ABSTRACT
Introduction This chapter focuses on the social, cultural, political, and geographical implications of the economic crisis and the applied austerity politics in, and for, Southern European cities. It does so by adopting an approach that progressively unravels challenges for and the changing role of urban planning and territorial governance. The idea underlying this chapter is that the local dimension, and especially the dimension of cities, offers a privileged perspective to understand crisis and austerity for two reasons. First, crisis and austerity concern the cities, especially in the European context, where urbanisation is at a very advanced stage. Cities are the places where (most) people live; this means that capital, power, and wealth are accumulated here on the one hand; but on the other hand they are also the place where the most vulnerable classes are concentrated. Second, because of their role in global economic networks, cities are a significant level for understanding the linkages between the local and the global, hence the political and social implications of the crisis and the policies applied in response to these. Therefore, the chapter provides an understanding of the relations between economic crisis and austerity and gives an overview of the way crisis and austerity have had different effects on different European member states: the spatial manifestation of the crisis, effects for local political regimes, and the variegated geographical distribution of impacts in the current and past crises. Second, the chapter engages with the role of different contexts for, and cultures of, spatial planning in order to explore the way the variegated versions of the crisis clash with a landscape of administrative, political, and territorial contexts. Third, it depicts the emergence of new and alternative models for territorial and urban governance, and their implications for legitimacy and accountability in decisionmaking processes.
