Inclusion and the city

Europe’s cities are leading actors in the territorial order traced by rescaling processes. Their leading role is affected by different sorts of pressure which nonetheless converge in some senses. The constraints deriving from globalization have obliged the institutions of city government to adopt strategies of partnership with economic actors in order to increase the territory’s attractiveness and competitiveness. The process of devolution has widened urban decisionmaking areas and powers. In this way new forms of local governance have been designed, backed by instruments for action and collective decision, aiming to reconcile different interests (Le Galès, 2002). At the same time, ever since the 1970s cities have felt the most critical effects of restructuring and the economic crises. A growing combination of problems, fruit of the 2007/2008 crisis, weighs on the present-day scenario. Economic competition between cities only acts in the interests of those able to operate as strategic links in the relations between the economy and politics (Rossi and Vanolo, 2010). Processes of financialization of the economy transform the urban structure and the living conditions of its inhabitants profoundly. The growth of economic and socio-spatial inequality fuels dynamics of fragmentization and polarization (Cassiers and Kesteloot, 2012). The State fiscal crisis, which returned as a key issue from 2008 onwards, induced rentrenchment strategies that have harsh consequences for balances and local powers. Despite all this, cities are considered ‘the economic engines of the European economy’1 and the places in which new strategies of economic and social development can be set up. According to the EU: ‘Cities are the places where social and/or economic problems become most manifest, but cities are also the places where innovative solutions are found more rapidly’.2 Initiatives in cities take place in a framework of constraints and opportunities in which frames, financial incentives and models for action are assembled, whose negotiation originates with the EU, the States and the subnational governments but also the transnational networks that connect cities directly, for example Eurocities. As Uitermark (2005, p. 149; cited in Blakeley, 2010) maintains, this results in the impression that cities are subject to a general strategy conceived by a central government (national or European). Nonetheless, similar global trends are incorporated everywhere, according to different dynamics (ibid.).