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A climate of austerity has gripped the politico-economic philosophy of many nation states across Europe and beyond as governments seek to rebalance budget deficits. This presents unique challenges for those engaged in purposeful acts aiming to regenerate communities of places – the regeneration managers.

England provides an interesting case study to examine some of the prime challenges facing regeneration managers by focusing on the ideologies that have informed successive UK governments’ policy responses and spatial strategies. The main body of research, including interviews, was carried out between 2010 and 2012, and was subsequently updated in early 2013.

Tracing an apparent transmutation of urban regeneration policy, the chapter helps to unmask a spatially unjust neoliberal toolkit, albeit pierced by some socially motivated actually existing regeneration initiatives. The transmutation of regeneration that has taken place is often concealed by de facto austerity measures and austerity politics.

The programme of interviews remains ongoing, as the research continues to track the shifting contours of state-led regeneration policy. Analysis is therefore provisional and explorative, with more detailed research reports and publications subject to follow.

The chapter explores emerging new agendas and sets out to identify some of the primary challenges that regeneration managers must face.

‘Regeneration’ as a state-led policy objective and political concern has been virtually expunged from the Coalition lexicon. The present policy preference is to target public resources in ‘value-added’ schemes that favour private oriented objectives in a highly unbalanced way.

The curtailment of broader regeneration debates has framed discussions limited to the depth of cuts, the speed of implementation and the spatial distribution of such measures. The result is that regeneration, understood as a capitalist policy instrument intended to respond to and assuage the outcomes produced by capitalist frameworks, is no more.

The proliferation of homelessness and housing precariousness, along with a dramatic growth in food banks, are two signs that while parts of the UK economy may be recovering from the 2008 financial crisis and recession, the same cannot be said for the living conditions of much of the poor and working class population. Much of the media discussion has centered on the ways in which these social ills have been caused by government policy, particularly cuts to social and welfare services introduced under the banner of “austerity.” I argue in this paper, however, that a narrow focus on austerity risks obscuring some of the longer-term structural transformations that have taken place under neoliberal capitalism, namely: (1) financialization and (2) the privatization of social reproduction. Situating these two trends within a longer history of capitalism, I argue, allows us to understand the contemporary housing and food crises as specific (and highly gendered) manifestations of a more fundamental contradiction between capital accumulation and progressive and sustainable forms of social reproduction. Doing so further helps to locate the dramatic proliferation of household debt, which has been supported by both processes, as both cause and consequence of the crisis in social reproduction faced by many UK households.

Political parties frequently engage in exclusionary narratives resulting in a game of blame-shifting. While this is understandably part of political life, claiming responsibility is decreasing and blame attribution is increasing in times of crisis as political actors seek to minimise political cost and rally supporters. Crises also create fertile ground for polarisation as affected citizens look for quick solutions and are driven to the extremes of the political spectrum. That effect has been demonstrated in Greece (Capelos & Exadaktylos, 2017; Vasilopoulou et al., 2014): political parties in the first years of the Greek financial crisis (2009–2012) engaged in an endless game of blame-shifting and exclusion, which was replicated within opinion pieces within mainstream press. This resulted in the polarisation of society with new political cleavages emerging, most notably on the pro/antiausterity divide. Within the context of this divide populist rhetoric assisted exclusion as the two sides tried to demarcate boundaries, identify allies and enemies and reinforce a ‘Them’ vs ‘Us’ dichotomy to consolidate their identities.

This chapter assesses how embedded this divide has become in setting up the electoral campaigns for the 2019 General Election between the two main contenders, Syriza and New Democracy in the way they projected their political narrative in the public sphere. Using substantive content analysis of framing, this chapter collected opinion pieces written from the day the election was announced (26 May) to day after the result (8 July) in two newspapers: New Democracy–leaning Kathimerini and Syriza-leaning Avgi. This chapter identified the blame frames of the two sides and assessed polarisation by coding for the tone of references using an exclusivity index as developed by Vasilopoulou et al. (2014). The findings suggest that both newspapers engaged in a race of blame, bringing the political debate to the forefront and ensuring that polarisation was transferred into the public sphere, consolidating the ‘them’ vs ‘us’ divide.

