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In this project (fieldwork took place between 2015 and 2018), we explored how austerity is navigated in and through municipal governance, in the context of prolonged neoliberalisation, economic crises, and struggles for alternative political economies.
Baltimore is known for its Inner Harbor redevelopment of the 1970s, which became a blueprint for waterfront regeneration around the world; and for its concentrated poverty and racial injustice, as immortalised in the HBO series ‘The Wire’. It is a salutary example of a deindustrialised city which was an early adopter of strategies of urban entrepreneurialism. Its ‘perma-austerity’ and the extent and depth of its divisions are extreme by the standards of the other cities we studied. In 2015, the city gained worldwide attention when there was an uprising following the death of a young black man, Freddie Gray, due to injuries sustained in police custody. My research, phased over the following two years, draws specific attention to what changed, and what didn’t, as a result.
Overall I found that the goals and fixes of Baltimore’s governance remained largely the same. City government continues to prioritise relationships with the city’s major ‘ed and med’ anchor institutions like Johns Hopkins University, and the sportswear corporation Under Armour, anchoring the latest waterfront megaproject which is benefiting from the biggest financing package in the city’s history. A triage investment system prioritises neighbourhoods with development potential. The most deprived neighbourhoods, with majority African American populations, are written off economically and ‘contained’ through repression. Participatory mechanisms for grassroots organisations and citizens are scarce and tokenistic.
The research affirms the importance of everyday struggles about public services - especially (over) policing, and (lack of) housing and education; along with conflicts about urban redevelopment, such as the distribution of tax subsidies which reasserts the dominance of the waterfront and of private actors in the city. Major, private but non-profit actors (such as the city’s ‘eds and meds’ and philanthropic foundations) were engaged in ‘economic inclusion’ efforts such as local hiring and procurement, but this was an incremental step which did not seek the radical community wealth building envisaged by some citizen activists.
Such struggles not only focus attention on the governance of the city, from which citizens are excluded, but on the scope for more equitable alternatives which can disrupt the normative power of neoliberal ideologies and redress the iniquitous divisions with which Baltimore is synonymous. The need to repoliticise debates about the priorities being pursued was stressed at a research workshop held in the city. Citizens and civil society were not only not ‘at the table’, but as a workshop attendee pointed out, “we don’t even know where the table is.”
Research outputs to date include a stakeholder report available in four languages and a special ‘Worlds of Austerity’ issue of the Journal of Urban Affairs (2020), which includes my paper, ‘The austerity governance of Baltimore’s neighborhoods: “The conversation may have changed but the systems aren’t changing” (42:1, 143-158). A co-authored volume, ‘New Spaces of Hope’ is forthcoming from Bristol University Press.