The Urban,Politics and Subject Formation

In contrast to more traditional debates about voting patterns, local versus state administrations, and individual rights and participatory democracy, this article addresses the question of urban politics through an analysis of subject formation. By taking subject formation as the analytical focus, research questions about ‘politics’ shift from traditional ones about local or state government and the development of consensus, for instance, to ones about the constitution of subjects who are governed and govern themselves in particular ways. Using the emergence of two increasingly commonplace subject forms in contemporary China — urban professionals and volunteers — as examples, the article considers how modes of self‐regulation become political problems and also how subjects may be of the urban as well as located in the urban. The problematizations of socialist state planning have led to new governmental rationalities and technologies that not only produced new subject positions, but also new urban spaces, landscapes, economies and lifestyles. From this view, the article is an intervention into discussions about the ‘where’ of urban politics. It also argues that it is critical to examine politics as problematization and normalization if we are to understand what is at stake in the constitution of potential ‘communities of action’.     

The rise and fall of social partnership in postsocialist Europe: the Commonwealth of Independent States

Traditional trade unions throughout the postsocialist world embraced ‘social partnership’ as a means to secure their institutional survival in a radically changed economic and political environment. The commitment of national governments to social partnership ebbed and flowed through the 1990s, but it was confirmed, at least rhetorically, in Central and Eastern Europe by the prospect and requirements of accession to the European Union. This article explores the fate of social partnership in the ‘other half’ of Europe, the countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States, where social dialogue has largely been abandoned and trade unions alternatively marginalised or subordinated to the state apparatus.     

Spatial Practices and the Institutionalization of Water Sanitation Services in Southern Metropolises: The case of Jakarta and its Kampung Kojan

This article examines the spatial practices and forms of institutionalization in the water and water sanitation sector in Jakarta, capital of Indonesia, and especially in Kampung Kojan in the Kalideres subdistrict of Jakarta. To this end, it develops a three‐layered analytical framework viewing the city as a multi‐scalar socio‐ecological system in which different forms of human–water relations and their institutionalization are found. Particular attention is given to informality in this system and how it interacts with ‘regular’ state and corporate market sector practices. Within these interactive dynamics, informality is not only understood as a survival strategy but also as a creative practice connecting various social‐ecological opportunities, traditional and contemporary technologies and modes of institutionalization to each other. Ongoing institutionalization processes in the formal and informal economy, as well as between them, are analysed. Opportunities to integrate and regularize the diverse water sanitation services into community‐led closed water–wastewater cycles capable of ensuring public health and sustaining a bio‐hydrological balance at the local level are explored.     

How Did Finance Capital Infiltrate the World of the Urban Poor? Homeownership and Social Fragmentation in a Spanish Neighborhood

When working‐class localities in developed countries are in question, social fragmentation is often analyzed along ethnic lines. Instead, this article claims that it is more critically fruitful to explore fragmentation in terms of people's relations with the state and different forms of capital. It does this by considering housing in Spain as a key resource that connects state policies both with the forms of reproduction and (dis)organization of the disadvantaged, and with the development of real estate and finance capital. First, it unfolds the historical formation of the Spanish ‘homeownership culture’ and the construction–finance complex. Second, starting from an in‐depth ethnography of a peripheral neighborhood in Barcelona, it emphasizes the embeddedness of recent financialization in the livelihood strategies of poor households. Finally, it shows how the process led to a commodification and erosion of those social relations on which it partially depended, thereby exposing problems for class reproduction and fracture lines among the urban poor.     

How Do Squatters Deal with the State? Legalization and Anomalous Institutionalization in Madrid

Radical and autonomous urban movements like the European squatters' movement tend to resist integration into the institutions of the state, although particular legal and political conditions in each country or city may significantly alter this tendency. In this article, I examine the controversial issue of ‘institutionalization’ among squatters, focusing on the few cases of legalized squats (social centres) in the city of Madrid. Negotiations with the state authorities and processes of legalization are the major forms of institutionalization involving squatters. However, an anomalous kind of institutionalization also emerges once squats, whether legalized or not, become consolidated and socially accepted. For squatting to have a successful impact, then, depends on both the type of autonomy achieved by squatters and the different outcomes of the processes of institutionalization. The case of Madrid provides empirical evidence that: (1) negotiations with state authorities were very frequent among squatters, but most were defensive; (2) the few cases of legalization were due to specific conditions such as the urban centrality of the squats, single‐issue identities, social network solidarity, favourable media coverage, formal organizations working as facilitators and the squatters' leadership of the process. Furthermore, legalized squats in Madrid preserved a high degree of autonomy, self‐management and ties to other radical social movements. In conclusion, both the legalized squats and the squatters' movement in Madrid as a whole, avoided ‘terminal institutionalization’ and, instead, gave shape to a ‘flexible’ one.     

