Editorial: Reform and/or Transformation?

‘Austerity has become a strategic space for the contradictory reproduction of market rule, calling attention to the ways in which neoliberal rationalities have been resuscitated, reanimated, and to some degree rehabilitated in the wake of the Wall Street crash of 2008-2009. By definition, however, this does not define a sustainable course. Beyond its internal contradictions, austerity urbanism has already become a site of struggle in its own right, though it remains to be seen whether the latest wave of occupations, protests, and resistance efforts will mutate into a politics of transformation.’ (Peck) After the Wall Street crash, market rule seems to have re-established itself under the guise of a form of austerity, one that draws, following out here Jamie Peck's powerful analysis, on neoliberal rationalities. Such a marketised and politically driven austerity involves an acutely skewed withdrawal, ‘extreme economy’, of resources and rights from workers and citizens, and reassertion by and for ruling elites of their own/owned rights and resources. It occupies a strategic space and time seeking to occupy (and therefore to negate the Occupy movement) a series of territorial spaces and moments. Its fluctuating fortunes as a hegemonic system and form of urbanism, seem to be determined by internal contradictions and internalised struggles. But are such struggles, as Peck's analysis seems in the main to suggest, necessarily internalised, confined to neoliberal rationality, essentially reformist, and therefore with little chance of achieving socio-spatial transformation, of taking us beyond this increasingly repressive and severe form of austerity? This is one question that underlies the accounts of local, regional and global developments, urban and pre/post urban, in this issue. If not, this is the second question, what forms of agency, where/ how/when, could bring that transformation about? Five contributions address these questions, implicitly and/or explicitly, on both a large-scale and a minute basis. The others deal with aspects of the questions.