Fran Tonkiss

Austerity urbanism and the makeshift city

This paper engages with a recent set of critical arguments concerning the ‘post-crisis city’ and the political economy of ‘austerity urbanism’. The focus of the discussion is on practical interventions in the vacant and disused spaces of recessionary cities, and in particular on temporary designs and provisional uses. In this way, it opens a further line of argument about urbanism under conditions of austerity, alongside analyses of the formal politics of austerity or the possibilities of urban activism in these settings. Its concern is with forms of urban intervention that re-work orthodoxies of urban development as usual: in particular the timescales that inform conventional development models; the understandings of use around which sites are planned and designed; and the ways in which value is realized through the production of urban spaces. The argument centres on European contexts of austerity urbanism, drawing on critical examples of urban design and occupation in the regions largest economies. Such urban strategies are concerned with a politics and a practice of small incursions in material spaces that seek to create a kind of ‘durability through the temporary’.

The Ethics of Indifference: Community and Solitude in the City

Modern social theory has frequently represented city life as isolating, as degrading of social ties and as inimical to community. In another register, however, urban contexts have also been primary sites for imagining and re-imagining forms of community, especially on the basis of shared social spaces or elective identities. The discussion in this article explores this relation between solitude and community in the city. While a language of community has been important for articulating various politics of difference, I suggest that an ethics of indifference also opens up certain rights to the city. The point, however, is not simply to set a conception of indifference or anonymity against one of community or visibility, but rather to think about dissociation as a certain kind of social relation, to consider the solitude of cities as a common, if ambivalent, property. The discussion begins by addressing the nature of indifference and anonymity in urban contexts before turning to New York as the site for recent narratives of a private urban life, and a more public death, in order to explore the complex interplay of difference and indifference, community and solitude, in the city.

International Organization of Securities Commissions

The International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) is a representative forum for regulators of securities and futures markets. Founded in 1983, it is headquartered in Madrid, Spain. IOSCOs voting membership includes the chief regulatory authorities for the worlds financial jurisdictions. These are mainly but not solely national – certain members represent transnational (e.g., the West African Monetary Union acts for eight countries) and sub-national markets (e.g., Ontario and Quebec have separate delegates). The organizations voting membership totalled 114 in 2010, with oversight of more than 95 percent of global securities markets. IOSCO forms part of a developing architecture of global governance through international networks. It is significant as an agency whose goals are both to promote global exchange and to regulate the terms of such exchange, implying a model of economic globalization based on increasing standardization across national borders and legal systems. IOSCO is especially interesting in aiming to steer activities in financial markets, one of the primary challenges for global economic coordination. The organizations work has become highly relevant in light of successive shocks to the global financial system: notably the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and the global financial crisis of 2008. Keywords: financial globalization; international regulation

Trust, Social Capital and Economy

Debates over the nature and uses of ‘trust’ return to some very enduring concerns within social theory — problems of social order, the anatomy of civil society, the relation between individual and collective action. An interest in such questions represents more than simply the rehearsal of familiar themes; rather it marks a renewed argument for the relevance of social explanation in a range of fields, from education and health to urban development and governance. This social turn has been particularly striking in relation to economic issues. Here, perspectives on trust are central to accounts of ‘social capital’ that provide a critical counterpoint to dominant neoclassical models, by arguing for the effectiveness of social factors in shaping economic arrangements and outcomes.

Template urbanism: Four points about assemblage

I ntellectual vogues can take a while in coming, but it seems fair to say that assemblage has now arrived on the urban scene. Colin McFarlane’s argument (2011a) for the uses of assemblage in critical urban thinking offers a cogent, compelling, but not entirely airtight account of what this approach might offer the analysis of cities. The latter quality, as much as the other two, is welcome: his claims are ambitious without being doctrinaire, letting some air into what is already in danger of becoming—for all its commitment to openness, contingency, indeterminacy—a fairly hermetic system of thought. One of the domains in which McFarlane sees the purchase of ‘assemblage thinking’ is in the analysis of policy mobility—the ways in which policy ideas and interventions (working tax credits, student loans, faithbased welfare, enterprise zones: the list goes on) travel between government jurisdictions, and translate more or less well across administrative and national boundaries. A similar itinerancy is characteristic of theory, in this case the intellectual tourism that has seen ideas of assemblage move from philosophy to science and technology studies, to the sociology of markets and finance, and on again (with sundry side-trips) to the analysis of cities. In many ways, cities and urban systems are perfect for assemblage thinking. Cities are exemplary contraptions, contrivances of concrete and human clay, always unfinished, often rickety, definitely constituted and powerfully constitutive. Moreover, with the notion of the ‘socio-material’, assemblage thinkers have captured neatly what urban sociologists, geographers, historians and anthropologists have been saying all along: cities are at the same time, and inseparably, cultural and physical realities, subjective and objective forms, people and things, interaction and artefact. It is perhaps for this reason that McFarlane is happy to stick with the ‘the city’ as a category, given the more general aversion among aficionados of assemblage to such abstractions as ‘society’. The concept of the city cannot refer to an integrated whole, just as any city fails to resolve itself into a sum of distinct parts, however strenuous the official attempts to draw boundaries around it or to do a head-count. In what follows I have four points to make about assemblage. In part, they touch on the issues that are in contention in the exchange between McFarlane (2011a, 2011b) and Brenner, Madden and Wachsmuth (2011). These have to do with questions of agency, description, context and causality. However, there is also a cautionary point regarding the potential of assemblage thinking to produce a kind of template urbanism, rather than the critical urbanism Colin McFarlane is interested in.

