‘Adopt your city’: Post-political geographies and politics of urban philanthropy during austerity

Abstract

Over the last decade, urban philanthropic giving has acquired an increased significance for cities, shaping urban agendas and affecting local decision-making. Contributing to the emerging geographical literature on the impact of philanthropy on urban governance as well as to scholarship on post-foundational geographies, I argue that urban philanthropic giving is related to a post-political regime of multi-stakeholder urban governance. Contrary to being a linear process of managerial consensus politics, the post-politicisation of urban governance emerges as a multidimensional and variegated process of mutations and adaptations. Drawing from Athens, Greece, in the austerity period, I trace the emergence of a new donor-based philanthrocapitalist regime of urban governance and I demonstrate that post-political governance can take diverse forms: from the well-described in existing literature inclusive partnership-based approach to more authoritarian consensus-based governance processes. The aim of the paper is not just to answer if philanthrocapitalism gives rise to a post-political condition or not, but to explore how it is making and remaking (post-political) urban governance of public spaces, urban politics and urban everyday life. In doing so, the paper focuses on Athens Partnership, an intermediate governance organisation that was established to manage and support donations from the private sector to local governments in Athens and explores the ways urban philanthropy impacts on urban governance. Overall, the paper brings forward a renewed, more enmeshed understanding of post-political urban governance through an analysis of the novel philanthrocapitalist regime that emerged in European cities in the context of the recent intersecting crises.

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