Crisis and the city

Abstract

The current crisis, with its particularly severe configuration in Southern European countries, provides an opportunity to probe the interrelation of economic crunches and the production of space, and also to imagine potential paths of sociospatial emancipation from the dictates of global markets.This introductory chapter offers a preliminary interpretive framework exploring the fundamental role of urban and territorial restructuring in the formation, management and resolution of capitalist crises and, conversely, periods of crisis as key stages in the history of urbanization.I will begin by contextualizing the 2007-8 economic slump, the subsequent global recession and its uneven impact on states and cities in the longue durée of capitalist productions of space, studying the transformation of spatial configurations in previous episodes of economic stagnation.This broader perspective will then be used to analyze currently emerging formations of austerity urbanism, showing how the practices of crisis management incorporate a strategy for economic and institutional restructuring that eventually impacts on urban policy, and indeed in the production of urban space itself.I will start this discussion with two basic premises.Firstly, capitalism is a crisis-prone system.Crunches and recessions appear as the aggregated result of a continuous and contradictory process of expansion of value; they are structural aspects of capitalist development, not an aberration in a naturally balanced economic organization (Harvey, 2010).According to this viewpoint, the history of capitalism is staged as an evolution through successive regulatory regimes articulated around the emergence and overcoming of recurring crises of overaccumulation (Aglietta, 2000).The current predicament is therefore not an exception but just another

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