Urban Austerity

The global financial crisis has demonstrated the impact and implications of late capitalism and its bedfellow, globalisation. In the European context, crisis is seen as a threat to the stability of the region, rather than a local or national concern. Post-2008, crisis is social and political, rather than merely financial, as Western countries witness the consequences of consumption, growth and profit. In this book, Tsilimpounidi demonstrates how sociologists must develop new approaches to examining rapid shifts in the social landscape, since crisis is not merely reflected in balance sheets, but is mediated through spectacular imagery of loss, deprivation and increased vectors of marginalisation. Providing focused and valuable insight into the pressing problems of those living in Greece in relation to the wider spheres of the nation and at the level of the European Union, Sociology of Crisis takes an approach that is firmly located within a critical sociological appeal to reflexivity. A timely engagement with the problem of crisis at a macro-level and in dialogue with the everyday experiences of crisis on a micro-level, this interdisciplinary title will appeal to both undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in sociology, social policy, geography, urban studies and research methods (social science).

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.

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.

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. Mark Davidson is Associate Professor of Urban Geography at Clark University and the coeditor (with Deborah Martin) of Urban Politics: Critical Approaches. Kevin Ward is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom and the coeditor (with Eugene McCann) of Mobile Urbanism: Cities and Policymaking in the Global Age.

Through a case study in a Chicago public school, Means demonstrates that, despite the fragmentation of human security in low-income and racially segregated public schools, there exist positive social relations, knowledge, and desire for change that can be built upon to promote more secure and equitable democratic futures for young people.

"In wealthy nations such as Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States, issues of poverty and homelessness have often been displaced or sidelined by the accelerating number of studies on income inequality and wealth disparity. In Poverty and Austerity amid Prosperity, Gregg M. Olsen refocuses our attention on rising levels of poverty and homelessness, suggesting what we can do to address these issues. Highlighting the important differences between Canada, the UK, and the US, this volume explores the broad and narrow ways that poverty and homelessness have been conceptualized, and how this has shaped the way they are defined, measured, and addressed in each country. After a careful examination of poverty in these three countries, the volume draws comparisons with European nations that have been more successful in keeping issues relating to poverty under control. Olsen presents and critically contrasts the two main theoretical traditions, individual versus society, that have emerged to explain poverty and homelessness. Olsen argues that societal approaches to the study of poverty are better equipped to explain the developments unfolding across these nations, and that the eradication of poverty will only happen when the socio-economic system has been seriously overhauled and founded upon economic democracy."--

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.