Alternatives to the “New Urban Politics”: finding locality and autonomy in local economic development

Rural governance, community empowerment and the new institutionalism: A case study of the Isle of Wight

“…Putting its future prospects to one side, we would want to argue at this point of time that RDT's impact as a political institution-its success in asserting a place-based identity, in establishing structures of local accountability and in forging a broad-based coalition in support of community-based regeneration-is itself part of the process of creating an empowered community (DeFilippis, 1999). What has been more difficult to determine is the contribution of the 'community', as opposed to the 'professional' or 'topocratic' members of the Board and its sub-groups, in driving the organisation forward: in the final analysis we would regard the strategic leadership of the Trust's chief executive officer as critical to the success of institution building.…”

The myth of social capital in community development

“…An institution or an individual can possess something, but a community cannot. Instead, communities are products of complicated sets of social, political, cultural, and economic relationships (DeFilippis 1999;Massey 1994). Communities are outcomes, not actors.…”

Non-profit and Community-based Green Space Production in Milwaukee: Maintaining a Counter-weight within Neo-liberal Urban Environmental Governance

“…While such a community-oriented mode of governance is often rejected as just another neo-liberal strategy and/or relegated to a marginal role (DeFillippis, 1999;Imrie and Raco, 2003;Perkins, 2009), it should be noted that civic agents in an increasingly prominent civil society may offer a point of vulnerability and contestation to neo-liberal processes (Purcell, 2008). So far, the nature-neo-liberalisation literature has largely focused on the state's technologies of environmental governance that help to extend neo-liberalism, failing to emphasise the techniques of resistance-resistance that need not take the form of violent opposition, but could involve more indirect and subtle strategies (for instance, addressing environmental inequalities or conscious manoeuvreing of the state's need to create/maintain/protect a green image).…”