The Austerity Governance of Baltimore’s Neighbourhoods

This online lecture has been organised by the Cities, Environment and Liveability (CEL) Pathway and is open to all ESRC and non-ESRC funded PhD and MA Social Research students within the WRDTP’s seven partner universities. Whilst this session has been organised by the CEL Pathway, students aligned with other interdisciplinary Pathways are welcome to attend if it’s themes and content will be of use to you in your research.

Following on from Dr Lawrence Brown’s talk, Madeleine Pill will present her research on the governance of Baltimore, undertaken over a two-year period following the city uprising in April 2015. Identification of elite, middle and marginal governance actors, the strategies of development (gentrification) and demolition (displacement) adopted, and their spatial manifestation, shows how neighbourhood governance is characterised by the local state’s absence except for its basic function of (over) policing of the marginalised. Citizens are excluded from governance arrangements. Despite persistent local activism protesting injustice and inequity, activist espousal of an alternative ideology with regard to the city’s development politics struggles to disrupt the logic and practices of austerity governance.

Dr Madeleine Pill

Madeleine is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, University of Sheffield, and deputy director of the WRDTP CEL pathway. She researches the theory and practice of governance and collaboration, with a particular focus on state-society relationships at the urban/local and neighbourhood scales in the UK and the US. She has published work on the scope for and limits to state and citizen action at the local level in a context of austerity politics, regarding the changing use of the neighbourhood scale amidst increased expectations of citizen self-help, shifts in local government policy and practice, and the roles played by other, non-state actors such as philanthropic foundations.