scholarly journals Remaking the People’s Park: Heritage Renewal Troubled by Past Political Struggles?

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-103
Author(s):  
Johan Pries ◽  
Erik Jönsson
Keyword(s):  
Development Process ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Radical Politics ◽  
Social Democrats ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
The City

This article explores how a series of heritage-driven renewal plans in the Swedish city Malmö dealt with a landscape deeply shaped by radical politics: Malmö People’s Park (Folkets Park). Arguing against notions of heritage where the past is essentially considered a malleable resource for present commercial or political concerns, we scrutinise plans for the People’s Park from the 1980s onward to emphasise how even within renewal attempts built on seemingly uncontroversial nostalgic readings of the park’s past, tensions proved impossible to keep at bay. This had profound effects on the studied development process. Established by the city’s social-democratic labour movement in 1891, the People’s Park is both enmeshed with historical narratives, and full of material artefacts left by a century when the Social Democrats had a decisive presence in the city. As municipal planners and politicians targeted this piece of land, the tensions they had to navigate included not only what present ideas to bring to bear on the making of heritage, but also how to deal with past politics and the park as a material landscape. Our findings point to how the kinds of labour politics that had faded for decades became impossible to dismiss in urban renewal. Both political representations and de-politicising nostalgic representations of Malmö People’s Park’s past provoked (often unexpected) resistance undoing planning visions.

New Labour in the Global Economy: Partisan Politics and the Social Democratic Model

2000 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Wickham-Jones
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Partisan Politics ◽  
Social Democrats ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Wage Moderation ◽  
The Social

Drawing on a framework developed by Geoffrey Garrett in his recent book Partisan Politics in the Global Economy, I examine the ‘policy space’ that is available for the social democratic project in the United Kingdom. Garrett is optimistic about the possibilities for reformism: he emphasises the ability of an ‘encompassing’ labour movement to exchange wage restraint for reformist policies. Given the absence of such an encompassing labour movement in the United Kingdom, his conclusion apparently offers little support to those seeking reformist measures in these circumstances. I discuss three reasons why Garrett's model may still be applicable in the British context. First, social democrats may be able to offer policies desirable to capital. Second, wage moderation may be possible without the existence of an encompassing labour movement. Third, and most ambitious, it may be possible to develop an encompassing labour movement within the United Kingdom. My tentative conclusion is that a variant of the Garrett model is potentially a plausible one for a reformist party in the United Kingdom.

Craxi’s Italy

1985 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 166-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincenzo Guizzi
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Party ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Decline ◽  
Social Democrats ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Christian Democratic Party ◽  
The Government

IT IS NOT EASY TO EXPLAIN THE REASONS THAT LED TO THE appointment of Bettino Craxi as Prime Minister. First of all, there was certainly the political fatigue of the Christian Democratic Party which had held the premiership for 35 years. AIdo Moro, a great man and leader, had tried to mediate between the various currents within the party, as well as between the party and other allied parties (the Republicans, the Social Democrats, the Socialists). But what Moro really dreamt of was a possible alliance with the Communist Party to solve at least the most serious issues, such as terrorism and economic decline. He thought of repeating with the Communists the experience the DC had had in the early 1960s with the Socialists: widening the democratic area with the view of transforming the PCI into a social democratic trend. In order to obtain this he even considered letting the PCI take part in the majority at least if not in the government itself. His disappearance had serious repercussions, especially in the Christian Democratic Party where internal friction grew even stronger than in the past. This resulted in a great drop in the party's power and ability to manage the country politically even if, at least in part, it regained in the 1979 and 1983 elections the votes lost in the 1976 elections.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aled Davies
Keyword(s):  
Industrial Development ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
Financial Centre ◽  
Conservative Government ◽  
The Social ◽  
Post War ◽  
City Of London ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

This book is a study of the political economy of Britain’s chief financial centre, the City of London, in the two decades prior to the election of Margaret Thatcher’s first Conservative government in 1979. The primary purpose of the book is to evaluate the relationship between the financial sector based in the City, and the economic strategy of social democracy in post-war Britain. In particular, it focuses on how the financial system related to the social democratic pursuit of national industrial development and modernization, and on how the norms of social democratic economic policy were challenged by a variety of fundamental changes to the City that took place during the period....

Czech Social Democracy and its “cohabitation” with the Communist Party: The story of a neglected affair

2008 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 317-338 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lubomír Kopeček ◽  
Pavel Pšeja
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Social Democratic Party ◽  
Pragmatic Approach ◽  
Social Democrats ◽  
Unsuccessful Attempt ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Relationship

This article attempts to analyze developments within the Czech Left after 1989. Primarily, the authors focus on two questions: (1) How did the Czech Social Democratic Party (ČSSD) achieve its dominance of the Left? (2)What is the relationship between the Social Democrats and the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSČM)? We conclude that the unsuccessful attempt to move the KSČM towards a moderate leftist identity opened up a space in which the Social Democrats could thrive, at the same time gradually assuming a pragmatic approach towards the Communists. Moreover, the ability of Miloš Zeman, the leader of the Social Democrats, to build a clear non-Communist Left alternative to the hegemony of the Right during the 1990s was also very important.

