AUSTERITY URBANISM AND THE SOCIAL ECONOMY ALTERNATE ROUTES Edited by Carlo Fanelli and Steve Tufts, with Jeff Noonan and Jamey Essex2017 © Alternate Routes, 2017 Toronto www.alternateroutes.ca Twitter: @ARjcsr “Alternate Routes” ISSN 1923-7081 (online) ISSN 0702-8865 (print) http://www.alternateroutes.ca/ Alternate Routes: A Journal of Critical Social Research Vol. 28, 2017 Managing Editors: Carlo Fanelli and Steve Tufts Interventions Editors: Jeff Noonan and Jamey Essex Editorial Advisory Board: Nahla Abdo, Dimitry Anastakis, Pat Armstrong, Tim Bartkiw, David Camfield, Nicolas Carrier, Sally Chivers, Wallace Clement, Simten Cosar, Simon Dalby, Aaron Doyle, Ann Duffy, Bryan Evans, Randall Germain, Henry Giroux, Peter Gose, Paul Kellogg, Jacqueline Kennelly, Priscillia Lefebvre, Mark Neocleous, Bryan Palmer, Jamie Peck, Sorpong Peou, Garry Potter, Georgios Papanicolaou, Mi Park, Justin Paulson, Stephanie Ross, George S. Rigakos, Heidi Rimke, Arne Christoph Ruckert, Toby Sanger, Ingo Schmidt, Alan Sears, Mitu Sengupta, Meenal Shrivastava, Janet Lee Siltanen, Susan Jane Spronk, Jim Struthers, Mark P. Thomas, Rosemary Warskett Journal Mandate: Alternate Routes is committed to creating an outlet for critical social research and interdisciplinary inquiry. A broad range of theoretical and methodological approaches are encouraged, including works from academics, labour, and community researchers. Alternate Routes is a publicly accessible academic journal and encourages provocative works that advance or challenge our understandings of historical and contemporary socio-political, economic and cultural issues. In addition to full-length articles, we publish review essays sparked by previously published material, interviews, commentaries/interventions, and book reviews. javascript:openRTWindow('http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/about/editorialTeamBio/7083') javascript:openRTWindow('http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/about/editorialTeamBio/10441') javascript:openRTWindow('http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/about/editorialTeamBio/4624') javascript:openRTWindow('http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/about/editorialTeamBio/4624') javascript:openRTWindow('http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/about/editorialTeamBio/5106') javascript:openRTWindow('http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/about/editorialTeamBio/4317') javascript:openRTWindow('http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/about/editorialTeamBio/7468') javascript:openRTWindow('http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/about/editorialTeamBio/10423') javascript:openRTWindow('http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/about/editorialTeamBio/6210') javascript:openRTWindow('http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/about/editorialTeamBio/5072') javascript:openRTWindow('http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/about/editorialTeamBio/7471') javascript:openRTWindow('http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/about/editorialTeamBio/7086') javascript:openRTWindow('http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/about/editorialTeamBio/7467') javascript:openRTWindow('http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/about/editorialTeamBio/7449') javascript:openRTWindow('http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/about/editorialTeamBio/7944') javascript:openRTWindow('http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/about/editorialTeamBio/7435') javascript:openRTWindow('http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/about/editorialTeamBio/7582') javascript:openRTWindow('http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/about/editorialTeamBio/10436') javascript:openRTWindow('http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/about/editorialTeamBio/7440') javascript:openRTWindow('http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/about/editorialTeamBio/6013') javascript:openRTWindow('http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/about/editorialTeamBio/7546') javascript:openRTWindow('http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/about/editorialTeamBio/7546') javascript:openRTWindow('http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/about/editorialTeamBio/5392') javascript:openRTWindow('http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/about/editorialTeamBio/4480') javascript:openRTWindow('http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/about/editorialTeamBio/7102') javascript:openRTWindow('http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/about/editorialTeamBio/7469') javascript:openRTWindow('http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/about/editorialTeamBio/7103') javascript:openRTWindow('http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