Introduction: Greig Crysler (UC Berkeley)


Abstract

The lecture provides some political and theoretical context of the recent social and spatial transformations in European cities. In spite of uneven and increasingly bifurcated developments, particularly between Southern and Northern European regions, neoliberalization is at the core of austerity, dispossession, as well as new forms of urban upgrading of city space, often via cultural policies. After presenting key features of urban neoliberalism, I will present how, in the wake of the 2008 crisis, people have sought to reclaim spaces as well as rights and what specific challenges they confront, both, in marginalized/downgraded areas and in those deemed profitable in the intensifying interurban competition. The divides and distances between both types of struggles – within cities as well as between northern and southern regions – pose the gravest obstacle on the way to alternative models of urbanism.
 

Bio

Margit Mayer (Technical University of Berlin, Germany) has taught comparative and North American politics at Freie Universität Berlin since 1990 and is associate professor at the Center for Metropolitan Studies at Technical University Berlin. Her research focuses on comparative politics, urban and social politics and social movements. She has published on various aspects of contemporary urban politics, urban theory, (welfare) state restructuring and social movements. She co-authored Nonprofits in the Transformation of Employment Policies (2004), co-edited Urban Movements in a Globalizing World (2000), Cities for People not for Profit (2013), and Neoliberal Urbanism and Its Contestations (2013). Currently she is co-editing a volume on Urban Uprisings: Challenging the neoliberal city in Europe (forthcoming 2015), and writing a monograph on urban social movements and the state. She serves on the board of the International Graduate Program ‘Berlin-New York-Toronto’ organized by the three Berlin universities. She served as editorial board member of The International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, on the Editorial Committee of the book series “Studies in Urban and Social Change” (Blackwell). She has won the 2014 RJ-AvH fellowship for Göteborg University, Sweden.

2nd part of the opening session starting at 10am, free and open to the public, of the CES Summer School «Workshop 'Spaces of Dispossession and Dissent: Lisbon after 2008»