Social Innovation and Civil Society in Urban Governance: Strategies for an Inclusive City

Transcription

1 Urban Studies, Vol. 42, No. 11, , October 2005 Social Innovation and Civil Society in Urban Governance: Strategies for an Inclusive City Julia Gerometta, Hartmut Häussermann and Giulia Longo [Paper first received, June 2004; in final form, June 2005] Summary. Processes of socioeconomic polarisation and social exclusion mark contemporary cities. In many countries, welfare states are in crisis, suffering from post-fordist transformations. In cities, new ways of governance are needed to overcome the consequences of economic, social and political restructuring. This article seeks to explore the role of civil society in new urban governance arrangements that will hopefully contribute to counter the trends towards social exclusion. While aware of the ambiguity of civil society s role in rebuilding governance relationships, it is argued that, under certain conditions, civil society is found to be a valuable contributor towards more cohesive cities and governance arrangements that promote them. Such conditions involve the existence of a multiscalar democratic governance regime that favours public deliberation and social economy initiatives. 1. Introduction European cities exhibit rising levels of social exclusion. This article seeks to contribute to a conceptualisation of social innovation in urban development, which focuses in particular on the processes aimed at countering social exclusion. 1 The term social innovation is introduced in this Special Topic (see Moulaert et al.) with three core dimensions: the satisfaction of human needs (content dimension); changes in social relations especially with regard to governance (process dimension); and an increase in the socio-political capability and access to resources (empowerment dimension). Social innovation is understood as both a normative and analytical concept in the formation and analysis of solutions to social exclusion problems in European cities and one with an eventual input into the development of new social integration strategies. We use the social exclusion dimensions outlined in the third section of this paper to operationalise these three core dimensions into the role of civil society and its impact on institutional change, governance dynamics and empowerment. We are concerned mainly with two spatial scales: the city and the smaller localities or neighbourhoods within it; but we also include urban conurbations. The city, not primarily the countryside, was the spatial focus and engine of the Industrial Revolution, of social struggle against capitalist exploitation and the emergence of socioeconomic life as we know it today, with its regulated labour markets and welfare systems. Large families with a subsistence economy gave way to smaller families and an increasing individualisation of social and economic life. Under these Julia Gerometta, Hartmut Häussermann and Giulia Longo are in the Department of Urban and Regional Sociology, Humboldt University Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, D Berlin, Germany. Fax: þ julia.gerometta@sowi.hu-berlin.de; hartmut.haeussermann@sowi.hu-berlin.de; and giulialongo@tiscali.it. The authors would like to thank the following colleagues for inspiring discussions, comments and hints to earlier versions of this paper and the research it is embedded in: Erik Swyngedouw, Frank Moulaert, Patsy Healey, Steve Graham, Matthew Gandi, Sara Gonzales, Lena Schulz zur Wiesch, Katrin Luise Läzer and Christian Brütt Print= X Online=05= # 2005 The Editors of Urban Studies DOI: =

2 2008 JULIA GEROMETTA ET AL. conditions, insurance against unemployment was more urgent in the city than in the countryside. The current crisis within the welfare state is greater within cities because, in the case of social exclusion, there is a greater erosion here of the conditions for the replacement of welfare services. In general, family ties are limited and weak, providing little support; the availability of land for cultivation and other means of reproduction is very restricted. Individualisation fosters social fragmentation, emphasises the fault lines between different social groups and thus limits possibilities for integration. At the same time, cities as places of crisis are also places of innovation in governance relations and institutions and are the primary arenas of social movements and other civil society social experiments. In this article, we highlight the role of civil society in social innovation initiatives and organisation. Efficiency-oriented governance relationships within the New Urban Policy, such as large project-oriented public private partnerships often result in more exclusionary institutions (Moulaert et al., 2002, 2003). Beyond doubt, in the sphere of the reproduction of public interests, civil society has been found to have potential for innovation towards needs-satisfaction, with institutional change allowing more effective action and the development of other socially innovative processes (see the literature on welfare state restructuring, for example: Offe, 2002; Jessop, 2002) as well as the local development literature (see, for example, Taylor, 2000). We attempt to analyse civil society by examining local governance dynamics in order to identify factors critical to social integration. We begin with a description of the crisis in the modern welfare state and subsequent new developments, especially in local welfare regimes. Then we model the dynamics of social exclusion