HomeMaintaining public goods in an era of austerity

Maintaining public goods in an era of austerity

Maintenir les biens publics à l’heure de l’austérité

Mantener los bienes públicos en tiempos de austeridad

Espaces et Société n°200, march 2027

Espaces et Société n°200, mars 2027

Espaces et Société n°200, marzo 2027

*  *  *

Published on Monday, April 07, 2025

Abstract

This special issue aims to highlight the spatial dimension of public goods maintenance and evolution in the context of austerity by adopting the spatial care perspective through three axes: 1) actors and practices involved in maintaining public goods; 2) maintaining public goods on a day-to-day basis; 3) the work and values of public goods. We encourage ethnographic and situated perspectives that consider top-down political experimentation, bottom-up urban practices and their convergence in the protection, maintenance and regeneration of public goods. This call is open to interdisciplinary, national and international contributions.

Announcement

Argument

As the lowest links in the “devolution of austerity” (Peck, 2012), European municipalities have been particularly exposed to the effects of the crisis in national finances, especially since 2008. The steady drop in the resources allocated to them by central governments has become a structural phenomenon that has forced them to reorganise their budgets and public policies (Schipper and Schönig, 2016). Local government service budgets have continued to be cut, exacerbating the social and environmental vulnerabilities that municipalities now have to manage with limited resources. These multiple expressions of austerity primarily affect the maintenance of a whole series of public goods which, by definition, need to be “produced (or protected and maintained) by collectively funded public bodies […] and made available to the members of a community, free of charge, or at low cost” (Weinstein, 2017, p. 90) 1. Reducing access to or the quality of certain public services, reviewing free provision or pricing conditions, abandoning the construction of new facilities, delaying renovation or considering the sale of under-used facilities, are among the trade-offs made by different public bodies and considered by municipalities themselves with respect to the services and facilities they manage directly. While these measures are accelerating the crisis in care (Dowling, 2022) by undermining the institutional infrastructures that provide local care, education and access to rights for the most vulnerable populations, they are also stimulating initiatives that seek to maintain these public goods by other means.

The purpose of this dossier is to focus on the spatial dimension of the continuance and evolution of public goods in a context of austerity. In particular, we encourage ethnographic and situated perspectives that consider top-down political experiments and bottom-up urban practices and their convergence in the protection, maintenance and regeneration of public goods. The goal is to give space to studies that investigate the relationship between austerity, public goods and care practices. A wide range of experiments may be explored: calls for projects issued by municipalities inviting citizens to revitalise disused or underused municipal buildings; self-managed social and health infrastructures; participatory management of cultural facilities; urban food cooperatives; community real estate companies that support local initiatives. These are just some examples of the wide variety of approaches relating to the protection, co-production and alternative production of public goods that could be encompassed in contributions to this dossier. These kinds of experiments might take place in metropolitan, suburban or rural areas, in European or non-European countries. However, we want to move away from the current debates around transitional or tactical urbanism and third places, which are far too ambiguous in their variety and context dependence (Idelon, 2022; Burret, 2021; Douay and Prévot, 2016).

The dynamics that interest us in this dossier are at the heart of a large body of international research that has highlighted the permanent and creeping nature of urban austerity. This corpus focuses on four central topics. The first concerns the proliferation and growing diversity of the forms of privatisation and commodification of the city through urban policies intended to reduce public spending in response to budget deficits (Peck, 2012; Piganiol, 2022). The second central focus of investigation in the literature is whether local authorities can continue to practise forms of redistribution through projects of different kinds (Adisson and Artioli, 2020). In the third category, authors highlight the way in which compensation for austerity is increasingly based on a “co­production” approach to public services, relying on the capacity of civil society to produce social innovation (Pestoff, 2017; Russell et al., 2023). And fourthly, many studies explore how the “neglected” domains of austerity can be conducive to the emergence of alternatives to public action (Tonkiss, 2021). Despite all this, the literature rarely tells us about the socio-spatial adjustments that take place at the micro-local, everyday level, and about their material impacts. Yet it is at this scale, in the face of national and international dynamics that are individualising, co-opting and commercialising public goods that practices capable of “maintaining, perpetuating and repairing our ‘world’” are developed from day to day (Fischer and Tronto, 1991, p. 40).

