De‐municipalisation? Legacies of austerity for England's urban parks

Andrew Smith · Meredith Whitten · Marion Ernwein

25 citations0/0 files storedGeographical Journal

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Urban Planning and Governance Urban Green Space and Health Urbanization and City Planning

Abstract

Abstract Parks are important urban infrastructures that contribute a broad range of health, environmental, social, and economic benefits. Despite this, UK parks' status as non‐statutory services makes them particularly vulnerable to local authority budget cuts. This paper focuses on parks in English cities as these were particularly affected by severe cuts to local government budgets 2010–2019. This period of austerity affected parks provision in various ways, including service reductions, increased reliance on volunteer labour, and pressure to generate commercial revenue. Combined with a series of other factors, including ongoing neoliberalisation, austerity‐driven changes left a range of physical, social, and institutional legacies. This paper explores these using the notion of de‐municipalisation to frame the discussion. The paper is based on an innovative synthesis of research conducted by the authors 2016–2022 and presented at the RGS‐IBG Annual Conference in 2021. The paper identifies that austerity‐driven changes included an experimental ‘shaking up’ of park governance, away from local authorities and with greater involvement from national‐level NGOs. Changes also involved a ‘breaking down’ of municipal management, with responsibility delegated to dedicated parks trusts but also to community groups and volunteers. Ultimately, austerity 2010–2019 altered parks governance, transforming the stewardship and condition of parks, reducing accountability and accessibility, and exacerbating inequities in parks provision. Rather than representing new directions, these changes perpetuate those instigated in previous austerity eras. The noted trend towards de‐municipalisation also reduces parks' capacity to serve as integrated infrastructures – something that may hinder efforts to make cities more sustainable and resilient.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 25 citations exist upstream.

References

2012Austerity urbanism 2011Local Governance under the Coalition Government: Austerity, Localism and the ‘Big Society’2018The depths of the cuts: the uneven geography of local government austerity 2016Local governance under the Conservatives: super-austerity, devolution and the ‘smarter state’2017Austerity urbanism in England: The ‘regressive redistribution’ of local government services and the impact on the poor and marginalised 2013‘Don't Waste a Crisis’: Opening up the City Yet Again for Neoliberal Experimentation 2021Activating urban environments as social infrastructure through civic stewardship 2020Sustaining municipal parks in an era of neoliberal austerity: The contested commercialisation of Gunnersbury Park

Cited by

2025Creative improvement, cultural infrastructure and urban zones: a tale of three cities and their cultural districts 2025Green Space Production as a State Project in Urban China

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.