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Dear all,
 
we invite papers for our special issue in ephemera about 'Saving the city':
Collective low-budget organizing and urban practice until August, 18th 2013,
see also: 
http://www.ephemerajournal.org/content/%E2%80%98saving-city%E2%80%99-collect
ive-low-budget-organizing-and-urban-practice
 
Call for papers for an ephemera special issue on:
ŒSaving the city¹: Collective low-budget organizing and urban practice
Issue Editors: Paula Bialski, Heike Derwanz, Lena Olaison, Birke Otto, Hans
Vollmer 
 
In times of financial and economic crisis, cities have become sites of
austerity measures, permanent fiscal restraint, declining tax revenues,
bankruptcies and ever-increasing cuts to public services. In order to Œsave
the city¹, Jamie Peck argues that the imperative to Œcut back and save¹ and
Œwork your way out of debt¹ results in urban policies such as structural
adjustment, privatization, public-private partnerships, and welfare
retrenchments (Peck, 2012; see also Peck et al., 2009). While existing
institutional arrangements, collectivist, social-state based ideals and
redistributive systems are diminishing, there has been a proliferation of
collectively organized urban practices.
In light of these developments, urban dwellers are working creatively with
urban scarcity to develop new forms of organizing the city parallel and/or
in contrast to centralized, state-based infrastructure, and are forced to do
so with a low budget. These include collectively organized urban survival
strategies such as car sharing as opposed to car ownership; travelling using
online hospitality networks (e.g. CouchSurfing) instead of hotel
accommodation (Bialski, 2012; Rosen et. al., 2011); second-hand shopping,
cloth swapping and Œdumpster diving¹ versus mass consumption and throwaway
culture (Gregson and Crewe, 2003); or DIY-building rather than ready-made
(Brodersen, 2003; Drotschmann, 2010). Other examples include urban farming
and cooperative gardening (Schmelzkopf, 1995); local currency systems
(Hughes, 2005); transport ticket sharing, house squatting (Neuwirth, 2005);
up-cycling of sewage and trash, and other forms of re-using and re-valuing
urban resources. As the city is made up of multiple forms of organizing,
forming an alternative, low-budget solution often means moving away from the
more centralized and top-down forms of urban organization into the
decentralized and local.
These self-organized, collective saving practices all involve Œcomplex
encounters, connections and mixtures of diverse hybrid networks of humans
and animals, objects and information, commodities and waste¹ (Sheller and
Urry, 2006: 2). Here cultures of frugality and sharing (Botsman and Rogers,
2010; Doherty and Etzioni, 2003) emerge, creating new economic forms that
have long-term effects on the urban space. Their emergence poses new
questions regarding the relation of these practices to capital, the state,
and citizen responsibilities of citizen. For example, how do long-term
self-organized projects alleviate and replace the responsibility of
state-run systems in favor of the entrepreneurial urbanism (Harvey, 1989)
and what are its effect in terms of gentrification processes, splintering
urbanism and the loss of urban commonalities (Graham and Marvin, 2001;
Harvey, 2012; Brenner et al., 2012)?
While these practices transform the urban setting, the motivations as to why
people and communities deploy new forms of budget organizing are not so
clear-cut. Such practices are an expression of a lack of material means and
imposed abstinence (Oswalt, 2005; Bude et al., 2011), but also
manifestations of conscious decisions to save money and resources. Quite
simply, these practices can occur out of necessity and/or choice. What these
activities have in common is that they bring on a new awareness of scarcity,
low-cost and local production, they produce new forms of value, other
measures of calculating, smaller cycles of exchange and coordination and
collective organization under the principle of frugal living. Such saving
practices engage actors in bottom-up, improvised, flexible, local
organization (Pacione, 1997) that creates solidarity and new forms of urban
cooperation. To what extent are these practices strictly a middle-class
phenomenon, and at what levels of the urban do they force urban dwellers
into underground and illegal economies (Venkatesh, 2006; Sharff, 1987)?
This ephemera Special Issue asks what new forms of urbanity are produced
through the interplay with or under the impression of austerity policies
that we can observe all over Europe and the US. Here, we are less interested
in the analysis of top-down policies and city governance, but ask how living
in the city continues under these circumstances? What new urban forms of
organizing emerge based on everyday practices of saving in the city? How are
daily living conditions affected by austerity urbanism and what are the
self-organized and cooperative practices that people develop in such
circumstances? What are systems of reciprocity and redistribution build in
this age of austerity? What are the responsibilities of citizens to the city
they live in (Massey, 2004)? What are bottom-up progressive politics,
networking initiatives? What are alternative urbanities?
To this end, we ask for contributions, from both a theoretical and an
empirical perspective, that critically analyze the practices, objects,
discourses and histories that inform notions of Œlow-budget urbanity¹. We
welcome contributions from within the broad study of urban, collective
organization  ­ e.g. from management and organization studies, human
geography, urban studies, urban theory, city planning, social anthropology,
sociology, accounting, political theory ­ with an emphasis on the material
and social economy of frugal urban practice. Possible topics include, but
are not limited to the following:
* Anthropological perspective on everyday practices of saving in the city
* Calculating a low-budget to survive in the city
* How new practices emerge out of political struggles (e.g. reclaim the
streets, squatting, collective gardening)
* Collective organization, collective entrepreneurship
* New practices that help trace the historical trajectories of low-budget
urban life 
* The way people perform a budget and the materialities that surround this
performance 
* The networks and communities that create an alternative urbanity
* Politics of saving money
* Alternative forms of collective organizing in the city
* Sharing and exchange
* Thrift, frugality, conscious saving
* Recycling, up-cycling
* Low-resource urbanities
Deadline for submissions: 18 August 2013
All contributions should be submitted to one of the issue editors: Paula
Bialski ([log in to unmask]), Heike Derwanz
([log in to unmask]), Birke Otto ([log in to unmask]), Lena
Olaison ([log in to unmask]), Hans Vollmer ([log in to unmask]). Please
note that three categories of contributions are invited for the special
issue: articles, notes, and reviews. All submissions should follow
ephemera¹s submissions guidelines (www.ephemerajournal.org/how-submit
<http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/submit.htm> ). Articles will undergo a
double blind review process. Please do not hesitate to contact one of the
editors with any queries you might have, or to propose a note or review
contribution.
 
