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作者

来源

URBAN STUDIES,Vol.54,Issue9SI,P.2139-2154

语言

英文

关键字

community organising; Gramsci; participation; Third Way; urban crisis; GOVERNANCE; MANCHESTER; CITIZEN

作者单位

[Watkins, Heather M.] Nottingham Trent Univ, Nottingham, England. Watkins, HM (reprint author), Nottingham Trent Univ, Dept Hist Languages & Int Studies, Nottingham NG11 8NS, England. E-Mail: heather.watkins@ntu.ac.uk

摘要

This paper explores the ambivalent nature of community organisation as a response to a crisis of authority' in post-industrial areas subject to urban regeneration. In the discourse of the Third Way, activism has been increasingly discursively framed as participation', legitimising a shift in welfare provision from the state onto civil society and a proliferation of private actors. As part of the process, existing local solidarities based on long-term shared interests and histories of conflict with the parts of the state, have been transformed (in theory) into social networks, forms of short-term instrumental co-operation based on consensus. Community activists are brought into contact with what Rose (after Foucault) describes as the technologies' of power which are deployed to produce governable subjects, co-opting and dividing them from their base communities. However, local participation also provides our most immediate experience of political economy, what Gramsci identifies as a sometimes fierce sense of difference, and the practical, historically acquired local knowledge, or good sense' which can form the basis of a challenge to hegemonic thinking. Engaging empirically with local organisers in the East Midlands, I conclude that the potential of this as a source of contestation depends on two dimensions of practice: (1) the development by activists of a critical understanding of how to foster or maintain long-term collective interests, identity and practices within their communities and (2) maintaining a clear sense of separation from the state which allows power to be confronted.