Department of Geography Seminar Series: Dr Brendan Murtagh

Dr Brendan Murtagh
Thursday, September 28, 2017 - 16:00 to 17:30
Rocque Lab, Rhetoric House

Social Economics and the Solidarity City
Brendan Murtagh Reader in Urban Planning, School of the Natural and Built Environment, Queens University
 
Drawing on Polanyian ideas of embeddedness, this presentation examines the potential of the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) as a counter to neoliberal narratives of the city and as a site of experimentation and alternative urban politics. There are multiple interpretations of the SSE and how it has evolved as part of a ‘shadow state’, enabling responsibilities and functions to be downloaded to the local and the community. But it is also globally inflected and has been formed and reproduced in very different conditions in mainland Europe and the global South, compared with the UK and the US. The presentation argues that its emancipatory capacity needs to be made but that such making entangles the sector in private and public markets, social finance and distinctive skills, practices and techniques. Using examples from a range of cases, it suggests that managing these contradictory logics and legitimacies (the market and social) are constitutive of resistance and inclusive placemaking. 
  Geography: Brendan Murtagh Seminar