 
References
Bialski, P. (2012) Becoming intimately mobile: Warsaw studies in culture and
society. Warsaw: Peter Lang.
Brenner, N., P. Marcuse and M. Mayer, (2012) Cities for people, not for
profit: Critical urban theory and the right to the city. London: Routledge.
Botsman, R. and R. Rogers (2010) What¹s mine is yours: The rise of
collaborative consumption. New York: HarperBusiness.
Brodersen, S. (2003) Do-it-yourself work in North-Western Europe.
Copenhagen: Rockwool Foundation.
Bude, H., T. Medicus and A. Willisch (2011) ÜberLeben im Umbruch: Am
Beispiel Wittenberge: Ansichten einer fragmentierten Gesellschaft. Hamburg:
Hamburger Edition.
Doherty, D. and A. Etzioni (2003) Voluntary simplicity: Responding to
consumer culture. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield.
Drotschmann, M. (2010) ŒBaumarkt 2.0. Do-it-yourself, Youtube und die
Digital Natives¹, Journal of New Frontiers in Spatial Concepts, 2: 18-27.
Graham, S. and S. Marvin (2001) Splintering urbanism: Networked
infrastructures, technological mobilities and the urban condition. London:
New York: Routledge.
Gregson N. and L. Crewe (2003) Second-hand cultures. Oxford: Berg.
Harvey, D. (1989) ŒFrom managerialism to entrepreneurialism: The
transformation in urban governance in late capitalism¹, Geografiska Annaler,
71(1): 3-17.
Harvey, D. (2012) Rebel cities. London: Verso.
Hughes, A. (2005) ŒGeographies of exchange and circulation: Alternative
trading spaces¹, Progress in Human Geography, 29(4): 496-504.
Massey, D. (2004) ŒGeographies of responsibility¹, Geografiska Annaller,
86(1): 5-18.
Neuwirth, R. (2005) Shadow cities: A billion squatters, a new urban world.
New York: Routledge.
Oswalt, P. (2005) Schrumpfende Städte. Band 1: Internationale Untersuchung.
Ostfildern-Ruit.
Pacione, M. (1997) ŒLocal exchange trading systems as a response to the
globalisation of capitalism¹. Urban Studies, 34: 1179-1210.
Peck, J. (2012) ŒAusterity urbanism¹, City, 16(6): 626-655.
Peck, J., N. Theodore and N. Brenner (2009) ŒNeoliberal urbanism: Models,
moments, and mutations¹, SAIS Review, 29(1): 49-66.
Rosen, D., P. R. Lafontaine and B. Hendrickson (2011) ŒCouchsurfing:
Belonging and trust in a globally cooperative online social network¹, New
Media & Society, 13(6): 981-998.
Schmelzkopf, K. (1995) ŒUrban community gardens as contested space¹,
Geographical Review, 85(3): 364-381.
Sharff, J. (1987) ŒThe underground economy of a poor neighborhood¹, in L.
Mullings (ed.) Cities of the United States: Studies in urban anthropology.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Sheller, M. and J. Urry (2006) Mobile technologies of the city. New York:
Taylor & Francis.
Venkatesh, S. A. (2006) Off the books: The underground economy of the urban
poor. Chicago: Harvard University Press.
 
­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­
Dr. Heike Derwanz
HafenCity Universität Hamburg Forschungsinitiative Low Budget Urbanität
Winterhuder Weg 31 22085 Hamburg
Tel: 040 42827-4612 Mail: [log in to unmask]
www.low-budget-urbanity.de

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