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Home‐ and Community‐Based Work at the Margins of Welfare: Balancing between Disciplinary, Participatory and Caring Approaches
Full text linkBy the end of the 20th century, deinstitutionalisation had become a pervasive trend in the Western world. This thematic issue discusses how successful deinstitutionalisation has been in enabling dignified and safe living with necessary services in local communities. It contributes to an understanding of the history and phases of deinstitutionalisation and ‘home turn’ policies, and sheds light on the grassroots‐level of home‐ and community‐based work at the margins of welfare, hitherto little researched. The latter includes grassroots work to implement the Housing First approach to homelessness, commonly portrayed as a means of social inclusion, worker–client interactions during home visits and in the local community, as well as close inspections of what ‘housing support’ may actually entail in terms of care, discipline and service user participation
Irritation Design: Updating Steering Theory in the Age of Governance
Full text linkIs steering still a viable concept? The article answers this question with a conditional yes. On the one hand, its conceptual core remains intact. Getting others—who are considered to be idiosyncratic—to solve rather than pose societal problems is no less relevant for recent governance analyses. On the other, steering as a concept needs some updates in terms of subjects, objects, and ways of steering. Beyond merely extending the list of possible subjects and objects of steering, the concept of irritation design is proposed. It stresses that making communication hard to ignore can be a matter of design. Modern society seems to be crowded with steering entities, many of which displaying smart irritation designs. This leads to complex constellations. Yet it remains valuable to analyze strategies of influence because despite all dynamics and happenstance, different chances of impact correlate with different irritation design. Still, we have to account for two aspects: 1) Capacities (beyond money or power) needed for designing irritations are unequally distributed; 2) material effects and empirical boundaries have their share in a decreased ignorability
A City Profile of Malaga: The Role of the Port-City Border throughout Historical Transformations
Full text linkThe relationships Malaga has established with its port have changed over the centuries, conjuring up a variety of scenarios and circumstances. The past and present are closely linked phenomena in this case study where the porosity of the port‐city fabric has marked the city’s development and constitutes a key issue in the current and future challenges it faces. Malaga provides a particularly interesting example of a post‐industrial city that has reopened its port to its inhabitants’ acclaim while maintaining port activity. However, the growth tourism has seen in recent years has come to dominate the local economy. Cruise ships have taken on a significant role and have brought about important changes in the dynamics and flows between the port and the city, unsettling the balance between the two. This profile explores port‐city development through the lens of boundaries and flows, demonstrating how their dynamics have determined Malaga’s spatial, functional, and social development over time and how they continue to do so to this day. This article reviews the transformations the city has undergone and its future opportunities to achieve a balanced and sustainable port‐city relationship
Critical Theory and Being Critical: Connections and Contradictions
Full text linkThis editorial responds to a professionalization and constrained notion of “critical theory” to argue for an academic and humanist-centered approach to developing debates and discussions around the future of critical theory and “being critical.
Editorial: Access or Excess? Redefining the Boundaries of Transparency in the EU’s Decision-Making
Full text linkOver the last decades, transparency has featured prominently among the European Union’s (EU) efforts to democratize and legitimize its governance. This shift toward transparency has taken many forms and, as the contributions to this thematic issue show, these different forms have evolved significantly over time. Yet, initiatives to enhance transparency have often been blamed for limiting the efficiency of the decision-making process or leading to suboptimal policy outcomes. Consequently, the debate has shifted to whether transparency would be excessive in that it would undermine the EU’s capacity to deliver through political arrangements. This editorial presents this transparency–efficiency dilemma, which the different contributions to this thematic issue analyse further
Blak, Bi+ and Borderlands: An Autoethnography on Multiplicities of Indigenous Queer Identities Using Borderland Theory
Full text linkIndigenous queer people often experience a conflict in identity, feeling torn between long-standing cultures and new LGBTIQA+ spaces; however, conflicts are being reframed by new generations of Indigenous queer academics who consider decolonising ideas about white heteronormativity. The following autoethnography of my own Indigenous queer journey (muru) uses narrative analysis to explore the challenges of living between worlds as well as the difficulties in gaining acceptance from multiple cultures. This story, like many others, highlights the power of narrative as it reflects the nuanced experiences of Indigenous queer people with identity multiplicity via the application of borderland theory. The narrative analysis forefronts the wide impact of internalised phobias (homophobia, biphobia, and racism) and its impact on performative self-expression of sexual identity, self-sabotage, institutionalized racism and shadeism, and community acceptance, particularly for bi+ sexual identities. This article will explore existing literature which illustrates how navigating the multiplicity of identities may result in poorer social and emotional wellbeing, particularly for Indigenous queer youth. The article concludes with final comments and suggests future directions in mixed method research with Indigenous queer Australians to better understand and improve their social and emotional wellbeing
Extreme Risk Makes the Journey Feasible: Decision-Making amongst Migrants in the Horn of Africa
