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There has been much debate about the impact of recession and austerity on the voluntary and community sector over recent years. Using secondary data from the 2008 National Survey of Third Sector Organisations, Clifford et al. (2013), writing in this journal, have argued that voluntary sector organisations located in more deprived local authorities are likely to suffer most due to the combined effect of cuts in government funding in these areas and their greater dependency on statutory funding. This paper develops this argument by exploring the sector’s changing relationship with the state through an empirical analysis of the differential impact of recession and austerity on voluntary and community organisations involved in public service delivery in the two English core cities of Bristol and Liverpool. This paper highlights how the scale and unevenness of public spending cuts, the levels of voluntary sector dependency on statutory funding and the rising demands for the sector’s services in a period of recession and austerity are being experienced locally. It portrays a sector whose resilience is being severely tested and one that is being forced rapidly to restructure and reposition itself in an increasingly challenging funding environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we explore the case of Stokes Croft, Bristol, UK, as a neighbourhood in a city which has appropriated the discourse of the creative industries from the bottom up in order to foster its regeneration against capital’s art of rent. We show how Stokes Croft’s self-branding as a cultural quarter has led to struggles over the creative and cultural commons thus produced, which we conceptualise as value struggles where localised value practices clash with capital’s imposition of value. Our case study including two vignettes points both to the productivity of such value struggles in producing new value practices understood as commoning, as well as the limits of reproducing a common life in the face of existing financial and property regimes. Stokes Croft therefore serves as a case in point of the tragedy of the urban commons and points to potential ways of overcoming it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Smart urbanism is a currently popular and widespread way of conceptualising the future city. At the same time, the smart city is critiqued by several scholars as difficult to define, and as being almost invisible to the naked eye. The article explores two urban spaces through which the smart city is rendered visible, in two UK cities that are prominent sites for smart urban experimentation and development. Bristol's Data Dome and Glasgow's Operations Centre are analysed in light of their iconic nature. The article develops a conceptual understanding of these flagship spaces of the actually existing smart cities through three interrelated conceptual lenses. Firstly, they are understood as a videological type of Leibniz's concept of the windowless monad. Secondly, they are conceptualised as examples of banal and serialised architecture. Thirdly, these spaces and their attendant buildings are understood as totemic assemblages that point to newly emergent forms of elite urban power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]