False promises of co-production in neighbourhood regeneration: the case of Dutch community enterprises

Many European countries are implementing austerity measures alongside trends of welfare state retrenchment. Entrepreneurial forms of active citizenship are considered as a new form of public management to fill gaps left by spending cuts and to continue neighbourhood regeneration. Inspired by British practices, Dutch citizens are trying to set up community enterprises (CEs) to provide services or other benefits for residents in deprived neighbourhoods. Based on a qualitative panel study, this article reveals supportive responses but also resistance from local governments and housing associations. Within a positive policy discourse on co-production, institutional responses often encompass forms of ‘counter-production’ that hold CEs in full uncertainty about crucial conditions for their business.     

Multiculturalism in Canada: Accidental Discourse,Alternative Vision,Urban Practice

Multiculturalism became an official policy of the Canadian government in 1971. Since then, Canada has been cited as a world leader in diversity issues and a model of social engineering and institutional arrangement. In particular, former Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau is remembered as its visionary author. Another debate, mostly internal to Canada, criticizes the Multiculturalism Act as limited and flawed, and questions its impact. The present article submits that multiculturalism as a policy is not the product of longstanding, intentional initiatives, but more an ‘accident’ or a coincidence of several factors. Moreover, multiculturalism as a social reality and/or nationalist vision is not the result of the policy, but a deeper social history. Canadians, even scholars, know very little about why multiculturalism ‘works’ or does not work, and why it has taken root in different ways in different cities. We suggest a theory regarding the central role of urban public space, not only as a decreed place for public life, but rather as the place for an emerging process of democracy. En 1971, le multiculturalisme est devenu une politique officielle du gouvernement canadien. Depuis, le Canada a été cité en exemple sur les questions de diversité et en modèle pour la construction sociale et l’aménagement institutionnel. L’ancien Premier Ministre, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, s’est notamment inscrit dans les esprits comme son créateur visionnaire. Un autre débat, national pour l’essentiel, critique la Loi sur le Multiculturalisme comme étant limitée et imparfaite, et remet en cause son impact. Cet article avance que le multiculturalisme en tant que politique n’est pas le produit d’initiatives intentionnelles sur le long terme, mais plutôt un ‘accident’ ou une coïncidence entre plusieurs facteurs. De plus, le multiculturalisme en tant que réalité sociale et/ou vision nationaliste ne résulte pas de la politique, mais d’une histoire sociale plus profonde. Les Canadiens, intellectuels compris, en savent très peu sur ce qui fit que le multiculturalisme ‘marche’ ou pas, et qu’il s’ancre de manières différentes dans des villes différentes. L’article présente une théorie sur le rôle central de l’espace public urbain, non seulement en tant que lieu décrété pour la vie publique, mais surtout comme site pour un processus de démocratie naissant.     

Ecosocialization or Countermodernization? Reviewing the Shifting ‘Storylines’ of Transport Planning

In recent decades, in most western countries, conventional transport planning has encountered growing social opposition from environmentalists and increasing scientific criticism on the grounds of its unsustainability. In some places, including the United Kingdom, the assumptions, beliefs and values (‘storylines’) about transport have shifted to some degree away from the car in favour of public and slow forms of transport. The article elaborates a concept of ‘ecosocialization’ to describe and explain the various reform pressures that have sought to reorient transport planning away from car‐dominated approaches. We use this concept in preference to the more familiar one of ‘ecological modernization’ in order to foreground the influence of embedded value systems and habits, as well as institutions and rules, on key pathways of social development. Whilst these reformist pressures and their consequences have been evident for decades, it is also apparent that in other contexts, after moments of subordination to alternative policy settings, conventional car‐dominated transport planning has reasserted its pre‐eminence. Our article explores the shifting discourses and practices of transport planning in three national policy settings, charting the contest between critiques of car‐dominated approaches and those ‘countermodernizing’ forces, especially road building institutions, that have resisted this ‘ecosocialization’.     

Austerity,labour market segmentation and emigration: the case of Lithuania

The so‐called ‘Baltic model’ of austerity sometimes receives uncritical praise from advocates of tightened austerity. This model has achieved an almost uncontested vogue among international finance officials and European Union policy makers who portray it as a ‘socially costless’ template for other crisis economies. The article examines the impact of austerity on Baltic Lithuania, a peripheral newer EU member state, and suggests that the harsh austerity measures adopted by its government in order to restore fiscal balance have been far from socially costless. Austerity has accelerated fragmentation of the labour market into a differentially advantaged primary (largely public) sector, and an increasingly informalised secondary (low‐skill manufacturing and services) sector, stimulating extraordinarily high levels of emigration as the population, especially younger persons, depart from the country. We describe this here as the formation of a new austeriat.     

