This paper engages with a recent set of critical arguments concerning the 'post-crisis city' and the political economy of 'austerity urbanism'. The focus of the discussion is on practical interventions in the vacant and disused spaces of recessionary cities, and in particular on temporary designs and provisional uses. In this way it opens a further line of argument about urbanism under conditions of austerity, alongside analyses of the formal politics of austerity or the possibilities of urban activism in these settings. Its concern is with forms of urban intervention that rework orthodoxies of urban development as usual: in particular the timescales that inform conventional development models; the understandings of use around which sites are planned and designed; and the ways in which value is realised through the production of urban spaces. The argument centres on European contexts of austerity urbanism, drawing on critical examples of urban design and occupation in the region's largest economies. Such urban strategies are concerned with a politics and a practice of small incursions in material spaces.
Recent debates within social and political theory, and within the public sphere more generally, reveal growing concern with issues of `trust'. While forms of voluntary association frequently are cited as prime examples of trust relations, they rarely provide a focus for such debates. In this paper we examine current developments within the voluntary sector in Britain, arguing that the relation of voluntary organisations to questions of trust is increasingly problematic. In particular a tension exists between trust relations based on principles of voluntarism and linked to shared values, and relations of confidence that are mediated by institutional and contractual forms. After surveying recent theoretical accounts of trust and confidence, we consider the relevance of these debates to the British voluntary sector. We then draw on a range of quantitative and qualitative research on the voluntary sector to examine how trust and confidence are negotiated with a number of key constituencies: the general public; government and institutional funders; business; and users or beneficiaries. Our argument is that, while resources of trust are linked to their core values, voluntary organisations are increasingly governed by formal measures designed to promote confidence.
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Modern social theory has frequently represented city life as isolating, as degrading of social ties and as inimical to community. In another register, however, urban contexts have also been primary sites for imagining and re-imagining forms of community, especially on the basis of shared social spaces or elective identities. The discussion in this article explores this relation between solitude and community in the city. While a language of community has been important for articulating various politics of difference, I suggest that an ethics of indifference also opens up certain rights to the city. The point, however, is not simply to set a conception of indifference or anonymity against one of community or visibility, but rather to think about dissociation as a certain kind of social relation, to consider the solitude of cities as a common, if ambivalent, property. The discussion begins by addressing the nature of indifference and anonymity in urban contexts before turning to New York as the site for recent narratives of a private urban life, and a more public death, in order to explore the complex interplay of difference and indifference, community and solitude, in the city.
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