The limits to participation: dynamics of state-civil society relationships in Barcelona and Budapest

With the onset of the global financial and economic crisis in 2008, citizen participation in urban regeneration has once again become a crucial discursive element of struggle over the position of the citizen in organising society. However, inquiry is commonly reduced to the binary debate over whether citizen mobilisation serves ‘neoliberal austerity urbanism’ or provides opportunities for emancipation and insurgent citizenship, which sets the urban level as the centre of focus. Instead, I opt for an analysis wherein the relation between the developments of different spatial scales is considered. To do so, I rely partly on the ‘re-scaling’ literature to explain how state–civil society relationships have been shaped by both global forces and local processes, with a view from the dusk of Atlantic Fordism up until the latest 2008 crisis. Taking the crisis as an analytical focus point, I explore the changing role of the state in capitalist restructuring, the increasing focus on cities and the ‘urban moment’, and how the attention on cities affects citizen subjectivities and the meanings of participation. On the basis of a comparative study of Barcelona and Budapest, I discuss post-crisis rationales in a relational manner, by dealing with the multiscalar origins of citizen participation and providing an analysis of interactions between actors and processes operating on different scales. Methodologically, this research has emerged from a qualitative study of city council policies implemented after the crisis as part of larger frameworks of underlying rationales, which propose various constellations for the inclusion of citizens in urban regeneration. The two cities provide different contexts for analysis, with Barcelona being a post-austerity Mediterranean, and Budapest a post-socialist Eastern European city, which offers examples outside of the mainstream AngloAmerican literature and meta-narratives of neoliberalising cities. Rather than to pose law-like causations or compare Barcelona and Budapest to an (imaginary) Western European norm, the intention of this particular comparison is threefold: to demonstrate (1) how historical-geographical development informs a better understanding of the path-dependency of state–civil society relationships, (2) how the ‘urban moment’ has shaped the politics of urban regeneration policies in the ‘peripheries’ of Europe, and finally, (3) how rescaling processes of state–civil dialectics alter the perspectives of actors and influence imagined alternatives. This thesis ultimately untangles the material– discursive nature of citizen participation, as well as how these characteristics determine its functions in each city’s political economy and social life.