This book explores urban governance in the ‘age of austerity’, focusing on the period between the global economic crisis of 2008–9 and the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was originally born of a question about how modes of governing have been transforming in the post-war period, particularly the proposition that where hierarchies once ruled, networks now predominate. With this question in the background, the book considers urban governance from the perspective of governability. How did cities navigate the crisis and the aftermath of austerity, with what political ordering and disordering dynamics at the forefront? To attempt an answer, it engages with two influential currents, urban regime theory and Gramscian state theory, with a view to understanding how governance enabled austerity, deflected or intensified localised expressions of crisis, and generated more-or-less resonant political alternatives.

The book follows the critical tradition in exploring mechanisms that produce inequality and weighing struggles for equality. The goal was to locate reasoned, if cautious, grounds for hope, or even optimism, while looking unpalatable realities squarely in the face. This approach is at odds with the managerialist crusade to monetise research through services rendered to ‘stakeholders’. It also questions the voluntarist ethos in anarchist and post-Marxist theory, expressed in the proposition that ‘we can always just begin by doing things differently’ (Biesta, 2008: 176). The reader will judge whether this latest attempt to maintain structure and action in a constructive tension works, or not.

The research was generously funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council under the title Collaborative Governance under Austerity: An Eight-case Comparative Study (ES/L012898/1). An earlier phase of research involving two of the cities discussed in this volume, Barcelona and Leicester, was funded by the Spanish government's Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under its National Development Plan (Ref: CSO2012-32817) as part of a larger study of austerity governance in Spain and the UK: Transformations of Urban Governance in the Context of the Crisis (TRANSGOB). The research discussed here was inspired by TRANSGOB and the outstanding leadership of its Principal Investigator, Dr Ismael Blanco (Autonomous University of Barcelona).