/about/editorialTeamBio/7104') javascript:openRTWindow('http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/about/editorialTeamBio/4979') javascript:openRTWindow('http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/about/editorialTeamBio/7436') javascript:openRTWindow('http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/about/editorialTeamBio/9350') javascript:openRTWindow('http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/about/editorialTeamBio/9350') javascript:openRTWindow('http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/about/editorialTeamBio/10416') javascript:openRTWindow('http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/about/editorialTeamBio/7105') javascript:openRTWindow('http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/about/editorialTeamBio/7106') javascript:openRTWindow('http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/about/editorialTeamBio/10545') javascript:openRTWindow('http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/about/editorialTeamBio/10545') javascript:openRTWindow('http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/about/editorialTeamBio/5935') javascript:openRTWindow('http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/about/editorialTeamBio/4515') Table of Contents Editorial Introduction Austerity Urbanism and the Social Economy Carlo Fanelli and Steve Tufts Articles Settling on Austerity: ISAs, Immigrant Communities and Neoliberal Restructuring Sophia Lowe, Ted Richmond and John Shields “You Got to Make the Numbers Work”: Negotiating Managerial Reforms in the Provision of Employment Support Service Debbie L Rudman, Rebecca M. Aldrich, John Grundy, Melanie Stone, Suzanne Huot, Awish Aslam Alternatives to the Low Waged Economy: Living Wage Movements in Canada and the United States Bryan Evans Does Participatory Budgeting Lead to Local Empowerment? The Case of Chicago, IL. Laura Pin Against Housing: Homes as a Human Life Requirement Jeff Noonan and Josie Watson 7 14 47 80 114 141 Interventions Austerity Governance and the Welfare Crisis in Montreal Pierre Hamel and Grégoire Autin Toronto Alles Uber: Being Progressive in the Age of Progressive Conservative Urbanism Roger Keil Redefining “Renewal” in Toronto’s High-rise Suburbs Douglas Young A Beautiful Community, But a Troubled City: Flint’s Water Crisis Otrude N. Moyo Do Efforts to Mitigate Gentrification Work? Evidence from Washington DC Carolyn Gallaher The University in the City: The Campus as a Space of Dependence and Engagement in the Age of Austerity Kafui Attoh, Don Mitchell, Lynn A. Staeheli 165 189 219 233 248 264 Can Marx’s ‘Capital’ help us find new routes to radical change? Alternate Routes and Pluto Press present: Reading ‘Capital’ Today: Marx After 150 Years A special edition of the journal published for the 150th anniversary of ‘Capital’ Visit www.readingcapitaltoday.com to pre-order a copy at a special discount for AR readers April 2017 / 9780745399713 Available Internationally Editorial Introduction: Austerity Urbanism and the Social Economy Carlo Fanelli 1 and Steve Tufts2 This issue of Alternate Routes, “Austerity Urbanism and the Social Economy,” is particularly timely and relevant. The ‘urban question’ has been with us for some time, but it seems particularly significant at the current conjuncture. We are now, it is argued, in an age of ‘planetary urbanization,’ with ‘the urban’ predominating contemporary economy and society (Brenner 2013). It is not merely an empirical reality that most of the world’s population lives in cities, a ‘statistical artifact’ as Brenner and Schmid (2013) have argued, but that we now exist in a deeper process of urbanization or ‘global urban condition’. The global financial crisis of the last decade launched a prolonged period of austerity that continues to play out in the urban arena. Much needed investments in public transit, affordable housing, aging infrastructure, and social services elude municipalities constrained by low taxation regimes and interurban competition. These urban challenges are beginning to be linked to the broader phenomenon of “permanent austerity," a condition that precedes but is exacerbated by the 2008 recession. Ever more, cities are the battlegrounds where the struggles against increasingly authoritarian forms of neoliberalism are being waged (Albo and Fanelli 2014; Thomas and Tufts 2016). Austerity can be defined broadly as government measures taken to reduce public spending, particularly in the areas of social welfare expenditures and public sector employment. In some cases, this also includes new taxes. According to conventional narratives, these measures are taken when a government’s expenditures exceed its revenues, creating 1 Carlo Fanelli teaches in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at Ryerson University. He is the author of Megacity Malaise: Neoliberalism, Public Services and Labour in Toronto (Fernwood 2016) and co-editor (with Ingo Schmidt) of Reading Capital Today: Marx After 150 Years (Pluto 2017). 