Between Realism and Revolt

Between Realism and Revolt explores urban governance in the “age of austerity”, focusing on the period between the global financial crisis of 2008-9 and the beginning of the global Coronavirus pandemic at the end of 2019. It considers urban governance after the 2008 crisis, from the perspective of governability. How did cities navigate the crisis and the aftermath of austerity, with what political ordering and disordering dynamics at the forefront? To answer these questions it engages with two influential theoretical currents, Urban Regime Theory and Gramscian state theory, with a view to understanding how governance enabled austerity, deflected or intensified localised expressions of crisis, and generated more-or-less successful political alternatives. It develops a comparative analysis of case studies undertaken in the cities of Athens, Baltimore, Barcelona, Greater Dandenong (Melbourne), Leicester, Montreal and Nantes, and concludes by highlighting five characteristics that cut across the cities, unevenly and in different configurations: economic rationalism, weak hegemony, retreat to dominance, weak counter-hegemony and radically contagious politicisations.

Studying Urban Political (Dis)Orders

Chapter 1 develops the framework through which urban political (dis)orders are explored in subsequent chapters. It begins by engaging debates about critical vantage-point. It advances a Gramscian approach to urban regime analysis, through which it pivots between perspectives, and explores the encounter between power and resistance in struggles over the normalisation, disruption and transformation of austere neoliberalism. It is further framed by neo-Gramscian conjunctural analysis, which derives from Marxist thinking about the history and periodisation of capitalist development and phases of struggle. The problem arising from this framing is how the dynamics of crisis, neoliberalisation, austerity and resistance play out in cities and constitute urban political (dis)orders, and what these in turn reveal about conjunctural continuity and change.

Consolidating Neoliberal Austerity Regimes

Chapters 4 and 5 turn from state rescaling to coalitions among state, market and civil society actors, and the urban regime configurations that have arisen, or been challenged, in the post-crisis period. Chapter 4 explores the four cities in which regime consolidation was occurring around the amplification of austere neoliberalism: Athens, Baltimore, Dublin and Leicester. Though the cities vary significantly in size and influence, in each case the persistent lack, and further diminution, of local political capacity contributed to the recuperation of the municipality and its ostensibly centre-left political leaders. Multi-scalar regime politics contributes to rendering neoliberal austerity governable and to disorganising and disrupting contentious elements within civil society.

Exploring the Emergence of Innovative Multi-Actor Collaborations toward a Progressive Urban Regime in Madrid (2015–2019)

For the last decade, urban actors around the globe have been struggling to adapt to a post-crisis and austerity context through increasing social mobilization and experimentation, calling for an urban democracy renewal and challenging established neoliberal urban regimes and governance systems. This has triggered social innovations, in which novel collaborative formulas have been envisioned and implemented. In particular, civil-public collaborations (CPCs) have come to the fore as an empowering alternative to the well-established private–public partnerships (PPP). This article examines the conditions of possibility, enabling mechanisms and constraints for the emergence of innovative multi-actor collaborations (IMACs). For this aim, we developed a three-fold analytical framework combining social innovation, public governance, and urban regime theory. We applied this framework to the case of the so-called “government of change” in Madrid between 2015 and 2019. After exploring the pre-2015 context, the institutional innovations implemented once Ahora Madrid accessed the local government, and the post-2019 context, it points to the preconditions that allowed experimentation with IMAC, identifies the institutional mechanisms and governance innovations that support their emergence, and assesses to what extent and how power to act was created and used to accomplish urban regime change.

The Urban Regime Theory in Political Science Research — The Possibilities and Limitations of Implementation

The article discusses novel methodology. The main aim of the paper is to analyse the explanatory potential of the urban regime theory used in political science studies. The author verifies the hypothesis which states that the explanatory potential of the urban regime theory, understood as the ability to explain the dynamic transformations of the socio-political reality of modern cities, is derived from the possibility of using a set of research methods, and not only those that are of “customary” (traditional) interest to political scientists. This set includes eight different research methods, selected on the basis of a review of the positions and methodological approaches dominating in the extensive literature on the subject. The hypothesis verification determines the structure of the article, which consists of the considerations focused around: (1) theoretical issues (2) methodological assumptions of the presented analysis, and (3) variants of the examination of the urban regime. The analysis confirms the hypothesis and proves that the application potential of the urban regime theory results from the possibility of using at least several research methods, with particular emphasis on those that are just gaining popularity among political scientists.