in urban societies drawing on the approaches of the French sociologist and philosopher Robert Castel (1995) and the German sociologist Martin Kronauer (1999, 2002). Next, we present current ideas for welfare state restructuring of civil society, thereby highlighting the potential inherent in this sphere of social organisation for the governance of urban localities. We also address the critical aspects found in the literature. Finally, we use a Hegelian approach to philosophy and to the concept of civil society, to deduce aspects which are crucial for social innovation under conditions of social exclusion. According to our analysis, civil society is and always will be supplementary to the local state and will never replace it. The rights and legal guarantees which only a state can grant are a pre-condition for an inclusive civil society, as we show in sections 4 and 5. Where crisis develops as a response to new and changing social conditions and interests, civil society can alternatively take the role of reproducing as well as amending the state s vision and the embodiment of the general interest it represents. This role, supplementary to those of local states, and located between an innovatory sphere and a sphere of production of welfare, is analysed in greater detail in this article. Furthermore, we show that certain conditions need to apply for local social innovation, driven by civil society, to occur: different spatial scales and their welfare regimes need to be intermediated in a way that prevents putting local social innovation at risk through developments and actions at higher spatial scales; the deliberation of issues needs to be antiexclusionary, and thus truly public, and local social economy experiences need welfare state support. 2. The Crisis of the Welfare State and the Rise of Aspirations towards Civil Society in Urban Governance The present crisis facing the welfare state has endogenous as well as exogenous causes. Exogenous to the actual welfare state are the internationalisation of national economies, the increase in international competition which puts pressure on cost structures, curtailment of national economic and fiscal policy autonomy through European Union regulations and the general conception of the opposing effects of levelled wages on one side and production sites positions in

3 SOCIAL INNOVATION 2009 the geography of competition on the other. Endogenous causes are the lower productivity rises in large sections of the service economy and consequent lower or more slowly growing state income and tax revenues, the erosion of normal employment regimes and the proliferation of maturing welfare states as a result of demographic change (for example, an ageing population as well as the increasing role of women in the labour market), with its demands for new welfare measures (Lütz, 2004). Alongside the crisis in state financial foundations lies the erosion of the moral basis for redistributional politics. This is due to the on-going process of social individualisation (work responsibility, financial independence) and neo-liberal orientations fostering individualist ethics. Since its foundation, the welfare state has relied on traditional forms of welfare production and social care. It has remained incomplete in this subsidiarity; this incompleteness has become more tangible against the background of the recent decline in domestic and informal production. Possible solutions for the crises affecting the welfare system can be found in the recomposition of institutions, actors and responsibilities to enhance social inclusion. When the family and other cohesive milieux, often based on working-class culture and religious organisation, do not provide for the reproduction of altruistic motivations and social embedding, new and different institutions must take over the caring tasks (Muenkler, 2001). These can come from either the community sphere, self-organisation, the third sector or other components of civil society. The traditional left of the political spectrum, fixated as it is on the traditional welfare roles of the state, must recognise these problems; it is no longer possible to overlook the social and demographic changes undermining traditional welfare arrangements and moral convictions. 2.1 New Welfare Regimes In his radical, regulation theory analysis, the British economist, Bob Jessop (2002) outlines the development of a global neo-liberal political-economic regime. In general, active entrepreneurs and their representations are the driving forces of the global neo-liberal regime, which Jessop also calls a successful hegemonic project (p. 455), which is the outcome of successful exercise of political, intellectual, and moral leadership (p. 455). At the same time, the Keynesian welfare national state is in severe crisis and is being transformed following the end of Atlantic Fordism. The associated mixed economy is also undergoing crises, as shown by the developments in east Asia, the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the rise of new social movements in response to economic, political and social changes. Liberalism according to Jessop (2002) can be seen as a spontaneous philosophy in capitalist societies. It corresponds with four of its features: private property, free choice of consumption, the institutional separation and operational autonomy of state and economy, and the institutional separation of civil society and state. At the same time, spontaneous criticism of liberalism is likely to emerge. It takes the shape of a