David Gordon’s early work included a focus on cities and their role in capitalist development, but he didn’t complete or publish an ambitious project called CAPITALopolis. Gordon instead developed a framework linking Marxian insights with historical analysis of institutional impact and change through his social structures of accumulation framework. Subsequent mainstream and radical urban analyses didn’t use Gordon’s work, but his early writings are consistent with his passion for fighting racial and economic inequality, and understanding those forces systematically as part of the history and logic of capitalism.

What is systemicity and what is its relationship to third-generation cybernetics, will be explored here. I begin where my published work in social complexity theory let off: What is the benefit of studying experienced emergence versus attributed emergence? And how do we account for researcher reflexivity in the study of emergence? Is systemicity really an ontological given; that is, an inevitability of any rigorous relational position? Or, is it more an accompaniment to a layered (physical, life, social) epistemology? Or, is systemicity an invitation to acknowledge the ontological limits of perception, cognition, and truth? And finally, assuming that systemicity represents third-generation cybernetics, where and how in organizational studies do we recognize our own reflexivity and relation to what we study, to whom we address our ideas, and how we communicate?

The form of crisis-governance responses to austerity urbanism that is the focus of this paper is ‘fleet-of-foot’ partnerships. These non-statutory mechanisms which champion dispersed forms of leadership are crafted in policy discourse as lean, mean, crisis-tackling fighting machines. Their perceived agility and entrepreneurialism are often lauded, yet empirical evidence for these traits remains sparse. This paper investigates this concern through the lens of the Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) in England, which are deemed by some to exude some of the defining characteristics of ‘fleet-of-foot’ mechanisms.

A mixed method approach was utilised, including analysis of socio-economic datasets and qualitative policy analysis of primary and secondary material. The quantitative element includes analysis of employment and journey-to-work data, whereas the qualitative material originated from a review of LEP proposals, and narrative analysis of transcripts of interviews undertaken since 2010, together with other textual artefacts.

The findings reveal that dispersed public leadership is problematic as a mode of crisis-governance. LEPs were adopted as a crisis-governance fix. These loose (or looser) constellations of many, varied actors, are considered to be more flexible, responsive and delivery-orientated than more traditional and statutory democratic-administrative mechanisms: lean, mean, crisis-tackling fighting machines. Flexibility is a primary trait of ‘fleet-of-foot’ configurations and perhaps the defining feature of LEPs.

The programme of research remains on-going, which reflects the continual shifts in the form and configurations of LEPs.

Detecting some of the primary weaknesses of ‘fleet-of-foot’ public leadership arrangements, the research draws attention to some of the dangers of pushing austerity down and through ‘fleet-of-foot’ formations. The practical implications are highlighted by examining the limits of LEPs to achieve efficient outcomes or to open up a shared leadership space.

Through an engagement with current conceptual and policy debates where austerity ‘blows out’ across Europe, it is observed that austerian politics may be pushing partnership bodies too far, thus risking the danger of overburdening and under-resourcing the very distributed leadership mechanisms that are expected to reconcile local economic crises and stimulate local growth. This paper also contributes to the literature on dispersed public leadership, which runs counter to traditional command and control leadership constructs.

Social inequality is a key recurring theme animating various protest movements over the past decade. Take, for example, the Occupy Wall Street movement conceived by many as a new global movement phenomenon. Others, however, maintain that these demonstrations displayed characteristics typical of “old” social movements. We argue that in order to understand differences between old and new movements, it is necessary to compare Occupy protests with other contemporaneous anti-austerity protests, as demonstrators in both protested against stark inequality following the financial meltdown. To do so, we rely on the Caught in the Act of Protest data where data were collected at actual demonstrations at Occupy protests and anti-austerity protests between 2009 and 2012. We examine sociodemographics (the who of protest), motivational dynamics (the why of protest), and mobilization dynamics (the how of protest). We find that the two types of demonstrations brought different crowds into the streets. Occupy protesters were younger, higher educated, and much less involved in formal organizations compared to anti-austerity demonstrators. Moreover, Occupiers were more dissatisfied with democracy. Finally, we discuss these findings against contemporary anti-inequality mobilization. We argue that political entrepreneurs on the (populist) left and/or the right will politicize current inequality-related grievances and mobilize people in the streets and/or at the voting booth.