Trust, Voluntary Association and Civil Society

Ideals of voluntary association are central to recent thinking about both trust and civil society. On one hand, voluntary associations are cited as exemplary forms of trust relation; on the other hand, they provide the defining features of a distinctly civil sphere (Fukuyama, 1996; Putnam, 1993a, 1995a; Cohen and Arato, 1992; Powell and Guerin, 1997). Such theoretical approaches line up with a widespread political emphasis — if often ill-defined — on voluntary action as a basis for public provision and democratic participation. A catch-all language of ‘partnership’ has, in this context, proved as amenable to the minimal state project of the new right, as to the declaratively ‘new’ politics of the liberal and social democratic left (see Taylor and Lansley, 1992; Ratgheb Smith and Lipsky, 1993; Blair, 1998).

The one-dimensional city

On the day that Occupy Londons appeal against the eviction order from its St Pauls encampment was rejected in the UK Court of Appeal, a spokesman for the Corporation of the City of London summed up the problem: ‘Peaceful protest is a democratic right but the camp is clearly in breach of highway and planning law.’ The bathos of the statement is to the point: democratic principle is one thing, but the citys obligation to keep the highway clear cannot be gainsaid. The agonism of protest is quieted by the anaesthetic of the by-law.

Spatial causes, social effects: A response to Soja

Taylor and Francis CCIT_A_539048. gm 10.1080/13604813.2011.539048 ity: Analysis of Urban Trends 360-4813 (pri t)/1470-3629 (online) Original Article 2 11 & Francis 5 0 0 00 February 2011 ran o kis f.to kiss@l e.ac.uk ‘Capitalism has found itself able to attenuate (if not resolve) its internal contradictions for a century ... We cannot calculate at what price, but we do know by what means: by occupying space, by producing a space.’ (Lefebvre, 1976, p. 21; quoted in Soja, 2010, p. 98)

Cultural Goods and the Limits of the Market: Beyond Commercial Modelling

Preface Acknowledgements Introduction PART I: KEEPING THE MARKET AT BAY Consumer Sovereignty and the Integrity of Practice Scepticism, Authority and the Market Citizens, Consumers and the Environment Colonization by the Market: Walzer on Recognition Science and Recognition PART II: MAKING THE BEST OF THE MARKET Markets, Firms and Practices Consumer-Friendly Production or Producer-Friendly Consumption? Justifying the Market and its Limitation Notes References Index

The British Journal of Sociology in the 1970s: continuity and crisis.

In 1977, on the occasion of the forty-third Hobhouse Memorial Lecture presented at the London School of Economics and published in the December issue of the British Journal of Sociology, Daniel Bell noted that the first was given in 1930 by J.A. Hobson on the topic ‘Towards Social Equality’: ‘are there no constants in sociological thought?’ Bell (1977: 419) asked, ‘or is it that there is no progress?’ Reviewing the contents of the BJS over the 1970s, Bell’s question is both easy and hard to answer. The easy part is the question of constants – articles appearing during this decade engage with long-standing, even foundational, debates in the discipline as well as with more specific skirmishes of the time; they also portend newer concerns that remain critical today. The harder question concerns the matter of progress. Certainly it is possible to note the changes that have taken place within the discipline in the last three to four decades; that it is difficult to say whether these mark any kind of progress probably has most to do with a recent scepticism about the very concept that was not so typical of the 1970s. Bell was not himself concerned with the issue of social equality. His lecture and article were on ‘The Return of the Sacred? The Argument on the Future of Religion’ (‘are there no constants in sociological thought?’ one might echo, ‘or is it that there is no progress?’) The sociology of religion is one of the constants that link the 1970s to current debates in sociology, in terms of both continuity and change. In the 1970s, the greater number of the papers in this field extended the exegetical treatment of Durkheim’s and Weber’s works on religion, with several also cast in an anthropological understanding of religion in terms of belief-systems, magic, occult or ritual behaviour.A small number of contributions presage the analysis of religion and politics that is so current today, including studies of the Orange Order in Ireland (Roberts 1971), Islam and political behaviour in Malaysia (Kessler 1972), the Nation of Islam in the USA and Rastafarianism in Jamaica (Watson 1973), and race, religiosity