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Chapter 11 The City as Local Welfare System Alberta Andreotti and Enzo Mingione Since the 1960s, economic, demographic, social, and political change has been reshaping individual and institutional life throughout the industrialized world. These changes have brought back to the fore the crucial role played by local context in both economic development and social welfare programs. This new importance of the local has only been strengthened by a tendency toward territorialization of policies through devolution of programs and provisions at different territorial levels and contexts. Policies regarding welfare provision are increasingly planned and implemented at the local level, as are other urban policies—as one might expect when considered through a lens of vertical subsidiarity.1 At the local level, moreover, the number of actors participating in the definition of policies and provision of services has risen, giving way to partnerships between public and private actors as well as between nonprofit and for-profit organizations, thereby increasing horizontal subsidiarity. The renewed importance of the local and the multiplication of actors have led to a significant expansion of the range of policies and their modes of implementation and outcomes. Urban scholars and planning professionals should give serious consideration to the impact of welfare rescaling on urban development as it plays out in different cities, each with its own requirements and features, its unique social and historical contexts. In what follows we frame the main lines of this emerging issue, with particular reference to European cities. Alongside the local context,2 with its ability to act as a collective social actor (Bagnasco and Le Galès 2000), the nation-state is still the main arbiter of policy, but in an increasingly diverse frame. The push toward decentralization and rescaling 13423-Policy Planning and People_Carmon1.indd 224 3/14/13 9:48 AM 225 The City as a Local Welfare System has been widespread even as the overarching regulatory framework remains in the hands of the central states—certain countries excepted, like Italy and Spain, where it has shifted to regional authorities (Kazepov 2010). Even in these places, the nation-state still shapes the possibilities and limits of freedom in local contexts. In Europe, a further element adds to the complexity of the picture: the ever-increasing role of the European Union. Thanks to its directives , funding programs (e.g., the European Social Fund, target programs like URBAN), and the omnipresent possibility of appealing to the Court of Justice, the EU enhances the process of vertical subsidiarization, and in doing so is increasing the importance of local contexts (Ferrera 2005, 2008). The presence of these processes has led to the formation, within and beyond the field of social policy, of local welfare systems, defined here as “dynamic arrangements in which the specific local socio-economic and cultural conditions give rise to different mixes of formal and informal actors, public or not, involved in the provision of welfare resources” (Andreotti, Mingione, and Polizzi 2012). By “local welfare system,” we mean not only the local government but also the complex combination of social and political institutions and actors who comprise the system, shaped differently by cultural and historical factors and processes. This view of local welfare systems challenges traditional models of welfare capitalism that assume national homogeneity. The diverse range of local welfare systems and the richness of their configurations make understanding their multiple changes in direction more difficult than in the past. This problem is compounded by traditional analytical tools, which while useful for understanding national welfare capitalisms are less so for local dimensions. In what follows we discuss local welfare in comparative terms. Our hope is that this will prove useful to urban planners who are confronting local contexts in their practice, where the capacity to provide social services and welfare support to a very heterogeneous and unstable urban population is increasingly important for promotion of social cohesion and a high standard of urban life. The chapter is organized in two parts. The first discusses the shift from national to local welfare systems and highlights some of the processes that have led to increasing reliance on local provision. The second suggests ways to integrate analysis of the traditional parameters of welfare systems with analysis of the population’s needs and the way the public good is institutionalized. This approach can help planners and others make sense of local variety and support them in the process of identifying local change, which we hope will be useful in planning and implementation of social and urban...

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