growing socialisation of the production forces, the dialectics between shared producer interests in maximising revenues and conflicts over the distribution of revenues, flanked by regulations to balance co-operation and conflict and the gap between civil society s particular interests versus the state s embodiment of universal interests. These tensions are evocative of existing neo-liberal regimes oscillating between liberalist, statist and corporatist models and, in particular, local neo-communitarian regimes. Neo-communitarianism, the condition under which social innovation is most likely to occur, lays a strong focus on the third sector for economic development and social cohesion and grassroots mobilisation in economic strategies. It also encourages the link between economic and community development and decentralised partnerships inclusive of community organisations and local stakeholders, on the one hand, and state and market interests on the other. It focuses on less competitive economic spaces, such as inner cities, deindustrialising cities or those at the lower end of urban hierarchies, where

4 2010 JULIA GEROMETTA ET AL. against the logic of a globalizing capitalism, the social economy prioritizes social usevalue (Jessop, 2002, p. 464). The conflicts in neo-liberalism appear mainly in cities. These provide the main areas of operation for the economic and social tensions accompanying neo-liberalism, as well as for civic action. Taken together with government aspirations, this may result in neo-communitarian local regimes within a global neo-liberal turn. Civil society in this context is the main focus in the discussion on triggers for social innovation within various strands of debate, as will be laid out in the fifth section of the paper. The Marxist critique of this development is that neo-liberalism seeks to transform completely civil society as a flanking, compensatory mechanism for the inadequacies of the market mechanism (Jessop, 2002, p. 455). In the republican model, civil society is seen as a necessary supplement to the welfare state, even a permanent pre-condition, but never a substitute for it. Civil society can be socially innovative due to its strong social affiliation dimension and it remains the one and only resource for the reproduction of moral values, on which the support of the welfare state must rely (Münkler, 2001). A crucial condition for the overcoming of social exclusion is a public sphere, where socially innovative social, economic, cultural and political experiences can develop, interact and find entry into urban governance relations. In the course of this interaction, they form a place of intermediation between the involved actor groups. It seems most likely under Jessop s neo-communitarian conditions that such approaches create a community-oriented place of intermediation between state, market and citizens tending towards the general welfare of the place. 3. Social Exclusion Dynamics in Contemporary Cities Contemporary discourse on social divisions within urban society, resulting from regime changes after the end of the Fordist era, uses a growing number of concepts: fragmentation, segregation, polarisation, dualisation, partitioning, social exclusion and so forth. Social divisions in society are not new, yet the character of social divisions has changed. Social exclusion has become a preferred term in current debate, because it appears to be a broader and more dynamic concept than the notion of poverty. The notion of poverty focuses primarily on distributional issues, the lack of resources at the disposal of an individual or a household. In contrast, social exclusion focuses primarily on relational issues: inadequate social participation, limited social integration and lack of power (Room, 1995; Häussermann et al., 2004). Social exclusion can be defined, on the one hand, as disaffiliation (Castel, 1995) or non-integration into social and labour relations, that we understand as the absence of interdependence, and, on the other hand, as the absence of participation in various dimensions of social life. The standard given to certain levels of affiliation and participation in order to live a life as a respectable citizen is understood as given externally. This is a twodimensional approach to social exclusion, built on lack of participation as well as lack of interdependence. As Table 1 indicates, inclusion in social relations is characterised by interdependence and formal co-operation within the formal division of labour, and reciprocal obligations, acceptance, acknowledgement and solidarity in private relations. Exclusion, on the other hand, means the abandonment and subsequent break of these relations. Looking at the dimension of participation, exclusion can take place in different spheres of society: shortage of money (as a means to participate in everyday consumption), powerlessness, educational Interdependence Table 1. Forms of inclusion Inclusion in the social division of labour Inclusion in social networks Source: Kronauer (2002). Participation Material participation (ability to consume) Political-institutional participation Cultural participation

