 Welcome everyone, let's talk about urban planning. So today we ask, how do global economic structures shape the everyday experiences of people that live in cities? And to answer this question, I've invited my speaker, Sander Van Lennon from the University of Groningen to tell us how the global financial crisis shaped austerity policies in Ireland. And of course, how these policies affected young people in disadvantaged neighborhoods. And we're also gonna look at what can we learn from the Irish case in this particularly. Sander, welcome to our episode. Thank you, happy to be here. Tell us a bit about the importance of your study because some years have passed since the global financial crisis, but well, consequences still endure and lessons are still to be learned. Yes, exactly. Indeed, the global financial crisis is more than a decade away from us. The period of austerity implementation is also almost a decade away from us, at least from the most direct implementations. But I think it is important to remember that those transformations that have been brought in, the transformations to policy, but also to public space, the way cities are being managed, the way services in cities are being financed, are still with us today. And they kind of put the groundwork of what future urban development, future urban governance looks like. So therefore, I think it remains important to study what happened in those years. But of course, the more we move away from that period, it becomes important to investigate how it shapes where we currently are and how it shapes urban possibilities now and in the future. What was missing specifically under research that you wanted to understand? Yes, when I started this research, which was already back in 2013, so it was also quite a while ago, Ireland was in the middle of this harsh, this fierce austerity regime being implemented. And at the time, there was a lot of attention to the impact of austerity in the crisis on young adults. But what I noticed was that it was specifically on young adults that more or less had opportunities available to them. So a lot was about students that had an outlook on having a good job, suddenly working in jobs that were considered not so good for someone that studied, right? So less highly skilled jobs and people moving abroad again. People not being able to find houses or not being able to buy houses anymore. And within this whole narrative, I started thinking, but what about young adults that maybe you were not so fortunate to begin with that maybe never really had those positive outlooks that, for example, students had? So that's when I decided to focus on, well, youth that experiences more poverty, more social exclusion. And being a geographer, I of course also wanted to add a spatial component. And that's why I decided to look at disadvantaged urban neighborhoods and ended up studying two of Ireland's most disadvantaged neighborhoods. So Nocnihimi and Cork and Baliman in Dublin. And I think in that what I was interested in or kind of struggled with during my studies is that, of course, on the one hand, you can go into these neighborhoods and ask what's changing in people's lives, know what services close, what things they struggle with on a day-to-day basis. And that gives you one part of an understanding of what austerity does in urban spaces. But on the other hand, I felt it would be a bit flat if you do this without investigating at the same time where these austerity measures come from, with why they are being implemented at the national scale, at the municipal scale, but also how they relate to global financial developments, political and economic development. So I think my two challenges were to see it kind of overarching change in relation to the everyday and the relation of the everyday to the overarching structural developments. And on the other hand, to look into this group that, as I felt, was not getting enough attention yet and was kind of being a bit undersnowed by the attention of more middle-class youth that had their opportunities reduced, perhaps, to what they expected without downplaying the importance of that dynamic, too. Sure, promising. So let us know about the most important highlights, the findings of your study. Yeah, so I think one of the most important highlights, both of this paper, but also the wider project as a whole, is that when you look at the everyday influence of austerity in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods in Ireland, and especially young adults, you see that there are three main spheres in which austerity is being experienced. That's work and income. So basically people getting less income, either from work or welfare. That's housing, especially people trying to move out of their parental house and not being able to find affordable or suitable housing and all the consequences that has. And the other is a decline in service availability or at least a restructuring in service availability in these neighborhoods, which means that either people cannot access training, but also not access, for example, sport or music facilities that they used to have access to. What I then did, so I got these three main spheres out of interviews with young adults from Nock-Nahini in Cork and Baliman in Dublin. I then started looking what happened in these spheres at both national policy and how that was related to preceding policy and how that was related to austerity and these overarching political and economic developments, such as the global financial crisis, the involvement of the IMF, the European Central Bank, in the name of the Troika in Ireland, and started to see through how these different skills relate to each other. So how does what happens at a global scale relate to what's being implemented at the national scale and ultimately how