Battered bodies: Characterizing Johannesburg’s apartheid past and present in Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 213-228
Author(s):  
Addamms Mututa
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
The Past ◽  
Black Characters ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
Narrative Spaces ◽  
The City

Narratives of traumatic citizenship not only raise questions about the past, but also they give voice to contemporary stories about this past. In post-apartheid South Africa, these questions, markers of apartheid temporality, are embodied in, among other sites, the representation of battered Black bodies in cinema. This article critiques the characterization of Blacks as narrative spaces to illustrate the temporality of distress and trauma from apartheid to post-apartheid Johannesburg in Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi. It argues that the film posits Black characters as latent archives of intergenerational historical narratives that probe the apartheid past and speculate on the post-apartheid future in the city of Johannesburg. Consequently, the juxtaposition of embodied narrative archives and apartheid temporality, the article posits, is a crucial model in the theorization of battered Black bodies’ contiguous nostalgia.

The Perils of Vanguardism

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 947-968 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua C Gordon
Keyword(s):  
Causal Explanation ◽  
Unemployment Benefit ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Social Democrats ◽  
Asylum Policy ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Right ◽  
Unexpected Outcome

AbstractOver the past 25 years, Sweden has gone from having one of the most generous unemployment benefit systems among the rich democracies to one of the least. This article advances a multi-causal explanation for this unexpected outcome. It shows how the benefit system became a target of successive right-wing governments due to its role in fostering social democratic hegemony. Employer groups, radicalized by the turbulent 1970s more profoundly than elsewhere, sought to undermine the system, and their abandonment of corporatism in the early 1990s limited unions’ capacity to restrain right-wing governments in retrenchment initiatives. Two further developments help to explain the surprising political resilience of the cuts: the emergence of a private (supplementary) insurance regime and a realignment of working-class voters from the Social Democrats to parties of the right, especially the nativist Sweden Democrats, in the context of a liberal refugee/asylum policy.

scholarly journals Social Democratic and Critical Theories of the Intellectual Commons: A Critical Analysis

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 100-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonios Broumas
Keyword(s):  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Information Communication Technologies ◽  
Information Communication ◽  
Productive Force ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
The Past ◽  
Critical Theories ◽  
The Social ◽  
Intellectual Commons ◽  
Theoretical Paradigms

Over the past twenty years theorizing about the intellectual commons has undeniably become a popular activity not only among scholars that deal with the dialectics between information/communication technologies and society but also among the wider scientific community. Yet, the discourse over intellectual commons and their contested relationship with contemporary laws and institutions has not been confined only within the academia but has rather become a more general social issue. Social democratic and critical theories of the intellectual commons are re-conceptualizations of the social intellect as the productive force of our intellectual commonwealth. As emerging theoretical paradigms, they eventually come in contrast with the dominant notions of the social intellect, which basically advocate the establishment of private monopolies over intellectual works. By deciphering contemporary shifts and dynamics in the ways we produce and distribute information, knowledge and culture, such theories are thus better placed to inspire and orientate social movements, recast agendas of policy – making and construct alternative narratives to existing socio-legal arrangements, which are capable of accommodating the potential of the intellectual commons.

scholarly journals Filmic witness to the 1964 Kitty Genovese murder

Urban History ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 642-642
Author(s):  
CARRIE RENTSCHLER
Keyword(s):  
Violence Against Women ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Gender Violence ◽  
Male Violence ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
High Rise ◽  
The Past ◽  
City Street ◽  
The Social ◽  
The City

ABSTRACTThis essay examines a body of films that represent and re-enact the infamous 1964 Catherine Genovese rape and murder, helping to define the crime as a problem of bystander non-intervention exacerbated by urban living conditions and the ‘high rise anxieties’ of apartment dwellers. The moving image culture around the Genovese case tells a story about male violence against women in the city through the perspective of urban apartment dwellers, who are portrayed as bystander witnesses to both the city and to the social relations of stranger sociability in the city. Films depict the killing of Kitty Genovese, sometimes through fictional analogues to her and the crime, as an outcome of failed witnessing, explicating those failures around changing ideas about urban social relations between strangers, and ways of surveilling the city street from apartment windows. By portraying urban bystanders as primarily non-interventionist spectators of the Genovese rape and murder, films locate the conditions of femicide and responsibility for it in detached modes of seeing and encountering strangers. By analysing film as forms of historic documentation and imagination, as artifacts of historically and contextually different ways of telling and revising the story of the Genovese murder as one of bystander non-intervention in gender violence in the city, the essay conceptualizes film and filmic re-enactments as a mode of paying witness to the past.

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