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As this article is less about charity per se than it is about the relationships between place and institutional policies of benevolence, my intention is to look at how practices and laws of public charity operated in a city whose economic and social geography was changing after 1700, when the streets were populated with vulnerable people driven into poverty and when the subjects of pauperism and poor laws “engaged the attention of the legislature with increasing frequency” (Purdy 287). This article looks at the modus operandi of private and public philanthropic societies in eighteenth-century London in order to observe how both religious- and secular-driven charitable societies were motivated by the same goal of social reform, whether prompted by the Enlightenment or religious values. While the notion of Pietas Londinensis indicated the existence of various operating charities and casual philanthropic acts in the London area, charitable institutions had not been set up until the eighteenth century. In late Stuart and Georgian Britain charitable, London was shaped both by economic forces and by the various cultural meanings people attached to its space, and this new paradigm transferred all matters concerning the poor from parochial obligation to civic responsibility. The article will focus on the mechanisms which made this transfer possible while considering acts of public charity and philanthropic societies that emerged in the long eighteenth century, from hospitals and infirmaries to almshouses and charity schools, with a view to observing the changes in English mentality as a result of charitable activity.

The movement for a "sustainable" or "convivial" degrowth of the economy in our societies has been gaining momentum for almost twenty years. This movement, in addition to criticizing the pursuit of economic growth, espouses three key principles: produce less, share more, and decide together (Abraham, 2019). But how can such a course of action be implemented in practice? One way, according to the "growth objectors," is to try to organize our subsistence within the framework of the commons. Accomplishing this objective is less a question of inventing a new form of social life than of rediscovering one that, despite having been marginalized, has never ceased to exist. For this purpose, we can draw inspiration from remarkable initiatives like the Milton Parc community in Montreal, which for over thirty years has provided housing for 1,500 people in a way that is entirely consistent with the principles of degrowth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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