Suchergebnisse

Urban research often focuses on aggregate characteristics of macroeconomic performances or in-depth case studies of everyday urban phenomena. However, this dichotomy risks alienating two perspectives that can constructively illuminate spatial developments together. This article extends the "political economy of everyday life" approach, borrowed from political economy, to connect the local and everyday to global structures. The aim is to make this perspective sensitive to geographic differences and develop a "spatial political economy of everyday life." To operationalise this approach, I discuss the multi-scale analysis employed in a comparative project on austerity and urban youth in Ireland that sought to ground everyday consequences in a structural context. This project combined three methods: (a) a theoretical analysis of the global structures of the 2008 financial crisis, (b) a policy analysis of the impact of Irish austerity policies on youth, and (c) a comparative qualitative analysis of the everyday consequences of crisis and austerity on youth from disadvantaged neighbourhoods in Cork and Dublin. This embedded comparative approach identified how the global financial crisis shaped national policies and how geographic differences shaped everyday spatial and personal consequences. This embedded comparative approach conceptualises cities as places where the structural and everyday constitute each other. It illuminates how this mutual interaction creates spatial particularities and common trends. In doing so, an embedded comparative approach contributes to developing a "spatial political economy of everyday life."

This article explores exclusion and sense of displacement through the austerity experiences of young adults in Ballymun, a disadvantaged urban neighbourhood in Dublin, Ireland. Such youth encountered exclusion on the labour market, urban housing, and support services. As austerity intensified urban exclusion, youth's affective relations with their neighbourhood, their city, and the state transformed. Using the concept 'at-homeness', it is argued that reduced income and funding for social services resulted locally in a partial 'sense of displacement'. Nationally, the class character of austerity reduced sense of belonging as youth felt betrayed and unfairly treated. It is argued that social, economic and political developments affect at-homeness, and that reduced sense of belonging induced by austerity can lead to a sense of displacement, not through physical movement, but by estrangement from the places one inhabits through processes of abandonment. Therefore, sense of displacement is expanded beyond gentrification as it can emerge from socio-economic transformations in a more-or-less stable physical and demographic environment.

This chapter establishes how austerity interacts with place, space and class to create new constellations of urban exclusion and inclusion for disadvantaged urban youth. Focussing on the experience of austerity by young people (18-25) from Cork and Dublin, Ireland, it reveals the ways in which austerity encapsulates and transforms their lifeworld and how age, class, and space come together to shape the new social inequalities and spatial relations of austerity urbanism. Emphasising the critical insights to be gained from qualitative engagement with experiential accounts of austerity, this chapter focusses on experiences and encounters of austerity to establish the role of spatial, social, and personal characteristics in shaping the pathways through which austerity enters and transforms the lifeworld and the geographies of the everyday. Three specific dimensions of austerity urbanism – destructive creativity, deficit politics and devolved risk (Peck, 2012) – are connected to elements of social exclusion; not being allowed, not being able and not being willing to belong to society (Schuyt, 2006). As such, it is argued that the extreme economic rationality of austerity disallows urban life by disabling/discouraging stable employment and sustained consumption. Furthermore, it establishes how such developments are aggravated by the age and class status of disadvantaged urban youth. Finally, the experience of this exclusion affects youth's sense of belonging, the lack whereof presents itself as a desire to emigrate to countries that treat their citizens just and fairly. As such, austerity urbanism creates new conditions of urban inclusion and exclusion along lines of age, space and class.

Deze rubriek richt zich op (niet alleen jonge) onderzoekers. Simpel en kort: hoe was het ook weer? Over principes of procedures in kwalitatief onderzoek.

Often framed in the public discourse as Europe's ultimate Other, Muslims have been heftily debated and vastly problematised by politicians, pundits, and public intellectuals as unwanted immigrants, part of a bad diversity, problematic, violent, refusals of modernity, secularism, and freedom. Thinking through the body as a phenomenal lived body, we explore Othering as a set of visual, auditory, olfactory, and haptic encounters. Employing an urban ethnography on everyday lived experiences of young Muslims in Amsterdam, the paper investigates multiple modes through which Othering is sensed, lived, and felt through the body.