This paper provides a theoretical and political critique of how the concept of resilience has been applied to places. It is based upon three main points. First, the ecological concept of resilience...

From resilience to resourcefulness: A critique of resilience policy and activism

Social justice has moved to a central place in planning theory and practice, building on prior commitments to advocacy, equity, and deliberative planning. But moving beyond the abstraction of justice to definition, institutionalization, implementation, and practice has proved challenging. Social justice—a term coined by 19 th century theologians with roots in Aristotelian ethics—is one of those ideals that is easy to extol and hard to realize in practice. And the challenge of implementation has been heightened by existing conditions of structural inequality, social fragmentation, globalization, authoritarianism, demagoguery, institutional failure, and more.

[해외 대학 연구센터 소개] Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Eco-Localisation as a progressive response to peak oil and climate change - a sympathetic critique

As cities have become both site and object of capital accumulation in a neoliberal political economy, the challenges to community practice aimed at creating, preserving, and improving affordable housing and neighborhoods have grown. Financial markets and actors are increasingly central to the workings of capitalism, transforming the meaning and significance of mortgage capital in local communities and redrawing the relationship between housing and urban inequality. This article addresses the integration of housing and financial markets through the case of "predatory equity," a wave of aggressive private equity investment in New York City's affordable rental sector during the mid-2000s real estate boom. I consider the potential for community organizations to develop innovative, effective, and progressive practices to contest the impact of predatory equity on affordable housing. Highlighting how organizations employed discursive and empirical tactics as well as tactics that reworked the sites, spaces, and structures of finance, this research speaks to the political possibility of contemporary community practice.

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Contesting the Financialization of Urban Space: Community Organizations and the Struggle to Preserve Affordable Rental Housing in New York City

This paper addresses the increasing socio-spatial inequalities in European cities and their impact on the possibilities for fostering social cohesion. Many policy programmes tackle spatial unevenne...

Socio-spatial Inequalities and Social Cohesion in European Cities

As the realm of the community has grown increasingly important in the contemporary political economy, the theoretical debates surrounding community have also grown in importance and volume. Too often this literature has been either celebratory or dismissive; either romanticizing the concept and thereby elevating it to primary rank as the focal point of societal initiatives, or objecting to its regulated limits and contradictions and thereby dismissing its importance and political utility. There are important contributions being made by both those who dismiss community and those who celebrate it. But for those interested in understanding the potential for emancipatory social change in the contemporary political economy of neoliberalism there are also severe limitations imposed by these perspectives. After critiquing these literatures and debates, we put forward an understanding of community that is neither dismissive nor celebratory, but instead argues that communities need to be understood as simultaneously products of both their larger, and largely external, contexts, and the practices, organizations and relations that take place within them. Thus, communities, because of their central place in capitalist political economies, can be vital arenas for social change. But they are also arenas that are constrained in their capacities to host such efforts.

Robert Fisher

Papers

Neither Romance Nor Regulation: Re‐evaluating Community