Download or read book Cities under Austerity written by Mark Davidson and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2018-02-01 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Unequal Cities written by Roberta Cucca and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-11-10 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Urban Austerity written by Sebastian Schipper and published by Verlag Theater der Zeit. This book was released on 2016-12-19 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Fear City written by Kim Phillips-Fein and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2017-04-18 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST An epic, riveting history of New York City on the edge of disaster—and an anatomy of the austerity politics that continue to shape the world today When the news broke in 1975 that New York City was on the brink of fiscal collapse, few believed it was possible. How could the country’s largest metropolis fail? How could the capital of the financial world go bankrupt? Yet the city was indeed billions of dollars in the red, with no way to pay back its debts. Bankers and politicians alike seized upon the situation as evidence that social liberalism, which New York famously exemplified, was unworkable. The city had to slash services, freeze wages, and fire thousands of workers, they insisted, or financial apocalypse would ensue. In this vivid account, historian Kim Phillips-Fein tells the remarkable story of the crisis that engulfed the city. With unions and ordinary citizens refusing to accept retrenchment, the budget crunch became a struggle over the soul of New York, pitting fundamentally opposing visions of the city against each other. Drawing on never-before-used archival sources and interviews with key players in the crisis, Fear City shows how the brush with bankruptcy permanently transformed New York—and reshaped ideas about government across America. At once a sweeping history of some of the most tumultuous times in New York's past, a gripping narrative of last-minute machinations and backroom deals, and an origin story of the politics of austerity, Fear City is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the resurgent fiscal conservatism of today.
Download or read book New Developments in Urban Governance written by Jonathan S. Davies and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2023-09 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Austerity written by Mark Blyth and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selected as a Financial Times Best Book of 2013 Governments today in both Europe and the United States have succeeded in casting government spending as reckless wastefulness that has made the economy worse. In contrast, they have advanced a policy of draconian budget cuts--austerity--to solve the financial crisis. We are told that we have all lived beyond our means and now need to tighten our belts. This view conveniently forgets where all that debt came from. Not from an orgy of government spending, but as the direct result of bailing out, recapitalizing, and adding liquidity to the broken banking system. Through these actions private debt was rechristened as government debt while those responsible for generating it walked away scot free, placing the blame on the state, and the burden on the taxpayer. That burden now takes the form of a global turn to austerity, the policy of reducing domestic wages and prices to restore competitiveness and balance the budget. The problem, according to political economist Mark Blyth, is that austerity is a very dangerous idea. First of all, it doesn't work. As the past four years and countless historical examples from the last 100 years show, while it makes sense for any one state to try and cut its way to growth, it simply cannot work when all states try it simultaneously: all we do is shrink the economy. In the worst case, austerity policies worsened the Great Depression and created the conditions for seizures of power by the forces responsible for the Second World War: the Nazis and the Japanese military establishment. As Blyth amply demonstrates, the arguments for austerity are tenuous and the evidence thin. Rather than expanding growth and opportunity, the repeated revival of this dead economic idea has almost always led to low growth along with increases in wealth and income inequality. Austerity demolishes the conventional wisdom, marshaling an army of facts to demand that we austerity for what it is, and what it costs us.
Download or read book Managing Cities in Austerity written by Poul Erik Mouritzen and published by SAGE Publications Limited. This book was released on 1992-02-21 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Schooling in the Age of Austerity written by A. Means and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-02-12 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Climate Urbanism written by Vanesa Castán Broto and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-11-28 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that the relationship between cities and climate change is entering a new and more urgent phase. Thirteen contributions from a range of leading scholars explore the need to rethink and reorient urban life in response to climatic change. Split into four parts it begins by asking ‘What is climate urbanism?’ and exploring key features from different locations and epistemological traditions. The second section examines the transformative potential of climate urbanism to challenge social and environmental injustices within and between cities. In the third part authors interrogate current knowledge paradigms underpinning climate and urban science and how they shape contemporary urban trajectories. The final section focuses on the future, envisaging climate urbanism as a new communal project, and focuses on the role of citizens and non-state actors in driving transformative action. Consolidating debates on climate urbanism, the book highlights the opportunities and tensions of urban environmental policy, providing a framework for researchers and practitioners to respond to the urban challenges of a radically climate-changed world.
Download or read book Saving Our Cities written by William W. Goldsmith and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-23 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Saving Our Cities, William W. Goldsmith shows how cities can be places of opportunity rather than places with problems. With strongly revived cities and suburbs, working as places that serve all their residents, metropolitan areas will thrive, thus making the national economy more productive, the environment better protected, the citizenry better educated, and the society more reflective, sensitive, and humane. Goldsmith argues that America has been in the habit of abusing its cities and their poorest suburbs, which are always the first to be blamed for society's ills and the last to be helped. As federal and state budgets, regulations, and programs line up with the interests of giant corporations and privileged citizens, they impose austerity on cities, shortchange public schools, make it hard to get nutritious food, and inflict the drug war on unlucky neighborhoods.Frustration with inequality is spreading. Parents and teachers call persistently for improvements in public schooling, and education experiments abound. Nutrition indicators have begun to improve, as rising health costs and epidemic obesity have led to widespread attention to food. The futility of the drug war and the high costs of unwarranted, unprecedented prison growth have become clear. Goldsmith documents a positive development: progressive politicians in many cities and some states are proposing far-reaching improvements, supported by advocacy groups that form powerful voting blocs, ensuring that Congress takes notice. When more cities forcefully demand enlightened federal and state action on these four interrelated problems—inequality, schools, food, and the drug war—positive movement will occur in traditional urban planning as well, so as to meet the needs of most residents for improved housing, better transportation, and enhanced public spaces.
