Austerity Urbanism

By Sacha Hasan

The word austerity was defined by Merriam-Webster as a condition of enforced or extreme economy. Since 2010, austerity became the key word to describe the post-crisis times and to index the ongoing notions of stern economic measurements, as the meaning exceeded its classical association with self-discipline, thrift and scarcity to further describe the distinctively neoliberal changing matrixes that are often referred to as ‘these economic times’ (Peck, 2012).

Austerity budgeting in the public sector is promoted by neoliberal script as a ‘common sense’ and a ‘necessity’ to respond to the market conditions and failures (Peck, 2012; Fanelli and Paulson, 2010). In this, the state maintains a cult-like privileging of individual economic liberties and personal responsibility, rolling privatisation as fiscal necessities, shifting from the universal, public provision of social services to market provision with attached user fees, lowering of taxation between jurisdictions, and tax-shifting from businesses to consumers and from property owners to the users of city services (Peck, 2012; Fanelli and Paulson, 2010; Harvey, 2005).In other words, austerity contributes to press for "yet smaller small-state settlements at the urban scale" where the most vulnerable social groups are affected (Peck, 2012, p. 626), and this is the terrain of neoliberal urbanism, which is defined by Fanelli and Paulson (2010, p. 4)as:

"... a range of uneven urban processes taking place simultaneously in the communities where we live and work. This includes the privatization, restructuring, or elimination of public goods and municipal services; the shifting of the cost of maintenance of public resources onto the working class; the increasing precariousness of work; the devolution of responsibilities onto local governments without matching fiscal supports; the scaling of regulatory capacities upwards to regional or international institutions (characterized by little transparency, accountability, or public consultation); the reining in of the power of municipal unions and community groups; the scaling back of social entitlement programs; and expansion of so-called 'public-private partnerships' that shift some of the responsibility for urban governance to corporations".

Changing governance and downloading responsibilities have always been the key results of neoliberal government, as it sees governance to be a potential threat to individual rights and constitutional liberties, and democracy to be a luxury and hardly guarantees political stability (Hackworth, 2007; Harvey, 2005; 2012; Peck, 2011; 2012). Alternatively, neoliberals prefer governance by experts and elites, where issues are governed by executive order and judicial decisions rather than democratic and parliamentary decision-making (Harvey, 2005). These are seen to help create and promote a business climate and stable political system. However, practice has shown that neoliberal measures have biases especially at the time of crises. These arise in particular out of "the treatment of labour and the environment as mere commodities" (Harvey, 2005, p. 70). With more focus during times of conflict, like the current fiscal crisis, the typical neoliberal state sides with a good business climate at the expense of collective rights of labour and the capacity of the environment to (re)generate itself. Furthermore, the neoliberal state favours "the integrity of the financial system and the solvency of financial institutions over the well-being of population or environmental qualities" (Harvey, 2005, p. 70-71). When doing this, the neoliberal state aims to restore class power, by limiting state action and focussing on privatisation (‘rolling-back’ of the state) and individual power. However, once again there is a contradiction between theory and practise, as the neoliberal state, especially at the time of conflict, has showed great intervention to create institutional reforms for the benefit of the economic recovery of the elite, through accumulation by dispossession (see Harvey, 2005).Therefore, it is accepted to say that fiscal cutback is a recurrent condition of neoliberal government, despite its proven frequent episodes of over-reach, failure and crisis (see Peck et al., 2010; McBride and Whiteside, 2011).

Reflecting on this and when examining the effects of austerity, since the contemporary crisis began in 2008, and reaching its peak in 2010 when David Cameron came to power, the state, local government, and cities in particular are exposed to the full force of extreme economy. However, the applied austerity measures are not a mere rerun of the 1980s fiscal cutbacks, but a selective consolidation and intensification of their underlying logics and contradictions, resulting in cumulative political, social, institutional and fiscal effects. Thus, more than being a temporary fiscal fasting, austerity economy has led to the cumulative incapacitation of the state; this is driving the current urban crisis (Peck, 2012). This is due to the deeper resulting patterns of structural imbalances between cities governments' revenuesand their ongoing commitments to public services and workforce which are greatly renegotiated, as the preferred targets of austerity programmes are the poor, minorities and marginalised populations, public-sector unions and bureaucratised infrastructures (Peck 2012).

