The meaning of 'urban crisis', and its applications in concrete struggles to govern and contest austerity urbanism, remains under-specified analytically and poorly understood empirically. This paper addresses the lacuna by opening up the concept of urban crisis to critical scrutiny. It begins by exploring how urban 'crisistalk' tends to over-extend the concept in ways that can render it shallow or meaningless. The paper looks secondly at different applications of the terminology of 'crisis', disclosing key framings and problematics. In the spirit of critical urban studies, it focuses, thirdly, on practices of crisis-resistance and crisis-making. The paper concludes by summarizing the six urban crisis framings linked to six urban problematics, in order to inform future studies of austerity urbanism and assist in developing more reflexive approaches to the concept.

The paper examines the links between the rise of local entrepreneurialism and state rescaling in a neo-liberal context. The thrust of the article is that the agency of localities, increasingly manifested in the form of local entrepreneurialism, emerges through the political activism of a local bourgeoisie, in pursuit of a multiscalar local accumulation strategy. The article focuses on the spatial interest representation strategies of the local bourgeoisie introducing the concept of scalar strategies of representation, to examine in what ways the broader state rescaling process contributes to the formation of local agency and how this agency influences state rescaling. The city of Gaziantep, Turkey, constitutes its empirical focus.

This article discusses potential reasons for the continuities in the broader policy agendas of capitalist states, despite radical shifts in economic policies, by employing the state‐rescaling framework. Its main thrust is that, even though centrally designed policy programs mainly aim to give direction to the dynamics of the market economy, the institutional (re)structuring needed to operationalize such policy measures has been shaped around a politics of redistribution, a product both of the exclusionary results of past policies and the negative results of the newly introduced policy programs. This dialectical tension turns state rescaling into a political exercise in solving, and reproducing, ‘systemic crises’. The article examines the history of state rescaling in Turkey to develop these arguments.

This article aims to develop a comparative framework of analysis to study urban crises, arguing that there is a need to establish the analytical links between ‘everyday life and systemic trends and struggles’, and thus to tie together the insights produced by ‘particularistic accounts’. It examines urban crises as political phenomena and brings the Marxist notion of ‘alienation’ to the centre of attention. We argue that ‘alienation’ – as a universal mechanism facilitating capital accumulation process via dispossession, and as negative mental/emotional implications of dispossession, is useful to establish those analytical links. We identify two domains, urban economic structure and urban political system, where alienation is contained. Public authorities deploy various containment strategies in these domains to govern alienation, and urban crises occur when these strategies fail. The post-2008 wave of urban upheavals could be explained by the failure of roll-out neoliberal strategies, which constitute the basis of our comparative framework.

Recent research by economists has shown that deindustrialization is more severe in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America than it ever was in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Nevertheless, most research on deindustrialization is focused on the former centres of Fordist manufacturing in the industrial heartlands of the North Atlantic. In short, there is a mismatch between where deindustrialization is researched and where it is occurring, and the objective of this paper is to shift the geographical focus of research on deindustrialization to the Global South. Case studies from Argentina, India, Tanzania and Turkey demonstrate the variegated nature of deindustrialization beyond the North Atlantic. In the process, it is demonstrated that cities in the Global South can inform wider theoretical discussions on the impacts of deindustrialization at the urban scale.