Crisis Spaces: Structures, Struggles and Solidarity in Southern Europe

ISBN-13: 9781138184503 / Angielski / Twarda / 2017 / 218 str.

Costis Hadjimichalis

Opis

The financial malaise that has affected the Eurozone countries of southern Europe - Spain, Portugal, Italy and, in its most extreme case, Greece - has been attributed to a number of factors with most analysis focusing on dry macroeconomic and financial factors. Although these aspects are undeniably important, geographical, political and sociological considerations are every bit their equal while the severe negative socio-spatial outcomes of the ultra-neoliberal austerity policies introduced supposedly to solve the crisis and the great variety of social movements resisting austerity and/or building dense solidarity networks in these countries are other factors that have come into play. The author deconstructs the myth that public debt in Southern Europe is the sole outcome of the spendthrift ways of Greece, Spain, Italy and Portugal. Instead, the wider restructuring tendencies of global capital - such as financialization and the pursuit of profit from all kinds of rent rather than from production - are seen to have found fertile ground in these societies.

Spis treści

1. Introduction 2. Uneven development I: Capital restructuring and changes in the spatial division of labour before the euro 3. Uneven development II: capitalist transformation and the building of the Eurozone 4. "It is your fault": imagining and constructing the new "Southern Question" 5. De-politicizing uneven development and socio-spatial justice 6. "Nobody alone in the crisis": struggles and solidarity 7. Politics of Hope or the time of Monsters?

O autorze

Costis Hadjimichalis is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Geography at Harokopio University of Athens, Greece. He previously held a post in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, and has been a visiting professor at different universities in Europe, the USA and Australia. His current research and publications concern uneven geographical development, local and regional development, radical geography and landscape analysis. He has been the section editor of the Regional Development section in the International Encyclopaedia of Human Geography. Among his recent books are Space in Left Thought (co-author Dina Vaiou, 2012 in Greek), Debt Crisis and Land Dispossession (2014 in Greek, 2016 in German) and Geographical Issues Suited to Non-Geographers (2016 in Greek).