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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Austerity urbanism | 3/3 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austerity_urbanism | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T16:01:23.409249+00:00 | kb-cron |
In reality, these four approaches are often combined, as the case of squatting in some British cities that is a mix of the third and the fourth model. Indeed, in 2012, residential squatting was criminalized in England, and at the same time, budget cutback made it difficult to positively promote alternative practices, despite the ambitions of the Big Society political ideology. This situation was paradoxical considering that at that time the number of empty houses in the country well exceeded the number of squatters in the UK. On a more micro-scale level, interstitial urbanism such as community gardening is another form of alternative urban interventions, open to improvisation and adaptation. Such initiatives can take place on brownfields, waste ground like the Prinzessinnengärten in Berlin or even in-between two buildings, as it is the case with the self-managed space on the rue Saint-Blaise 56 in Paris. In a context of austerity, these sites represent an important testing ground for urban experimentation as well as providing local services and spaces to counteract the lack of public policy.
=== The case of Todmorden, England ===
Todmorden is a northern English town that engaged in austerity urbanism following the deindustrialization. Between the 1970s and 2010, the city lost about half of its population, mostly being workers that became unemployed. In response to the crisis, citizens had the idea of producing food in public spaces, cultivating vegetables in urban gardens located in every unused space around the city like next to the train station, the main road or even the police station. Todmorden is in fact the first city in the world to have launched, in 2008, a food self-sufficiency initiative, called the Incredible Edible. Nowadays, the project is still successfully going and contributes to strengthening social bonds and solidarity among the population.
== Criticism == Temporary urbanism can involve risks. Indeed, temporary and self-organized projects could also be used to keep unused lands attractive while the economy is in crisis and therefore facilitating the state withdrawal from its responsibilities. As Margit Mayer pointed out, “principles such as self-management, self-realization and all kinds of unconventional or insurgent creativity (…) have lost the radical edge they used to entail in the context of the overbearing Keynesian welfare state - in today’s neoliberal urbanism they have been usurped as essential ingredients of sub-local regeneration programs”. The concept itself of austerity urbanism is the subject of different critical points of views. From a free-market perspective, austerity is a necessary, if temporary, measure to assure the financial health of the public sector where it has been spending too much and faces a large amount of debt and deficit. This perspective relates to the orthodox neoclassical economic theory which argues, against a Keynesian ideology, that public investments are bad for the economy in a long term. For the free-market advocates, austerity is a way to purge non-efficient institutions and enterprises and let new technologies and strategies emerge in a Schumpeterian "creative destruction" perspective. Translated to urban planning theories, austerity means that it is beneficial for the economy to cut public investments in urban development and let private initiatives and the private sector run cities. Entrepreneurial urbanism argues that the public sector should function more like the private sector and seek to make returns on investment on public spending and be competitive to decrease the distortions of public intervention in the market. On the other hand, heterodox economy, radical geography, other fields of research, and left wing or Marxists political parties see austerity as a punitive and non-justified policy related to a pejorative perception of neoliberalism. Increasing inequalities, gaps in the rights to the city, and social injustice, austerity urbanism leads to what David Harvey describes as “accumulation by dispossession”. In this point of view, austerity should be stopped and new social strategies of urban development should be organized to fight the commodification and financialization of cities.
== References ==