Mercè Cortina Oriol

De Montfort University | DMU · Department of Politics and Public Policy

Chapter 1 focuses on how the eight cities encountered, worked with and against austerity in the period after the GEC. It begins by providing a flavour of the histories and traditions which contribute to explaining how austerity was experienced and mediated. It then turns to a discussion of Athens, Baltimore, Dublin, Leicester and Montréal, where mo...

The research shows that in some ways, the age of austerity vindicated critiques of “collaborative governance” as a medium of governmental control or “responsibilisation”. State-driven collaboration in the face of harsh austerity proved to be gestural, shallow and transient or reinforced the power of elites. However, in the wider sense of “who does...

This chapter discusses the way that (neoliberal) austerity has impacted social, racial and cultural inequalities and the ability of collaboration to support more inclusive democratic cities or resist exclusions. The basic premise is that cities play a fundamental role in the dynamics of social inclusion or exclusion of economic migrants and other r...

This chapter critically assesses the forms of social and political resistance that emerged across the eight cities in our study. Building on themes introduced in chapters 1 and 2, it argues that cities serve as crucibles for a diverse set of political contestations, responses and initiatives, but they exhibit differential capacities to shape their...

The 2008-2009 Global Economic Crisis (GEC) created an opportunity, eagerly seized by many national governments and international organisations, to impose a prolonged, and widespread period of austerity. Austerity is widely recognised to have done enormous damage to social, cultural, political and economic infrastructures in cities and larger urban...

This chapter seeks to better understand how austerity governance has been experienced in the eight cities, from the perspective of the local state. The chapter is divided into three parts. First, we consider literature on the local state and governance to frame contemporary changes in structure and function. Second, returning to the economic crisis...

From the basis of multiple definitions and mixed practices of collaborative governance, this chapter explores trends found through the comparative study of our eight cities, in the decade after the GEC. We aim to examine the impact of austerity on localised collaborative structures of policymaking. Specifically, the chapter elaborates three dimensi...

Our research concluded some time before the outbreak of COVID-19, but we suggest that many of the insights drawn from it, about austerity and collaboration, will be useful in considering ways forward from the pandemic. In the first instance, it seems clear that austerity made COVID-19 an iniquitous disease, with cities and urban peripheries the hea...

In this chapter, we show how the study of scale is enlightening when trying to understand how austerity has functioned in our eight case study cities. In order to put forth a clear definition of how we use the concept, we also propose a definition of scale and promote a synthetic and multi-faceted definition such as the one suggested by Byron Mille...

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.

Introduction Economic migration flows, accelerated by globalization, have substantially increased the cultural and ethnic diversity of Western societies with high GDP economies. As a large part of these migration flows are motivated by the aspirations of those living in the Global South, or the majority world, to improve their living conditions in...

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.

Our research concluded some time before the outbreak of COVID-19, but we suggest that many of the insights drawn from it, about austerity and collaboration, will be useful in considering ways forward from the pandemic. In the first instance, it seems clear that austerity made COVID-19 an even more iniquitous disease than it would in any case have b...

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.

Our book details and documents the impact of austerity governance on a selection of cities. Yet for some commentators, cities and urban spaces remain the ‘new theatres of struggle’ in our contemporary condition (Hamel, 2014). This chapter critically assesses the forms of social and political resistance that emerged across the eight cities in our st...

Introduction As the introductory chapter explained, collaboration was popularized as an idea across much of the globe in the 1990s and 2000s, including the Global South, and was considerably influenced by international actors and donor non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as well as ideas circulating through nation states about modernizing public...

Chapter 1 focuses on how the eight cities encountered, worked with and against austerity in the period after the GEC. It begins by providing a flavour of the histories and traditions which contribute to explaining how austerity was experienced and mediated. It then turns to a discussion of Athens, Baltimore, Dublin, Leicester and Montréal, where mo...

Introduction The reality of austerity in our eight case study cities and elsewhere has been strongly shaped by a phenomenon, long studied by geographers and recognized across the social sciences as well as by practitioners in policy making, politics and activism: social, political and institutional spaces are structured through a hierarchy of spati...

This chapter seeks to better understand how austerity governance has been experienced in the eight cities, from the perspective of the local state. As earlier chapters demonstrate, austerity governance is a real challenge for cities and local states, which can often have competing priorities and imperatives. This is because traditionally, local man...

A central message emerging from the volume is that while austerity may sometimes be instrumentally rational for profit-seeking corporations and governments wanting to position their countries as low-regulation, low-cost capital havens, it is always a political choice and never a necessity. It is invariably a disaster from the standpoint of equality...

The objective of the article is to identify the impacts of the squatting movement on public policies in Spain (1984-2018). Through the hermeneutics of social processes, three cases are compared (Barcelona, Madrid and Bilbao). Qualitative and quantitative data of the following variables are analyzed: 1) history, types, number and visibility of squat...

Austerity has been delivered in the UK without durably effective resistance. Read through a dialogue between urban regime theory and Gramsci’s theory of the integral state, the article considers how austerity was normalized and made governable in the city of Leicester. It shows how Leicester navigated waves of crisis, restructuring, and austerity,...