In the US, the majority of cities were bites for austerityare now evident ,they begun to fashion their own fiscal arrangements of reductions in staffing and service levels under the circumstances of falling revenues and structural deficits. While ordinary austerity is encouraging city governments to cut budgets and attempt innovative models of sourcing and privatisation (Peck, 2012).

Nonetheless, it is argued that austerity has failed, as it contributed to worsen and lengthen the crises rather than solve it (Fanelli and Paulson, 2010; Peck 2012). In relation to the geographical context of the proposed research, austerity budgeting showed no signs of success in Europe (Peck, 2012), as growth has slowed (e.g. the UK) or failed all together (e.g. Greece and Spain), protests have been provoked along with opposing movements on both the right and the left, and the hopes for pro-austerity government succession have collapsed (Peck, 2012).Furthermore, this 'severe economy' does not seem to be a passing moment, but a proposed institutional system designed for years to come (Pew Charitable Trust, 2012),because the resulting signs show that cities are expected to fall into line in the age of austerity (Edsall, 2012; Featherstone, et al., 2012).

However, the rationale of austerity starting to take effect since 2008 is defining a new terrain to neoliberalism. This is because it is being examined under distinctive historical and geographical conditions, in the context of already neoliberalised models of local state power and urban politics (Peck, 2012). Therefore, the proposed research suggests the importance to critically examine the features of the emerging ongoing institutional landscapes systemised by the current neoliberal government, as rather than a target, the crisis could be seen to serve as an excuse for  neoliberal governments to achieve two key goals: "the subjection of all workers to strict market discipline, and the political disorganization of the Left" (Fanelli and Paulson, 2010 drawing from Evans, 2009; Rosenfeld, 2009; Alboand Rosenfeld, 2009). This agrees with Krugman's argument (2012, p. A27) which points out that, "the austerity derive... isn't really about debt and deficits at all; it's about using deficit panic as an excuse to dismantle social programmes... economic recovery was never the point; the drive for austerity [is] about using the crisis, not solving it".

Therefore, the impacts of austerity extreme economy has started to take an urban dimension, highlighting certain features that can define austerity economy as an emergent form of neoliberal urbanism, which is austerity urbanism (Peck, 2012).This is because the cumulative effects of austerity extreme end are immediately revealed in the downsizing of public sector workforces, resulting in "back-office and front-line cuts in fields like education, healthcare and welfare [, ]and this will likely be spatially concentrated and socially regressive, compounding the effects of service withdrawals themselves" (Peck, 2012, p. 648). Furthermore, austerity urbanism has started to reach more deeply into ‘hard to reform’ fields (e.g. the welfare state, comprising grant-dependent institutions engaged in service-delivery roles in the community, non-profit and faith-based sectors) (Peck, 2012). This is in addition to the massive privatisation of the public sector (including land and property sites, user fees and service management). This will result in infrastructure development to become more highly dependent on public-private partnership, favouring projects that promise attractive returns. This is while leaving the public-sector developments to face intensifying management and financing difficulties, shifting responsibilities to local city governments that are expected to be 'creative' as to solve the mismatches and imbalances between the local capacities and what is expected from them, leading to hollow urban development policy-making initiatives in order to fill the resulting credibility vacuum (Peck, 2012). For local city governments to absorb these institutional shortcomings and their unaffordable costs, they tend to 'offload themselves'; reductions in social- service delivery and the adoption of fee-based systems will especially affect low-income populations, women and minority groups (Peck, 2012).

These features altogether have gone beyond being of immediate neoliberal characteristics (similar to those of the 1980s), but becoming an indirect drive of ongoing organisational transformation named austerity urbanism. This form of urban politics is defined by Peck (2012, p. 651),

"... to be understood as a particular mutation of neoliberal urbanism, unevenly realized and still no more than emergent in some respects, it is also important to acknowledge that the systemic imposition of fiscal discipline hardly represents a ‘new’ departure in the context of the shape-shifting, nonlinear dynamics of neoliberalisation. [...] however, this does not define a sustainable course. Beyond its internal contradictions, austerity urbanism has already become a site of struggle in its own right, though it remains to be seen whether the latest wave of occupations, pro- tests and resistance efforts will mutate into a politics of transformation".

However, it is important to note that the concept is very contested, as despite a number of emergent features of the concept can be highlighted, these greatly vary from one context to another in terms of severity and effect (Peck, 2012). Thus, having and end abstract definition can be unrealistic, and is not the purpose. The aim here is rather to develop an understanding of the concept and its relation to the examined context.