New municipalism and infrastructures of urban welfare | Silke van DYK

            The 2024-2025 StadsSalonsUrbains Lecture Series explores the evolving role of urban welfare infrastructures in contemporary cities. It examines how access to social spaces and community resources—beyond basic services like education, healthcare, and utilities—shapes people's ability to live fulfilling lives. With the pressures of privatization, austerity, and shrinking public spaces, traditional welfare systems are increasingly under strain. However, cities also serve as hubs for innovative solutions, where community-based initiatives, new models of governance, and collaborations across civic, public, and private sectors are creating alternative social infrastructures. These spaces not only address practical needs but also foster collective well-being, progressive politics, and social justice. The lecture series delves into these dynamic and critical issues from diverse theoretical perspectives.
          

New Municipalism and Infrastructures of Urban Welfare: Collective Ownership versus Community Capitalism

The multiple crises of our time are coming to a head in dramatic manner: Following the financial crises triggered in 2008, social disparities widened by austerity policies, concentration of wealth and climate crisis, most recently the pandemic and the new geopolitics have heightened the challenges. While the causes of these dynamics may be global, their social consequences manifest locally. Since the 2010s the impacts of urban austerity have burdened the public purse at municipal level in particular, with grave consequences for welfare provision and urban infrastructures. At the same time, a number of “rebel cities” (David Harvey) have emerged as sites of resistance that became known as the New Municipalism. New municipalists do not only center on redistribution and public infrastructures but also on instituting democratic practices to gain collective control over key aspects of everyday life. The presentation is based on four years of empirical research in Barcelona, which is regarded as a beacon of municipalist politics. The key question is as to whether the new city governement succeeded to implement new modes of ownership and collective management in infrastructure policy. Particular attention will be paid to the hurdles and obstacles and the question of where community-based initiatives run the risk of undermining social rights instead of democratising them. To put it bluntly: Do we witness new forms of urban collective ownership or rather the extreme mutability of community capitalism?

Silke VAN DYK

University of Jena

Dr. Silke van Dyk is Professor of Political Sociology at the Friedrich-Schiller-University of Jena in Germany and Speaker of the Collaborative Research Centre “Structural Change of Property”, funded by the German Research Foundation. Her research focuses on the following areas: Sociology of the Welfare State; Social Inequality and Property Relations; Political Sociology; Populism and Democracy; Ageing Studies.

In 2024 she published the book "Nach dem Privateigentum? Güter Infrastrukturen und Weltverhältnisse im Kapitalismus des 21. Jahrhundert" (Frankfurt/New York: Campus, together with Tilman Reith and Hartmut Rosa); in 2021 "Community Kapitalismus" (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, together with Tine Haubner).