“Laboratorio Q”, Seville: creative production of collective spaces before and after austerity

The creative city approach is going through a redefinition after the 2008 global financial crisis. In the specific case of South-European cities, in the context of austerity and cuts in public investment, creativity is becoming a strategy for achieving maximum social benefit and improvement of the built environment with minimum economic expenditure. This paper looks at this redefinition of creativity through the case study of Seville, in southern Spain. Through research methods that include video-recorded testimonies of the actors involved, mapping at the online platform “Laboratorio Q”, and public engagement activities, this paper explores how the civic society, professional, and public authorities have reinvented how to produce collective spaces. The paper concludes that bottom-up creative processes for producing collective spaces have become more visible since the 2008 crisis, when architects, planners, public authorities and policy-makers have been “learning” from them.     

Organizational resilience in national security bureaucracies: Realistic and practicable?

Resilience is increasingly highlighted as a necessary organizational property in national security bureaucracies. This article explores the resulting management dilemmas via interviews with Danish executives, who attempt to balance resilience, fiscal austerity and democratic accountability. It concludes that the resilience agenda inspires relevant organizational adjustments, including more external networking and internal resource variety. But austerity limits resilience to budget‐neutral forms, and fear of blame games limits the space for innovation to stay abreast with evolving risks. The article calls for a critical reappraisal of how much resilience to expect from public sector organizations and for more research into the boundary conditions of organizational resilience in the public sector.     

‘It’s like they make it difficult for you on purpose’: barriers to property tax relief and foreclosure prevention in Detroit,Michigan

Abstract

All U.S. states permit local governments to recover unpaid property taxes through a tax lien foreclosure process. Tax relief policies can reduce household tax burdens and prevent the foreclosure of owner-occupied homes, but little is known about their use and effectiveness. Like other cities, Detroit, Michigan, experienced a rise in tax foreclosures following the 2008 deep recession. Michigan law requires cities to exempt low-income homeowners from some or all of their property tax obligation. Implementation of this policy, the Poverty Tax Exemption, nevertheless failed to protect many low-income homeowners from dispossession through tax foreclosure. State-mandated and locally-determined procedures placed the burden of learning about and applying for the exemption on financially stressed homeowners, restricting widespread access to this critical tax relief. Eliminating institutional barriers to tax relief can prevent many owner-occupied tax foreclosures, especially in cities where a high need for tax relief occurs under local conditions of fiscal austerity.