5 SOCIAL INNOVATION 2011 disadvantages stemming from limited cultural capital, housing insecurity and feelings of rejection and alienation as well as a lack of options to join decision-making processes (Kronauer, 1999). One of the main transformations of Western societies has been, and still is, the shifting employment base: the declining importance of manufacturing and the increasing significance of services. Structural constraints on the labour market for large segments of the population have resulted from these developments. Depending on the social welfare system and wage policy used, this leads for example, to rising structural unemployment in Germany, or the development of a new class, referred to as the working poor in the UK or the US. In addition, flexible jobs are becoming increasingly important: individuals are more or less forced to be flexible with regard to their place of work and living arrangements. The trend towards greater flexibility leads to new divisions in the labour market and the risk of social exclusion for those who cannot adapt to the new demands (see van Kempen, 2001). These macroeconomic and macro-political developments affect local actors capacities for challenging existing modes of governance and institutions in that they shape the resources available to actors from different social groups. Furthermore, in cities, processes of individualisation are very advanced and thus social segregation and social polarisation are met with a lack of resources for family-based reproduction and basic needs satisfaction. In recent years, large migration flows have had a wide-ranging impact on the cities of western Europe. Illegal migration flows add to the number of immigrants, often resulting in disproportionate effects in specific cities and neighbourhoods because of chain migration and cheap housing opportunities. The direct effects of these migration processes are not easily identified, but some possible consequences for social exclusion can be mentioned. First, immigration increases competition for scarce resources, such as certain kinds of jobs and housing. Secondly, the combined processes of immigration and suburbanisation may lead to a decreasing heterogeneity of the networks and environments of the urban population. The strongest segregation takes place among the rich and influential parts of urban society. This is segregation by choice. Also strongly segregated are low-income households and ethnic minorities at the lower end of the social scale. These forced concentrations can have negative as well as positive effects: they may provide a shelter for the poor or ethnic minorities, and enable socialisation into their own social group. If this process is not temporary, they may also function as places of social exclusion (Häussermann et al., 2004). In the course of industrialisation, market and state have become the central modes of social and economic inclusion. Households have reached a high degree of dependency on markets and public services for their subsistence and for the protection of their position in society as most forms of reproduction outside markets and state provision have vanished (Polanyi, 1944/1995). In the modern period, various forms of welfare state intervention have offset market failure. Welfare state interventions made great progress towards reducing social inequality, spatial segregation and social exclusion in the period up until the 1970s, based on the Fordist compromise between capital and labour organisations. But since then, sharpening social and cultural differentiation has begun to undermine the large industrialist, homogeneous social organisations and milieux, which had underpinned the development of the welfare state. Progressive political majorities have become harder to achieve because of greater social heterogeneity and new forms of political fragmentation. Processes of social polarisation and segregation have been exacerbated by tendencies within national and urban welfare regimes to shift from larger social-democratic agreements towards cohesive societies and cities in the direction of a focus on competitiveness in many places. In the post-fordist era, a certain vacuum is emerging that leaves behind those who are the losers in the present changes. This involves risks for

6 2012 JULIA GEROMETTA ET AL. individuals and society. For individuals, this means the loss of possibilities to participate in social life (corresponding to common standards of usefulness, consumption, security, influence on public affairs and social appreciation or acceptance); for society, this corresponds to the loss of its ability to secure the social foundations of democracy as a universal mode of participation and governance. Coinciding with changes in the labour market and economic restructuring on a global scale, urban transformation has led to rising levels of segregation of vulnerable groups in cities. Declining incomes directly influence the housing market opportunities of individuals and households because they are relegated to the market segments they can afford. Different social groups are separated not only spatially, but according to living standards, life experiences and expectations as well. Marginalised groups are concentrated in large sink estates in poorquality housing, in certain inner-city areas or at the edge of the city. They are increasingly isolated from other social groups. Neighbourhood effects may, although also having shelter effects, lead to a worsening situation of collective social downward mobility, depending on the available bridging or bonding social capital (Putnam, 2002; Kearns and Parkinson, 2001; Moulaert and Nussbaumer, in this issue). Housing policies increasingly rely on market processes, so that the ability of municipalities to control the socio-spatial distribution of households is decreasing. Social segregation disturbs stabilisation of positions in lower areas of urban social