This call for papers invites contributions that address this dimension by linking political and structural issues with the day-to-day lives of those affected. In recent years, the spatial turn taken in care studies has led to a broadening of their field of enquiry to include spaces and territories (Fitz and Krasny, 2019; Davis, 2022; Gabauer et al., 2022; Power and Hall, 2017). Christine Milligan and Janine Wiles encapsulate this shift by pointing out that caring for people, and more generally for living things, necessarily brings together actors from the institutional, domestic and voluntary sectors, and that “the nature, extent and form of these relationships are affected by ‘where they take place’” (2010, p. 738). Following on from the work in the issue of the journal on “Taking care of urban nature” (de Biase, Marelli, Zaza, 2024), we invite future contributions to take up this spatial approach to care in order to interpret the transformations of public goods in a time of austerity. The aim of the dossier is to examine how, by means of such a reading, the cases studied can be approached in their singular materiality, through the everyday life of built spaces, the (sometimes vulnerable) people who transform them and the wider urban dynamics that frame these transformations.

The articles submitted may fall into the following three categories.

1. Actors and practices involved in maintaining public goods

The first thread concerns the way in which a wide range of public and/or civil society actors work together to maintain places and services that exist in the public interest. More specifically, it looks at alliances and practices that seek “to ensure the continuity of the socio-material fabric of the world” (Denis and Pontille, 2022, p. 355) in conditions of austerity where this continuity is under threat. In very concrete terms, the preservation or reactivation of facilities, places and services that offer free or subsidised access relies on practices for handling people and maintaining spaces that raise the thorny question of political management and economic equilibrium. While the parties involved in these initiatives agree to share responsibility for the goods in question, they may nevertheless assume and exercise this responsibility in different ways. The challenge here is to identify the often complex trajectories of their partnerships by exploring how they negotiate the scope of their involvement, particularly in contractual, financial and/or political terms. A further challenge is to examine the strategies that the stakeholders adopt together in organising the projects that link them in space and over time.

Within this thread, the aim is also to examine their more concrete investment in the relational practices generated by the management of the place and/or service in question. Here, this might entail exploring and putting into perspective what Sandra Laugier describes as a “relational conception of responsibilities in which good feelings do not necessarily reign, but conflicts and inequalities need to be clarified or endured” (2020, p. 203).

2. Maintaining public goods on a day-to-day basis

In this second thread, the aim is to explore everyday life as a timeframe that takes on an eminently political dimension in the context of austerity. The day-to-day is precisely the space-time within which public goods are supposed to provide equitable support with a view to cushioning the socio­spatial inequalities that can make everyday life unliveable for the most vulnerable or the poorest populations. In conditions of austerity, it is these vulnerable sections of society that are increasingly called upon to produce their own forms of everyday mutual aid in the face of declining public social services (Soeiro, 2023; Collectif Rosa Bonheur, 2017). This day-to-day existence, tested as it is by the environmental crisis, health crises and the crisis of care, increasingly casts light on the practices and actions of group survival (Pruvost, 2021), defined as “any work that serves the creation, perpetuation and direct maintenance of life on Earth and that has no objective other than itself” (Bennholdt-Thomsen and Mies, 2022, p. 57-58). These practices and actions raise the question of the existence of an alternative form of welfare that both conflicts with and complements that of the state (Power et al., 2022; Daquin, 2022). Whereas in the first thread the aim was to consider the how of these actions, here we want to observe their effects in and on everyday life, with particular attention to the timeframes in which they operate. Indeed, while on the one hand those who undertake these actions try to pool their efforts over the long term to maintain a public good, on the other hand they often work within a timeframe of emergency to ensure day-to-day access to services and facilities that are vital for a neighbourhood or a community of users. Although the two temporalities – the emergency and the long term – seem at first sight to be opposites, in reality, within the framework of a rationale of survival (Bennholdt-Thomsen and Mies 2022, Pruvost, 2024), they are intimately connected and interactive.

In this thread, we want to examine the relationship between everyday survival mechanisms, the materiality of public goods and urban policies. The aim is to understand the dynamics of transformation that these actions of care exercise on space and time through the new forms of management that they bring into being.

