Extracting Value from the Public City. Urban Strategies and the State-Market Mix in the Disposal of Municipal Assets

Driven by fiscal austerity measures, such as constraints on public budgets and the reduction of central government transfers, ideological assertions of the economic benefits of a ”thinner“ and more efficient state have resulted in an increased interest in municipal assets as income-generating resources for local governments. Public assets are no longer considered to be common and public goods. Rather, they are seen as strategic investment opportunities for the public sector, which are to be realized in and through the property market. This paper argues that austerity policies do not just transfer the impacts of the economic crisis to the urban. They also transfer new powers and responsibilities to the local state and emphasize the inherently contradictory role of the state between the need to facilitate capital accumulation and secure social reproduction. The tension between social, economic and financial uses of public assets is both central to and the outcome of this contradiction