Full text linkThis article explores how some potential migrants in the Horn of Africa incorporate the prospects of extreme danger into their journeys. It draws on evidence from qualitative interviews and focus group discussions with over 400 respondents, mainly from Ethiopian and Somali communities. It shows that the risks of migration within the Horn of Africa are often well known, thanks to strong migrant networks and improved mobile communications. Indeed, migrants may be better informed of the risks of the journey than they are about their prospects of securing a good living upon arrival. However, rather than discouraging people’s migration, high risk may open up new possibilities. This article supports this argument with two examples. First, as Yemen descended into civil war, the breakdown of state control created new opportunities to move undetected, notwithstanding the threat of injury and death. This helps explain why the number of Ethiopians passing through Yemen increased with the conflict, contrary to expectations. Second, some young Somalis are soliciting the services of smugglers to help them move towards Europe, knowing that they are likely to be abused and held for ransom en route. They gamble on their captors’ demands being met by family members, who would not otherwise have endorsed or paid for their journey. These findings challenge common assumptions about risk and decision-making, and suggests that some migrants may move because of, rather than in spite of, the risks involved. It also calls into question initiatives that seek to deter migration by raising awareness about the risks of the journey
The Practice of Urban Experimentation in Dutch City Labs
Full text link‘Urban planning by experiment’ can be seen as an approach that uses experimentation to innovate and improve urban planning instruments, approaches, and outcomes. Nowadays, urban experiments—interventions in the city with the aim to innovate, learn, or gain experience—are increasingly taking place in the context of Urban Living Labs. In the Netherlands, a certain type of Urban Living Lab, called city labs, is flourishing, and it has been suggested that these labs could make an important contribution to ‘urban planning by experiment.’ However, previous studies have indicated that this will depend on how experimentation is conducted in these labs. To obtain a more comprehensive picture of the practice of experimentation, we conducted a survey among Dutch city labs, supplemented by individual and group interviews with practitioners from a small subset of the 17 responding labs. We conclude that there is a poor match between the practice of experimentation in Dutch city labs and the characteristics that are considered to support effective ‘urban planning by experiment’ (i.e., a structured approach to experimentation, co-creation of experiments, active and targeted dissemination of lessons learned, and experiments as linking pins between municipal policy goals and the needs of urban society). This suggests that the current contribution of Dutch city labs to ‘urban planning by experiment’ is probably quite limited. Further research is needed to determine whether the typical practice of experimentation encountered in the Dutch city labs, i.e., action-oriented, resource-limited, and largely driven by opportunities, is also found in Urban Living Labs elsewhere
Scrutiny or Complacency? Banking Union in the Bundestag and the Assemblée Nationale
Full text linkThe financial and eurozone crises highlighted the inadequacy of the original governance structures of the eurozone. In response, a range of reforms were launched, including the creation of a European banking union. In practice, some elements of the banking union were delayed by division among member states and the breakdown of the Franco-German motor, such as the question of the operationalization of the single resolution mechanism and fund or the deposit insurance scheme. In addition, eurozone governance—which would once have been regarded as a technocratic issue—became increasingly politicized. The aim of this article is to study the extent to which the banking union was scrutinized by parliament and to what degree this reflects material interests and ideas. For this purpose, it focuses on salience (i.e., how much attention the issue received) and polarization (i.e., the divergence of positions). The analysis of the resolutions and debates of the German Bundestag and French Assemblée Nationale, i.e., the parliaments of two key states in EU decision-making on banking union, finds that the German government was indeed closely scrutinized, whereas the French government was relatively unconstrained
Housing Vienna: The Socio-Spatial Effects of Inclusionary and Exclusionary Mechanisms of Housing Provision
Full text linkThe provision of housing plays a decisive role in segregation processes. In a European context increasingly influenced by variegated neo-liberal housing policies, Vienna’s approach is characterised by generous access to social housing. This inclusive strategy aims at actively preventing segregation and the isolation of certain groups. Over the last 30 years, however, reconfigured multi-level arrangements and wider contextual changes have transformed Vienna’s housing governance. This article explores how. In particular, it aims at disentangling the relationship between housing policy reforms at multiple policy levels and the changes of the mechanisms shaping the access to tenure segments and residential segregation in Vienna. Through the use of process tracing, we identify critical junctures of housing governance and relate them to housing segmentation and segregation measures over a period of approximately 30 years. Our findings show that reforms on multiple levels produce an increasingly deregulated private rental market and an increasingly fragmented access to a diversified provision of social housing. From a spatial point of view, persistent patterns of segregation blend with new ones, leading to decreasing segregation characterised by a more even spatial distribution of low and high-status groups. At the same time, both groups show very low, but slightly increased levels of isolation. Tenant profiles in social housing are, however, generally still very mixed. Balancing the trade-off between a social mix and social targeting without excluding residents in need will remain the main challenge for Vienna’s social housing model