Download or read book Financialising City Statecraft and Infrastructure written by Andy Pike and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2019 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Financialising City Statecraft and Infrastructure addresses the struggles of national and local states to fund, finance and govern urban infrastructure. It develops fresh thinking on financialisation and city statecraft to explain the socially and spatially uneven mixing of managerial, entrepreneurial and financialised city governance in austerity and limited decentralisation across England. As urban infrastructure fixes for the London global city-region risk undermining national ‘rebalancing’ efforts in the UK, city statecraft in the rest of the country is having uneasily to combine speculation, risk-taking and prospective venturing with co-ordination, planning and regulation.
Download or read book City of Crisis written by Frank Eckardt and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2015-08-31 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ongoing crisis in Europe has dramatic impact on the life in many Southern European cities: Unemployment, social deprivation, poverty, political instability, severe cuts in the welfare state budgets and a wide spread feeling of despair have eroded much of the social foundation of the cities. In this book, contributors from Spain, Greece, Portugal and Italy provide an insight into the complex interference between the different aspects of the crisis. They show that the recent urban crisis is not purely a result of the budgetary problems of the nation state (»austerity urbanism«) but needs to be seen as multiple contestations. The Crisis of the City is therefore understood as a result of a changing nation state, cultural diversity, challenged urban planning and politics and a globalized economy.
Download or read book Class Power and Austerity written by Eric Lichten and published by Praeger. This book was released on 1986 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The athor views the fiscal crisis as both a product and the process of class struggle. . . . Interview data and documents are combined to present a useful and interesting counter-perspective sensitive to the contingencies of struggle. Choice
Download or read book Hope Under Neoliberal Austerity written by Mel Steer and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2022-09 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the ways in which communities are responding today's society as government policies are increasingly promoting privatisation, deregulation and individualisation of responsibilities, providing insights into the efficacy of these approaches through key policy issues including access to food, education and health.
Download or read book Austerity written by Alberto Alesina and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-12 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revealing look at austerity measures that succeed—and those that don't Fiscal austerity is hugely controversial. Opponents argue that it can trigger downward growth spirals and become self-defeating. Supporters argue that budget deficits have to be tackled aggressively at all times and at all costs. Bringing needed clarity to one of today's most challenging economic issues, three leading policy experts cut through the political noise to demonstrate that there is not one type of austerity but many. Austerity assesses the relative effectiveness of tax increases and spending cuts at reducing debt, shows that austerity is not necessarily the kiss of death for political careers as is often believed, and charts a sensible approach based on data analysis rather than ideology.
Download or read book Cities in Crisis written by Jörg Knieling and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-09-16 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, European societies and territories have witnessed the spatial impacts of a severe financial and socio-economic crisis. This book builds on the current debate concerning how cities and urban regions and their citizens deal with the consequences of the recent financial and socio-economic crisis. Cities in Crisis examines the political and administrative implications of austerity measures applied in southern European cities. These include cuts in local public spending and the processes of privatization of local public assets, as well as issues related to the re-scaling, recentralization or decentralization of competencies. Attention is paid to the rise of new ‘austerity regimes’, the question of their legitimacy and their spatial manifestations, and in particular to the social consequences of austerity. The contributions to this book lay the foundation for recommendations on how to improve and consolidate qualified governance arrangements in order to better address rapid economic and social changes. Such recommendations are applicable to cities and urban regions both within and outside of Europe. It identifies possible approaches, tools and partnerships to tackle the effects of the crisis and to prepare European cities for future challenges.
Download or read book Ethnographies of Austerity written by Daniel M. Knight and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-03 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some of the worst effects of the global economic downturn that commenced in 2008 have been felt in Europe, and specifically in the Eurozone’s so-called PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain) and Cyprus. This edited volume is the first collection to bring together ethnographies of living with austerity inside the Eurozone, and explore how people across Southern Europe have come to understand their experiences of increased social suffering, insecurity, and material poverty. The contributors focus on how crises stimulate temporal thought (temporality), whether tilted in the direction of historicizing, presentifying, futural thought, or some combination of these possibilities. One of the themes linking diverse crisis experiences across national boundaries is how people contemplate their present conditions and potential futures in terms of the past. The studies in this collection thus supply ethnographies that journey to the source of historical production by identifying the ways in which the past may be activated, lived, embodied, and refashioned under contracting economic horizons. In times of crisis modern linear historicism is often overridden (and overwritten) by other historicities showing that in crises not only time, but history itself as an organizing structure and set of expectations, is up for grabs and can be refashioned according to new rules. This book was originally published as a special issue of History and Anthropology.
