Contenu du sommaire : L'austérité urbaine : « faire face et faire avec » en Europe du Sud

Since the financial crisis of the late 2000s, the term “austerity”, initially referring to national policies seeking to reduce budget deficits through public spending cuts, fiscal restraint and privatization, is increasingly applied to cities. While the concept of “austerity urbanism” has been proposed to describe Northern American cities, this special issue focuses on the cities of Southern Europe, which were deeply hit by the public debt crisis and the “austerity agendas” which followed the 2008 economic turmoil. Many studies have dealt with the collective mobilizations and political struggles that broke out as a way of “facing up to” austerity policies, and explored the restructuring of municipal finances and local governance in Southern European cities. The articles of this special issue focus on everyday practices and individual adaptation strategies of urban dwellers. They analyse the impacts of austerity policies on governance and urban projects, but also on urban mobilities, living arrangements and everyday practices. They explore the resilience and adaptation capacities of urban societies in Southern Europe, and their ways of “coping with” austerity.

Is “austerity urbanism” really a new chapter in the history of Mediterranean cities ? This article examines this from the case of Spain, resituating recent Spanish urban policies within the national history of the welfare state and local government autonomy. This long-term perspective shows that, except during the first years of the return of democracy, during the 1980s and 1990s, cities and their citizens are used to facing austerity-led policies. Moreover, during Franco's regime (1939-1975), housing production was progressively assumed by private developers, who soon became the main actors of urban building- and extension of cities, starting from the 1950s.

In terms of housing systems, Italian cities belong to the so called “Southern-European model” which is marked by the primacy of home-ownership, a weak rate of tenancy and even more scarce presence of public housing. Since the financial and economic crisis of 2008, households are dealing with increasing economic distress rather than experiencing a wide housing crisis, as in the US or in global cities. The severe austerity agenda which is affecting Italy since the economic meltdown is mainly transforming the labour market and the public sector. Under such a scenario, this paper takes into account the multifaceted strategies emerging at a neighbourhood level, in quite an odd city if compared to other Italian contexts : Turin. The Turinese particularity is linked both to its urban history, for its industrial and then post-industrial path, to its weakly Mediterranean conditions, considering the below-average levels of informality and porosity. The working-class quarter of Aurora, in Northern Turin, interestingly shows a particular kind of reaction toward austerity, related to the new and controversial field of short-term rentals offered through online peer-to-peer platforms (e.g. Airbnb). Narratives and strategies elaborated to face the crisis by middle and lower-middle class individuals and households, using rent as income substitution, integration or investment in that area, are therefore the main source for this paper. The final remarks include discussion of the urban and social-justice implications.

In the last decade, Portuguese migrations have been reactivated. The economic crisis of 2008 led to high unemployment rates and austerity policies, giving rise to new mobilities. Migration to rural areas has mainly been studied in northern European countries and is generally considered as an amenity migration. This phenomenon has received little attention in southern European countries where rural migrations are more recent and are part of different issues. In Portugal, we propose to analyze the life trajectories of neo-farmers based on a field survey in Alentejo and the Lisbon region. Our results show that the choice of rurality is the result of a combination of factors, operating on different social and spatial scales. Rural migrations are reactivated by the economic crisis but also respond to individual aspirations originating from a rejection of the urban way of life. This rejection, though widely shared among neo-farmers does not entail a radical break with the city. On the contrary, these migrations emerge from circulations connecting rural and urban spaces, a dual integration that can become a resource in support of economic activities and mechanisms of solidarity.

Under what conditions can a big urban project be locally sustained in the era of austerity? The wakening of the metropolitan actors after a decade of crisis and dormant planning, reviving a project both as image and discourse, reconciling private and public interests, but with neither operational capacity nor financial room for manoeuvre, altogether creates a paradox. A set of theoretical tools (infrastructural functionalism, the actors'resources, soft spaces) help understand the reasons for the survival of a project that can never be implemented. While they expose two ways of legitimizing decisions, the authors reconstruct the dissymmetry in the protagonists'capacities for action, discuss the shift in power-relations, explain the frictions that arise from them. The result is as follows: the project is shrinking, but nothing changes fundamentally, except its spatial substance. The project's intention is not oriented towards the regeneration of marginal and deprived northern districts. It envisages a mystified metropolitan periphery as a new frontier which could integrate and resolve all opposition and contradictions among Madrid planners.