2 Steven Tufts is a member of the Department of Geography at York University. He has recently published in Antipode and the Labor Studies Journal. Austerity Urbanism and the Social Economy | 7 debt burdens due to over-borrowing. Seeing the problems of cities as part of this broader shift towards austerity urbanism, however, is valuable because it reveals the larger political and economic drivers of these problems that go beyond more particular issues such as antipathy towards taxes, over-spending or the salaries of municipal workers. “Above all, it is important to recognize” as Jamie Peck (2015: 6) has recently argued, “that enforcing economy is a relational strategy: austerity is ultimately concerned with offloading costs and displacing responsibility; it is about making others pay the price of fiscal retrenchment. In the language of the Occupy movement, it is something that the one percent, which continues to accumulate wealth and power at an alarming rate, does to the 99 percent.” Of course, manifestations of austerity urbanism vary across diverse contexts. Austerity urbanism can be understood as an uneven form of urban social organization that lacks both luxuries and basic comforts for people. As an approach to public policy, austerity urbanism has included tax-shifting for competitiveness, reductions to social services provisioning, contracting-out and privatization of city assets, new forms of marketization such as the use of public-private partnerships, and a shift away from universality to user-fees. New workplace arrangements have also proliferated, including the use of part- time and short-term contracts, as well as casual and seasonal forms of employment. In some cases, this has also incorporated new restrictions on workers’ rights to unionize and bargain collectively. Reductions to employee compensation have also been a stated aim of municipal austerity (Fanelli 2016). In this regard, the state has at times imposed austerity from above or led the charge from below, and at other times created the conditions for capital to lead in an assault against urban social life. Austerity urbanism is not a universal form, but rather a process of struggle with a diverse set of stories and practices. It is the unevenness across urban space that creates openings and possibilities for the future. This politically imposed condition is being actively resisted across a 8 | Austerity Urbanism and the Social Economy diverse range of social actors. This includes struggles against homelessness, fights for living wages, and experiments with new forms of governance all (re)producing the urban.3 What is central is developing an acute understanding of how austerity urbanism is implicated in strategies and tactics that can build a better world. Some of these strategies directly confront the logic and ideology of austerity urbanism. But others more closely reflect the context in which they operate. The ‘social economy’, the so-called ‘third’ or voluntary sector of the economy located between the public and private spheres is crucial to the functioning of neoliberal capitalism. As these institutions confront austerity urbanism, they themselves are being transformed – often in alignment with neoliberal practices. This issue addresses, through a number of articles and interventions, the links between austerity urbanism and the social economy. While the analyses provide no absolute paths to a more just world, there is enough evidence and understanding of the current conjuncture to demonstrate that alternatives are indeed necessary. Sophia Lowe, Ted Richmond and John Shields argue that in the case of immigrant settlement agencies (ISAs) the current era is an extension of the “permanent austerity” that faced such services since the 1980s. The new model for such services limits advocacy and autonomy, while integrating market driven, new public management ‘best practices’. The next contribution by Debbie Rudman and collaborators demonstrates how new public management has reconfigured nonprofit employment services agencies in ways that constrain and/or contradict the goals of reducing long-term unemployment. These pressures have reconfigured the relationships between service providers, unemployed persons and state funders, as well as increased the pace of work leading to heightened workplace insecurity. 