Crowdfunding the City: The End of 'Cataclysmic Money'?

The limits to openness: Co-working, design and social innovation in the neoliberal city

“…Becoming open is said to enable civic alternatives to either corporate or state-led initiatives, with crowdsourcing and crowdfunding a way of democratising new civic localism. Following Bieri (2015), given the claims of bottom-up democratisation through blurring the boundaries between who produces and consumes urban space -and here we can include social infrastructure -might the emergence of open projects be ushering in new tendencies towards crowd-financing in the post-crisis city? Certainly, open civic projects fit rather closely with the prevailing vision of small-state, entrepreneurial commons, coinciding with shrinking state funding under austerity localism.…”

Limits of fiscal federalism: How narratives of local government inefficiency facilitate scalar dumping in New York State

“…Studies in the 1990s (e.g., Gold and Ritchie, 1992;Pagano, 1990) found state governments often allowed localities to diversify local revenue sources when they imposed TELs on localities or cut state aid, but recent works find local governments are constrained on both expenditure and revenue choices (Kim and Warner, 2018b;Wen et al, 2018). This may signal a fundamental shift in state-local relations toward a "fend-for-yourself" federalism (Bieri, 2015).…”

Crowdfunding cities: Social entrepreneurship, speculation and solidarity in Berlin

“…Urban geographers are presently focusing on the role and consequences of crowdfunding in cities (Bieri, 2015;Tonkiss 2013). This includes, but is certainly not limited to, the emergence of so-called 'civic crowdfunding' that expressly mobilizes relatively small volumes of localized funding and financial flows for community and infrastructural projects (Brent and Lorah 2019; see Davies 2015).…”

“…With reference to crowdfunded projects taking place in disused sites in a number of European cities, for example, Tonkiss (2013) contrasts 'slow money and nonmonetary investments' that 'produce gradual spatial, social and economic value and continued returns to actual users' with '"cataclysmic money" leveraged to produce rapid returns to investors (most of them very distant) and to build the physical and economic ruins of the crises to come ' (p. 320). Bieri (2015) similarly draws on Jacobs to make a distinction between the crowdfunding of 'grassroots efforts' by entrepreneurs and local communities in cities, and crowdfunding as a new route by which finance capital is able to 'switch' from production into unproductive real-estate investment (see Harvey, 2001). With brief reference to New York, San Francisco and Chicago, Bieri highlights the rise of US crowdfunding platforms -such as FundRise, RealtyShares and CrowdStreet -that intermediate flows of investment into residential and commercial real-estate ventures.…”

“…First, we will address how crowdfunding is enrolled in urban governance in North America and Europe in particular. In his instructive piece for urban geographers, David Bieri (2015) suggests that crowdfunding 'emerges as the continuation of a neoliberal narrative of local economic governance that fetishises private initiative' (p. 2430).…”