space for the inhabitants of poor quarters. This in turn affects the political representation of these areas negatively. For problems of spatial inequality, the problem-solving capacity of the state is evidently deficient. Social embedding and networks for social caring have been weakened by the secular process of individualisation. Individualisation is also part of the context for secular demographic changes, such as the general ageing of the population and sinking birth rates, which affect redistribution in welfare states. Formal institutions can only marginally provide inclusion within social networks and cultural participation. The breakdown of social relations and processes of fragmentation, isolation and deprivation cannot be regulated by state agencies even if sufficient transfer payments are available. Administrative authorities cannot manage the problem of social embedding or inclusion. New and different actors and new resources are needed. Social innovation is key to countering trends of social exclusion and to fostering social inclusion processes. In the next sections, we examine the role of civil society in local social innovation as a means of providing answers to some of the social exclusion processes. 4. Debate Issues on Civil Society in Social Innovation Within the lively debate in Germany since 1989 around the term civil society (Zivilgesellschaft and Bürgergesellschaft), the use of the term has been detached from the context of radical democratic actors (Klein, 2002). A Commission of Inquiry had even been formed by the German Federal Parliament to explore the potential of civil society (see Enquète-Kommission, 2001). This allowed for its generalisation as a political project, put into the context of the reconstruction of the welfare state. But this process carries the danger of using the concept in an undifferentiated, affirmative manner, uncritical of societal structures. Important changes in social engagements of citizens for the common good have preceded this debate. Empirical research has shown that, in addition to the growing interest in civil society following the peaceful, civil revolution in eastern European countries, there have been diminishing participation and interest in political thematic movements and parties. There is a tendency to selforganisation and civic engagement: citizens increasingly take matters into their own hands in areas where the direct effects of their efforts can be seen and thereby redraw the boundaries between the political and the

7 SOCIAL INNOVATION 2013 private. At the same time, large uniform and bureaucratic organisations, such as trade unions and the traditional Christian churches, lose their attractiveness. New ties are built up that refer to the Gemeinwesen [common good] instead of private interests and bring it alive again and again within social networks. A political culture, a sense of community, seems to develop beyond the traditional institutional framework. This ambience is seen as necessary for a lively democracy as well as for a welfare society based on societal solidarity (Klein, 2002). Some nation-states, such as Great Britain or Germany, have launched new Leitbilder [leading frameworks] of social policy such as the activating state and the enabling state. The idea behind them can be interpreted in several ways. These models announce a welfare mix in which the state keeps responsibility for central problems of societal welfare while promoting an infrastructure of civic engagement for citizens to take matters increasingly into their own hands. In the name of welfare production, the civil sphere can easily be used as a replacement for the welfare state that has gone into crisis. Under current fiscal pressures, there is high risk and some evidence that civil society is colonised by the welfare state (Klein, 2002). Furthermore, there is evidence that, while there are demands in civil society for more welfare production, the delegation of responsibilities and the creation of free action spaces is lagging behind and for some groups more so than for others. We are thus discussing, in the role of civil society in innovating urban governance relations and institutions, a tension field of emancipatory justice and equality, pursuing neo-communitarian forces and their colonisation by neo-liberal macro-politics. Theoretically speaking, under current conditions, civil society is the very sphere of social organisation with the highest potential for socially innovative contributions to social integration. Within modern democracy theory, four constitutional-political views are expressed that highlight the role of secondary associations representing minorities outside parliamentary action i.e. the minority civil societies in democratic decision-making, relating to their potential impact on the decision-making process and outcome (Cohen and Rogers, 1992). In the least civil society accepting neo-liberal constitutionalist model, those associations are perceived as rent-seeking, encouraged by the states granting of those rents, therefore obstructing the political process. The solution is to deny secondary associations access to the political process. In the civic republican model of democratic decision-making, secondary associations are deemed important in order to reproduce the moral foundations of democracy among the members of society, but do not have to deal with overarching societal questions themselves or interfere with parliamentary decision-making, seen as too taxing for the wider public. The egalitarian pluralist