This chapter begins with crucial extralocal contexts: the Keynesian welfare state and its demise, prefiguring the focus on its stranded residuals within a context of consolidating yet incomplete neoliberalism and the uneven post-welfare city. As Esping-Andersen (1990: 3) noted, the welfare state seeks to de-commodify social goods and ‘permit people to make their living standards independent of pure market forces’. At the same time, it is by nature a stratifying system to those unable or unwilling to avail themselves of the labour market, as Wacquant (1999: 1642) emphasised:

At least in the Global North, the Keynesian period (1945–80) is now seen as a uniquely golden age, ‘… the culmination of a centuries-old struggle for social protection and security in the industrialised countries. It may justly be regarded as one of their proudest achievements in the post-war period’ (Ghai, 1996: vii). At the urban scale, the Keynesian period was associated with expanding collective consumption underwritten by the state (Castells 1977; 1983). Collective consumption revolved around what is termed publicly provided ‘collective goods’ such as education, health and social services. All of them ‘improve the well-being of the community and would not be supplied by markets because their benefits are non-excludable, but similar to collective-implementation goods, they are supplied only through active forms of cooperation’ (Hall & Lamont, 2013: 19).