the above, this book focuses on an issue that affects most people living in urban regions across Europe: the idea that fiscal austerity is a necessity that politics cannot avoid, no matter how harsh the consequences might be. To bring the effects of austerity politics to the forefront, the authors of this book expose actual urban problems in their spatiotemporal dimensions, discuss regulatory restructurings under a new regime of austerity urbanism, and reflect on the role of urban social movements struggling for progressive alternatives. Barbara Schönig is Professor for Urban Planning and Director of the Institute for European Urban Studies at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Germany. Sebastian Schipper, PhD, is a researcher at the Department for Human Geography, Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

This seminal edited collection examines the impact of austerity and economic crisis on European cities. Whilst on the one hand the struggle for competitiveness has induced many European cities to invest in economic performance and attractiveness, on the other, national expenditure cuts and dominant neo-liberal paradigms have led many to retrench public intervention aimed at preserving social protection and inclusion. The impact of these transformations on social and spatial inequalities – whether occupational structures, housing solutions or working conditions – as well as on urban policy addressing these issues is traced in this exemplary piece of comparative analysis grounded in original research. Unequal Cities links existing theories and debates with newer discussions on the crisis to develop a typology of possible orientations of local government towards economic development and social cohesion. In the process, it describes the challenges and tensions facing six large European cities, representative of a variety of welfare regimes in Western Europe: Barcelona, Copenhagen, Lyon, Manchester, Milan, and Munich. It seeks to answer such key questions as: What social groups are most affected by recent urban transformations and what are the social and spatial impacts? What are the main institutional factors influencing how cities have dealt with the challenges facing them? How have local political agendas articulated the issues and what influence is still exerted by national policy? Grounded in an original urban policy analysis of the post-industrial city in Europe, the book will appeal to a wide range of social science researchers, Ph.D. and graduate students in urban studies, social policy, sociology, human geography, European studies and business studies, both in Europe and internationally.

Presenting the findings of a major Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) project into urban austerity governance in eight cities across the world, this book offers comparative reflections on the myriad experiences of collaborative governance and its limitations.

This book is about the contemporary city and its management. Relates the analysis of urban and regional change to challenges for urban governance. Explores the socio-spatial consequences of economic, social and political change as these impact on the urban city. It reviews the conceptual and empirical challenges of understanding the future of urban management.

Urban management is a relatively new topic, which has gained increasing importance due to a rise in urbanization and a wave of decentralization programs in recent decades. This innovative book is the first systematic treatment of the critical urban management issues facing developing countries. The volume brings together a number of theoretical approaches and practical experiences in order to study the economic and financial aspects of urban management. The author argues that urban managers have to make their cities more competitive via the new opportunities provided by decentralization, and suggests that the formulation of a development strategy and the use of elements from new public management theory will improve urban governance and service delivery. In addition, emphasis is placed on the importance of involving different stakeholders, which will lead to an integrated analysis of urban problems and, therefore, integrated solutions. Related issues such as urban environmental sustainability and the role of modern information technology are also explored in detail. The book concludes with a review of the emerging new themes at the forefront of contemporary urban management studies. This important new volume will be an essential resource for students, scholars and practitioners with an interest in urban planning, development and management.

Examines the ways in which austerity policies are transforming US cities. Across the world’s most industrialized economies, the financial crisis of 2007 caused a contraction of state budgets and stimulated attempts to reform debt-burdened governments. In the United States, a system of fiscal federalism meant this turn towards austerity took a uniquely fragmented and geographically diverse form. Drawing on case studies of recent urban restructuring, Cities under Austerity challenges dominant understandings of austerity as a distinctly national condition and develops a conceptualization of the new US urban condition that reveals its emerging political and social fault lines. The contributors empirically detail the restructuring that is taking place across the United States, its underlying logics, its local impacts and the ongoing processes of challenge and resistance that influences how it is shaping the lives of citizens. The new American political economy, it is argued, needs to be understood as composed of a mosaic of urban experiences that both build upon a differentiated foundation and creates new divergences. As state reforms continue to interact with this diverse urban political economy of the United States, this collection provides a state-of-the-art survey on how postcrisis convergences and divergences in urban economies and urban politics have laid the foundations for the new political geography of the United States.