3 Many of these issues are addressed in fuller detail in the 2016 Alternate Routes special issue, “Precarious Work and the Struggle for Living Wages,” co-edited by Carlo Fanelli and John Shields. Austerity Urbanism and the Social Economy | 9 While transformations in the social economy do reflect the latest phase of neoliberalism, there is resistance. Bryan Evans reviews the struggles of living wage movements in Canada and the United States as an emergent post-industrial working class response to precarity in cities at a time when traditional unionism has failed many workers. Laura Pin’s examination of participatory budgeting, a much lauded alternative to neoliberal urban fiscal policy, finds that such experiments are themselves limited in their capacity to challenge elite municipal powerbrokers. In what follows, Jeff Noonan and Josie Watson critically engage with anti-homelessness movements that frame ‘housing as a right’ as opposed to ‘housing as a human need’. Together these contributions demonstrate that resistance to austerity urbanism takes many forms, yet remains an incomplete project. A number of Interventions further address austerity urbanism and its uneven social dislocations. Pierre Hamel and Grégoire Autin examine how austerity as ideology operates as a necessary collaboration with different levels of government to constrain the autonomy of municipalities. Roger Keil details with great insight the regime of Toronto’s John Tory as a form of progressive urbanism that aligns with an elite conservativism under conditions of austerity. Toronto remains the focus of discussion as Douglas Young examines the debates involving residential tower renewal in the ‘in-between city’ as a possible challenge to austerity urbanism. A series of interventions then shift to the US. Otrude Moyo recounts the Flint, Michigan water crisis and situates the tragedy in the broader context of a racialized, neoliberal urbanism that has reproduced white supremacy through urban policy. Related, Carolyn Gallaher examines policy efforts to mitigate gentrification in Washington, DC through an examination of a tenant ‘right-to-buy’ program which is a complex assemblage of austerity urbanism and social justice efforts. The final intervention from the US is from Kafui Attoh, Don Mitchell and Lynn A. Staeheli, who look at the role of the university in the city. Here, the final intervention provides a hint of optimism in an era where post- 10 | Austerity Urbanism and the Social Economy secondary institutions are viewed with increasing cynicism. Universities, as spaces of engagement, can provide a place for students and community to come together in the city and resist austerity urbanism. 4 We would like to thank all our contributors to this issue. We would also like to gratefully acknowledge the invaluable contributions of external reviewers who lent their time, energy and expertise in providing feedback on articles. Thanks are also due to Jeff Noonan who was joined by Jamey Essex this year as co-editors of the Interventions section. Moving into 2017, all book reviews will now be available online at www.alternateroutes.ca on a rolling basis. Many of these papers were presented at the Alternate Routes conference, “Sub/Urbanizing Austerity: Impacts and Alternatives,” hosted by York University’s City Institute in March 2016.5 We thank both the institute and the university for sponsoring the conference and assisting with the publication of this issue. References Albo, G. and Fanelli, C. (2014). Austerity Against Democracy: An Authoritarian Phase of Neoliberalism? Teoria Politica, 4, 65-88. Brenner, N. (2013). Theses on Urbanization. Public Culture, 25(1), 85- 114 Brenner, N. and Schmid, C. (2013). The ‘Urban Age’ in Question. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38(3), 731-755. Fanelli, C. (2016) Megacity Malaise: Neoliberalism, Public Services and Labour in Toronto. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing. 4 See also, the broad range of contributions in the 2015 Alternate Routes special issue, “Neoliberalism and the Degradation of Education,” co-edited by Carlo Fanelli and Bryan Evans. 5 Video presentations from this and past conferences are available online at the Alternate Routes website, http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/pages/view/Video Austerity Urbanism and the Social Economy | 11 Fanelli, C. and J. Shields, eds. (2016). Precarious Work and the Struggle for Living Wages, Alternate Routes 27. Edmonton: Athabasca University. Fanelli, C. and B. Evans, eds. (2015). Neoliberalism and the Degradation of Education, Alternate Routes 26. Edmonton: Athabasca University Press. Peck, J. (2015) Austerity Urbanism: The Neoliberal Crisis of American Cities. Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung (New York), City Series #1, http://www.rosalux-nyc.org/wp- content/files_mf/peck_austerity_urbanism_eng.pdf Thomas, M. and Tufts. S (2016) ‘Enabling Dissent’: Contesting Austerity and Right Populism in Toronto, Canada. The Economic and Labour Relations Review 27(1) 29–45. 12 | Austerity Urbanism and the Social Economy http://www.rosalux-nyc.org/wp-content/files_mf/peck_austerity_urbanism_eng.pdf http://www.rosalux-nyc.org/wp-content/files_mf/peck_austerity_urbanism_eng.pdf