model suggests that minority civil societies should be enabled to participate in and inform a public realm and that associations should be accommodated within a framework enabling egalitarian participation in a public realm, in which the general interest of a society is agreed through negotiation. The members of the parliamentary process can draw upon this pluralist bazaar to aid their decisions; but in this strand of debate, the linkage between civil society and the state is neglected. The model that is preferred here is what Cohen and Rogers (1992) call associative democracy (see also Offe, 2002). As an advance on previous models, associations in this model should have competencies that allow participation in decision-making itself, to the detriment of the exclusiveness of parliamentary institutions: Associative democracy draws on an egalitarian ideal of social association. The core of that ideal is that the members of a society ought to be treated as equals in fixing the basic terms of social co-operation including the ways that authoritative collective decisions are made, the ways that resources are produced and distributed, and the ways that social life more broadly is organised. The substantive

8 2014 JULIA GEROMETTA ET AL. commitments of the ideal include the concerns about fair conditions for citizen participation in politics and robust public debate, an equitable distribution of resources, and the protection of individual choice (Cohen and Rogers, 1992, p. 416). The contribution would show itself in a less constrained information flow between fragmented social groups and governing institutions. As the pre-condition for effective policy-making, the equalising of representation, for citizen education and for group contribution to alternative governance i.e. non-market and non-hierarchical this freer flow of information leads to the creation of trust and the reduction of transaction costs in securing agreement among competing interests. A general strategy is needed to curb the mischief of faction (Cohen and Rogers, 1992) in such a process and this should consist mainly of the support of those forms of group representation that contrast least with the norms of democratic governance. The case of northern European countries has shown that this model of associability and density with a supportive governance system encourages the growth of civil society as well as economic performance and social equity. It is a model that is apt to target rigid bureaucratic structures in developed welfare states and that can help to remobilise rigid corporatist relations which have been hindering those social innovations and reforms targeted at the old homogeneous national society and neglecting instruments to target the new plural and fragmented society. Innovation, qualitatively directed towards normatively defined social innovation, can take place within this associative democracy, in the shape of transfer and mediation of interests from formerly less represented groups and milieus. The interests of these groups, newly articulated, can be integrated into the public will and general interest formation, which can then be translated into public/ legal decision-making and strategic decisions from local states. This is especially true in the pluralistic, and often fragmented, urban societies of today. Here, states are informed about proceedings in society and interests to be represented. Models of socially innovative forms of governance are created. As European-scale urban research has shown, the initiative often starts in social movements, civic action groups and social economy initiatives. It is associations that engage actively in pursuit of the goals of the diverse social groups that they represent. They have often proved to have socially innovative impacts (Moulaert et al., 1997, 2000). Furthermore, civil society has an important role in the reproduction of cohesive orientations as well as in the provision of welfare. In civil society, if it is truly civil, people are oriented towards the general welfare, rather than individual interest. This produces social recognition, paving the way for integration, and is a pre-condition for the socialisation of people as citizens. The welfare state is dependent on support generated in civil society. A complementary welfare arrangement could encompass an emerging civil society supplementary to a tax-financed, administered welfare system and thereby supplemented by solidarity as people live it. The flaw to this arrangement is the replacement of legal security by the insecurity of expectation. This carries risks for those who cannot contribute, like the ill, the elderly, the mobile, migrants or children, that also in the future would have to be minimised through the frame of the welfare state. But a state-only solution to state failure is not possible in the medium term because, within it, the socio-moral convictions will erode and the people will orient themselves solely in relation to marketrational behaviour in a market-liberal order. The Italian sociologist Enzo Mingione sees a return to what he calls the household sphere in social reproduction. The latter expresses the diverse conditions and organisational relations which allow human beings to survive in various social contexts and groups (Mingione, 1991, p. 124), a form of integration that has become vital especially to the labouring classes in the course of the increasing substitution of labour by capital in the capitalist economy and the decline of the welfare social democratic dream.