THE 1930s AND THE PRESENT DAY – CRISES COMPARED

Many analysts are comparing the deep crisis of our times with the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed in the 1930s. They generally argue that Barack Obama is driving the world to recovery along Roosevelt's ‘state superiority’ line. Alas, today's crisis rings alarm bells for the manner in which we must manage the future of democracy, the state and markets. Markets cannot be ‘ordered about’ and when in the face of sound logic and practice an attempt is made to do just this, markets become refractory, or – even worse – they may collapse.     

Equipements collectifs et consommation sociale

Collective consumption has become a major issue in recent developments in urban research, as a focal point in the analysis of the aspect of urbanization concerned with social conditions of reproduction of the labour force. A survey of traditional approaches shows that they adopt a conception of the state as promoter of increasing welfare. The limitations of econometric measures of ‘social welfare’ and the associated theories of consumer choice are also discussed. Recent radical studies consider collective means of consumption as means of domination and repression by the state, either by way of an Althusserian analysis of ideological state apparatus, or by an extension of the critique of psychiatric institutions elaborated by M. Foucault. The concrete analysis of collective consumption must go beyond this useful but unilateral perspective, also beyond the recurrent empiricist temptation to use concepts as ‘boxes’ for direct classification of empirical objects, and try to link together theoretically the various and contradictory aspects of socialized consumption processes. Various concepts must be developed regarding the nature of social relations of consumption: relations of production and circulation, ownership and real appropriation of the means of consumption, forms of socialization transforming these relations, nature of the use value of the means of consumption and relation with the concrete process of its realization, forms of the division of labour, ideological processes inside the consumption process. The movements and results of class struggle in the reproduction sphere can be followed through the analysis of the contradictions in collective consumption—between state domination and repression and development of the labour force, between socialization of consumption, also considering precisely its social distribution, and capitalist interests.     

Writing on the Wall: Street Art in Graffiti‐free Singapore

The legalization of graffiti in many cities has impacted urban landscapes and the way artists and the public view graffiti, street art and the city as well. This article considers the genesis, process and consequences of legal walls programmes firstly by introducing and differentiating the key terms ‘graffiti’, ‘street art’ and ‘legal walls’, then by examining an empirical case, that of Singapore. Renowned as a graffiti‐averse and litter‐free city, Singapore's recent about‐turn in legalizing illicit art forms illustrates changing government perspectives on creativity and legality in the country. Why the government has effected this change, how artists and members of the public have responded to it and the resultant art forms are critically explored. The conclusion reflects on four key lessons from Singapore for cities in general.     

Seeing Like a City‐State: Behavioural Planning and Governance in Egypt's First Affordable Gated Community

Haram City is Egypt's first ‘affordable’ gated community, hosting both aspirational middle‐class homeowners and resettled poor urban residents. Amidst legal ambiguity during Egypt's 2011–2013 revolutionary period, the management team of this public–private partnership was tasked with creating a ‘fully self‐sufficient’ city. While Haram City is the product of top‐down ‘seeing like a state’ master planning (Scott, 1998 ), the day‐to‐day resolution of class vulnerabilities and disputes over ‘reasonableness’ in city life requires forms of interpersonal adjudication otherwise addressed through local urban law—‘seeing like a city’ (Valverde, 2011 ). This article uses ethnography of management techniques aiming to ‘upgrade behaviour’ to theorize that a private entity, in a strategically indeterminate relationship with the state, reconciles future‐oriented planning and storied prejudices by merging two visions of governance. Imitating the repertoire of urban law, managers plan the very realm of bottom‐up decision making. They then adapt top‐down urban planning to bottom‐up dispute resolution to spatially consolidate the ‘consensual’ outcomes of a rigged game. Evoking both colonial Egyptian vagrancy laws and neoliberal paternalist welfare, ‘seeing like a city‐state’ governance amounts to authoritarianism that conceals itself within custom, appearing neutral so as to plan streets, codes and inner lives at once.     

Models of democracy in spatial investments

Governance regarding spatial investments meets or even creates institutional tensions that process management finds difficult to cope with. Traditional democracy is confronted with new ways of policy making. New practices include multi-level governance, public?–?private partnerships and citizen participation. Central government and parliamentary control have to adapt to such practices. This article studies institutional tensions in two cases of spatial investment, using representative and participatory democracy as models of political regime and policy implementation. The analysis also links governance to characteristics of space. The authors make recommendations to combine ‘representative’ and ‘participatory’ elements of governance in a way that reduces institutional tensions in processes of spatial investment.     

