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Poverty Regimes and the Constraints on Urban Democratic Politics

Lessons from Toulouse, France

University of California, Los Angeles, USA, wnicholl{at}ucla.edu

Do policy communities designed to manage urban poverty (poverty regime) constrain the democratic opportunities found in cities? Recent investigations have targeted urban civil societies as particularly strategic arenas for generating democratic opportunities. In particular, the associational sector of cities has been viewed as a strategic site for forming citizens in relative autonomy of market and state forces, and for sustaining a plural set of voices; both crucial for generating opportunities for democratic activities such as dissent, debate, and claim making. Moreover, some scholars suggest that the city's placement at the juncture of globalization, transnational migration flows, and alternative identity networks has worked to reinforce the autonomy and radical plurality of urban civil societies. While sympathetic to these views, this article suggests that the emergence of poverty regimes across European cities and their tendencies for incorporating third-sector associations as policy `partners' significantly alters the capacities of associational sectors to generate the opportunities for democratic activities. Using the case of Toulouse, France, the article demonstrates that the particular architecture of the city's poverty regime has significantly constrained the capacities of the local associational sector to generate democratic opportunities. The article goes on to show what the implications of these depleted opportunities have been for social-movement organizations attempting to create general anti-system mobilizations. The article concludes that while poverty regimes are increasingly general across Europe, their particular architectures determine the specific effects they will have in terms of either constraining or enhancing the capacities of local civil societies to generate democratic opportunities.

Key Words: associations • democratic opportunities • poverty regimes

European Urban and Regional Studies, Vol. 10, No. 4, 355-368 (2003)
DOI: 10.1177/09697764030104005


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