3. Work and the values of public goods

Austerity and its effects on welfare policies have necessitated an increase in unpaid reproductive work, mainly carried out by women from minorities, to compensate for the reduction in public services and the fall in household incomes (Federici, 2014; Bassel and Emejulu, 2017). The voluntary investment on which the preservation of public services and spaces relies leads to increasingly invisible forms of violence and stress (Cottin-Marx, 2023; Krinsky and Simonet 2012; Simonet, 2021). At the same time, as part of the move to institutionalise participatory democracy, the potential of citizen action is becoming increasingly important not only to the co-production of services, but also to actual engagement in the renovation of public assets (Gatta and Montesano, 2024; Oevermann et al., 2023). The debate about the transformative potential of care practices on the one hand, and – on the other hand – about the risk of reinforcing an austerity approach to public service substitution, is becoming increasingly salient. Addressing this ambiguity in the context of public goods is a way to draw attention to the forms of un­remunerated work undertaken by citydwellers, in particular women, in taking care of spaces that democratic participation in urban planning has both institutionalised and rendered invisible. But this unpaid work also brings into play emotional, social and attachment values that cannot be reduced to market and accounting principles (Graeber, 2001). The aim of this thread is to shed light on the rationales of maintenance processes in their relation to space, to question the values they generate and their influence on the “biographical” trajectory of the places concerned.

This call for papers invites interdisciplinary, national and international contributions, primarily focusing on the analysis of empirical cases.

Submission guidelines

The Journal does not accept article proposals, only completed articles.

Articles should not exceed 45,000 characters (including spaces), encompassing: text, notes, bibliographical references, appendices, but excluding abstracts and keywords. The presentation requirements and advice for authors are available on the journal website : https://shs.cairn.info/revue-espaces-et-societes?lang=fr&tab=a-propos#consignes-auteurs

Articles to be submitted exclusively by email to:

by 15 September 2025

Authors who are not certain whether their article is suitable can contact the feature coordinators. 

The process of selecting, evaluating and finalizing the articles will take place over the course of 2026, for publication of the issue in March 2027. 

Articles will be published in French. However, the texts submitted for evaluation may also be written in English, Spanish or Italian. The authors will be responsible for translating the approved articles into French.

Organizers

  • Alessia de Biase (ENSA Paris La Villette - LAA LAVUE)
  • Federica Gatta (Institut d'Urbanisme et de Géographie Alpine - UGA - PACTE)
  • Cécile Léonardi (ENSA Grenoble - UGA - AECC)

Bibliography

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Collectif Rosa Bonheur, 2017, « Des “inactives” très productives, le travail de subsistance des femmes de classes populaires », Tracés, no 32, p. 91-110 [URL : http://journals.openedition.org/traces/6862, consulté le 30/01/2025].

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DAVIS Juliet, 2022, The caring city. Ethics of urban design, Bristol, Bristol University Press.

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DOUAY Nicolas, PRÉVOT Maryvonne, 2016, « Circulation d’un modèle urbain “alternatif” ? Le cas de l’urbanisme tactique et de sa réception à Paris », EchoGéo, no 36 [URL : http://journals.openedition.org/echogeo/14617, consulté le 30/01/2025].

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Note

1 The concept of public goods has been chosen here because it raises the question of public ownership and the role of public institutions. However, in a very broad sense of ownership, and on a local scale, it can be applied in different ways to include common goods or club goods (Yolka, 2017). This ambiguity seems to us to be fruitful, and we encourage authors to take advantage of its potential. 


Date(s)

  • Monday, September 15, 2025

Keywords

  • austérité urbaine, bien public, bâtiment public, pratiques de care, activités de subsistance, quotidien, travail gratuit, régénération urbaine

Contact(s)

  • Federica Gatta
    courriel : federica [dot] gatta [at] univ-grenoble-alpes [dot] fr
  • Alessia De Biase
    courriel : alessia [dot] debiase [at] paris-lavillette [dot] archi [dot] fr
  • Cécile Léonardi
    courriel : leonardi [dot] c [at] grenoble [dot] archi [dot] fr

Information source

  • Cécile Léonardi
    courriel : leonardi [dot] c [at] grenoble [dot] archi [dot] fr

License

CC0-1.0 This announcement is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal.

To cite this announcement

« Maintaining public goods in an era of austerity », Call for papers, Calenda, Published on Monday, April 07, 2025, https://doi.org/10.58079/13oxk

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