Contesting austerity, de-centring the state: Anti-politics and the political horizon of the urban

Abstract

This article draws novel links between ‘anti-politics’, austerity and a political horizon centred on the urban. Research on anti-politics often invokes a binary understanding of a politics of and within the state and an anti-politics at a distance from or hostile towards the state. This article argues that in the context of austerity, this binary loses traction. Austerity has intensified the transformation towards networked forms of governance within which the state becomes a more hybrid entity of contradictory ideals and practices. Austerity not only calls into question the legitimacy of formal politics because of its devastating social outcomes, it also disaggregates the political authority of the state and opens up a particularly urban terrain of politics. We capture this development by examining the intersections between the local state and the urban field of politics. Looking across the struggles against austerity in Europe, and focusing in more detail on housing politics in Berlin, we assert that the urban is important not only as a setting (as typically argued) but also as the basis for a different rationality of political action in and against austerity. In the context of austerity struggles, state authority becomes ever more contingent and other, more urban, forms of politics advance. In sum, the article contributes to a spatial reading of (anti-)politics against austerity, points to the de-centring of the state in transformative political projects and emphasizes the analytical purchase of a distinctly urban perspective on contemporary politics in Europe.

Sustainable Development Goals and Education: A Bibliometric Mapping Analysis

“…On this subject, the papers tackle various aspects such as climate change, environmental education, attitudes needed to address sustainable education, policies or the role of the community in sustainable education. (See Table 10) With an integrating approach to sustainability and education, educational policies on sustainability are reflected in studies such as Beveridge et al [91], which analyses the initiatives developed by Canadian ministries of education and their materialisation in schools.…”

What’s so new about New Municipalism?

“…In this sense, they share with political practices of the ‘urban everyday’ a rejection of state logics for a distinctive modus operandi of ‘the urban’ – made both site and stake of political struggle. Beveridge and Koch (2019a, 2019b) characterise ‘urban everyday politics’ as de-centring the state and foregrounding spatial practices in the ‘here and now’ rooted in everyday life which temporarily reshape or re-appropriate urban space or establish alternative urban systems to meet social needs, such as through cooperative housing, alternative currencies, community gardens and social centres. Where these ‘alternative economic spaces’ (Fuller et al, 2010), ‘do-it-yourself urbanisms’ (Iveson, 2013), experiments in ‘transformative social innovation’ (Thompson, 2019) and ‘diverse economies’ performing post-capitalist futures (Gibson-Graham, 2008) have struggled to find durable institutional form at sufficient scale to challenge dominant logics, new municipalism takes steps towards doing just that, through innovating municipal institutions for incubating, supporting and protecting their development; prefiguring an emergent ‘political horizon of the urban’ transcending state logics (Beveridge and Koch, 2019a, 2019b).…”

“…I bring this important-yet-overlooked literature into conversation with more familiar work on ‘the urban’ (Barnett, 2014; Beveridge and Koch, 2019a, 2019b; Magnusson, 2014) by way of a shared concern over the state-centrism of so much social science, including geography and urban studies. We have been ‘seeing like a state’ (rather than a city) for so long that we conflate the polis with the state and fail to see the ‘symbiosis of the urban and the political’ (Magnusson, 2014) implying an urban polis tied to the global cosmopolis transcending nation-state mediation.…”

“…New municipalists are pushing up against these boundaries to either re-form the state at the municipal scale or prefigure a different kind of polis, rooted in the urban. In breaking down and reconfiguring the connections between the political, the state, and the ‘urban everyday’ (Beveridge and Koch, 2019a), new municipalism begins to subvert state-centrism, to ‘see like a city’ (Magnusson, 2014).…”

From crisis to catastrophe: The death and viral legacies of austere neoliberalism in Europe?

“…These patterns of inequality, with respect to the ability to isolate, distance, shield, and quarantine, are by no means limited to the more advanced neoliberal economies but occur wherever austerity has widened spatial inequalities and de-centred the state. Whereas austerity opened up new practices and spaces of political contestation – with the urban forming a specific setting and rationality for political action (Beveridge and Koch, 2019) – COVID-19 has served to close them down through consensual lockdown and distancing for those who can, and threatening proximities at home and work for those who cannot.…”