that translates into what happens in the neighborhoods and then their shapes the everyday livelihoods, experiences and practices of young adults. So you have mentioned, again, a shell less income, less housing, the declining service availability and some connection between national and the neighborhood. So tell us a bit about, in all days, some policy consequences or community-led initiatives, individual action. So in practice, what does that mean? Yeah, I think that in practice, sometimes you see that urban planners or other professionals that tend to deal with issues at the local scale, you can, apart from planners, also think about social work organizations or medical organizations. And I've also seen that in other research projects myself, can learn from this that it is always important to connect what's happening at national and international scale to what they see at the local level in order to understand how their local interventions might interact with, for example, a national austerity program being handed out, being implemented, or international changes in, for example, job market structures or economic fortune. So how can local interventions, can they kind of be like a shock buffer, a buffer to these more larger scale developments or will they amplify them? And I think what also can be interesting both in practice and in research is to, at some point, turn it around. So what I did in this paper was to kind of work down skills, right? So I started at the international level, so investigate how it influenced the national government decision and how that influenced restructuring in the neighborhood and how youth in the neighborhood responded to that and experienced that. I think in the future, we can also think about if there is a local intervention. For example, here in the area at ARIZM, a new elderly care cooperative started, in what ways can these type of initiatives start to work upwards? Now, can they, for example, set an example that might end up influencing national policy, maybe eventually international relations between care providers, international learning, or maybe they might reshape relationships between people and institutions that will ultimately work through these different skills and also start to influence other neighborhoods, other cities, other countries as well. And I think I started to tease out this so-called embedded comparative approach in this paper as one framework in which this can be investigated, both as analysis, right? To see how what happens locally relates to what happens nationally and internationally, but also perhaps as an approach and a tool for change to think about how we can do something at the local scale. I noticed that with my students quite a bit, right? They might have a desire to implement change, but then sometimes feel restricted by kind of the local influence that a planner can have. And hopefully this can be a bit of tool to think about what can happen locally that maybe can have wider reverberations throughout cities and the world. Perfect, you mentioned a lot about the future, so let's look a bit into the future, but academically. So what should be the focus of future research? Other groups than young adults or students, but you're a geographer, so other special contexts, so what's ahead of us? Yeah, I think what I would really like to do, this is part of one of my challenges to think about what I would call a spatial political economy of everyday life. Political economy of everyday life is a discipline that really tries to connect what's happening in global political economies to everyday, mainly household experiences and practices. And I think I'm really interested in what that looks like or what type of geography there is to that. So how does space and place influence this relationship between the structural and the everyday? So ways in which I would like to expand that in the future is for example, making a comparison between different welfare states, for example, comparing like maybe traditional social democratic welfare states like the Netherlands with a more liberal welfare state like Ireland with a more Southern conservative welfare state in Southern Europe and maybe post socialist welfare states elsewhere to see how, for example, notions of culture or kind of remnants of how things used to be organized or are currently organized influence in what way global political developments touch down in the cities and the neighborhoods in which we live and thereby shape and inform the things we experience every day, the things we do every day and how that transforms in a changing world. Some important tips for future research. Sande, if we could shorten our more or less 10 minute conversation in one or two sentences what would it be? Let me think about that for a few seconds. Sure, it's not an easy one. No, and happy is not life, right? I think there is two lessons that I really want to stress that is we cannot understand everyday experiences and everyday practices without also understanding what's happening at the level of national politics and international economies. So in order to get a full grasp of what's happening in our cities, we need to understand both and even better, we need to connect both. And in my paper, I tried to make that argument using austerity as an example to see how kind of roll back, roll out neoliberalism neoliberalism processes at the national scale and the local scale interact with each other to create locally specific outcomes. Sande, thank you very much. Yeah, thank you very much. For those who are watching us on YouTube, you can find all the resources, all the materials of this conversation, including the article that served as base to our conversation on the, let's talk about urban planning episode. 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