Are we all on the same page? A qualitative study of the facilitation challenges associated with the implementation of deliberative priority-setting

Collaborative governance has given rise to decision-making methodologies promoting democracy, inclusivity and transparency. This is exemplified by deliberative priority-setting (DPS) that blends cost-effectiveness analysis with stakeholder deliberation. Little is known however, about the facilitation challenges when ‘technical’ and ‘social’ elements are combined in a methodology. This paper investigates the facilitation challenges of implementing a DPS project within the English National Health Service (NHS). Our study examines the relationship between facilitation and the effectiveness of DPS processes, highlighting the importance of knowledge management as facilitators seek to translate technical information, to enhance the deliberative experience and promote legitimate decisions.     

Is This What The Democratic City Looks Like? Local Democracy,Housing Rights and Homeownership in the Portuguese Context

This article analyses the creation of a normative framework for the democratic city during the regime change in Portugal in 1975—the answers that were given to the question, ‘What should a city be like in a democratic regime?’ While I critically discuss post‐democracy and its use of post‐foundational contributions, I review the post‐revolution Portuguese constitutional debate, contending that the call for democratization brought by urban popular organizations was answered with a political compromise that exchanged expectations of a participatory city for a commitment to a social rights city, enhanced with a promise of homeownership for urban popular segments. In light of this, in this article I question post‐democratic proposals, arguing that when this approach implicitly establishes equivalence between democracy and ‘the political’, it has difficulties in interpreting how the grammar of democracy is ‘organized’ in conflictual and contingent processes of democratic institutionalization. As an alternative, I contend that a critical debate concerning democracy and the urban must address how democratic expectations of emancipation have been translated into institutions and rights through interwoven and situated processes of politicization and depoliticization that allow both politicization of the urban and the production of consent .     

Community Leadership and the Construction of Political Legitimacy: Unpacking Bourdieu's ‘Political Capital’ in Post‐Apartheid Johannesburg

Apart from local monographs and normative texts on community participation, research on community leadership constitutes a blind spot in urban leadership, urban politics, social movements and urban studies. This article, based on case studies in post‐apartheid Johannesburg, contributes to theorizing community leadership, or informal local political leadership, by exploring Bourdieu's concepts of ‘political capital’ and ‘double dealings’. Considering community leaders as brokers between local residents and various institutions (in South Africa, the state and the party), we examine how leaders construct their political legitimacy, both towards ‘the bottom’ (building and maintaining their constituencies), and towards ‘the top’ (seeking and sustaining recognition from fractions of the party and the state). These legitimation processes are often in tension, pulling community leaders in contradictory directions, usefully understood under Bourdieu's concept of ‘double dealings’. Community leaders are required, more than formally elected political leaders, to constantly reassert their legitimacy in multiple local public arenas due to the informal nature of their mandate and the high level of political competition between them — with destructive consequences for local polity but also the potential for increased accountability to their followers. We finally reflect on the relevance of this theoretical framework, inspired by Bourdieu, beyond South African urban politics.     

Social and environmental reporting in local authorities

There has recently been a resurgence of interest in social and environmental reporting (SER) in both the private and the public sector; however, its meaning and application in the public sector are relatively new, and it has been little investigated. Our article is aimed at gaining a better understanding of the reasons underlying the adoption of SER by Italian local authorities by applying the concept of management fashion (Abrahamson ). Empirical analysis shows that both socio-psychological and techno-economic forces combine to shape the SER phenomenon, and a managerial fashion is currently in place among Italian local authorities. Thus, even when SER is adopted in response to ‘technical’ gaps, its label largely depends on its being driven by the need to signal that LAs are adopting a tool which is gaining momentum in academic and professional discourse. However, both forces are influenced not so much by a concern for sustainability as by the context of public-sector reform processes.     

‘They tell us after they've decided things’: A cross-country analysis of unions and digitalisation in retail

The role of trade unions in the social shaping of digital technologies is a vital question for research, public policy and social justice. This article draws on interviews with two unions in the grocery retail sector in the United Kingdom and Norway, and examines their involvement in technology decisions, and whether they can shape better outcomes for workers. By comparing a ‘neo-liberal’ economy and a ‘Nordic welfare state’, the article considers whether stronger institutional power and regulatory supports in Norway provide for greater influence in a sector regarded as challenging for unions. The findings indicate relatively few country differences and help shed light on the factors that enable and constrain unions’ role in digitalisation.