9 SOCIAL INNOVATION 2015 However, with the decline of family networks in northern and western European cities, forecasts for such a role are probably too optimistic. Likewise, Jeremy Rifkin (1995) stresses the challenge for contemporary welfare states in the provision of an alleviating thirdsector social economy, in which the unemployed can engage, receive recognition and material recompense and, thus, integration. When considering socially innovative governance to include civil society, we need to find models adapted to targeting these current urban processes of fragmentation and social exclusion. In cities, exclusion processes and therefore the need for social innovation have developed the furthest. Cities are also the primary action sites of urban civil society, action groups and social movements and thus for experimenting with new governance arrangements concerning these groups. In British urban geography and planning, a new, institutionalist approach to urban governance has been developed in which place is understood in terms of social relations. Actors and their actions are seen in the context of their networks of social relations within which systems of meaning and ways of acting are constituted (Healey, 1999). Networks in most cases extend beyond places and webs of relations that transect a place are potentially very diverse (Healey, 1999, p. 115). This diversity is captured in the term multiplex places (Graham and Healey, 1999). A city and a neighbourhood can each be thought of as a multiplex place. An urban governance arrangement in this approach is understood as a specific setting of different actors with specific shared norms and values (institutions), who reach decisions on urban places. To a growing extent, urban governance involves non-governmental actors from the spheres of market and civil society. These institutional coalitions constitute specific arenas and network nodes, in which places are shaped, actions and identities framed, and structures altered. Those with a weaker power position in the relational field of a place will feel more constraints within structures, whereas those with favourable positions in social space 2 will feel that structures work to their advantage, in making their position more comfortable and less challenged, in that it reinforces their position, through repeated and taken-for-granted routines (Bourdieu, 1976, 2000). Thus, this position of an actor within the social space of a place is crucial for power relations within all spheres of social organisation, including civil society. New policy approaches, such as integrated area approaches to social urban development, may provide a window of opportunity to new groups to be brought into the institutional frame of the governance of place (Tarrow, 1994). Social innovation in urban governance relations means the establishment of new links and new relations, crossing the emerging lines of fragmentations, where ties have been abandoned as a result of social exclusion processes. Examples for new relations are reinsertion into the labour market, or political, cultural and material participation. Eric Swyngedouw (in this issue) summarises criticism towards the increasing integration of civil society into urban governance relations under neo-liberal, market-focused conditions in a Marxist philosophy. He puts forward mainly problems of citizenship which is not clearly defined in governance systems. These include an increasing variety of horizontal institutional relations, problems of participation and related problems of representation, of accountability of those involved and, last but not least, problems of the legitimacy of their actions. In state government, these issues are clearly defined, regulated and reliable, often legally binding. In more dynamic and not legally regulated governance relations, problems arise that have the tendency to turn governance into an exclusive way of ruling the world. Yet, what Swyngedouw does not mention is that, yes, the state represents legitimacy as well as accountability, but this diminishes with growing numbers of immigrant non-citizens and rising levels of social exclusion in other dimensions. Consequently, the effectiveness of state policy is under threat. The dynamic institutional context in which Swyngedouw puts his criticism is one of a shift towards a

10 2016 JULIA GEROMETTA ET AL. neo-liberal governmentality in which actors have the possibility to up-scale or downscale decision-making capacities and thus rapidly empower or disempower actors according to their market-focused needs. The question to which we seek to contribute answers in this article, is: under what conditions and in what institutional configurations can the integration of civil society into local governance relations foster a form of social innovation, which is emancipatory, inclusive and needs-satisfying, and not purely an instrument of governmentality under a neo-liberal regime? Bob Jessop helps with answering this question. In his 2002 analysis of contemporary urban regimes, he states that, at different spatial scales, different regimes may become established. The local level is quite likely to develop neo-communitarian regimes under conditions of less competitive spaces in deindustrialised zones, and of great social problems without pre-defined solutions. Other regimes at intermediate scales may be neo-statist or neo-corporatist. All these regimes are headed by a general neo-liberal tendency, but as this tendency produces contradictions and conflicts, it does not find full acceptance and full execution in all places and at all spatial scales. Social movements, unions and the electorate are forces that may have hindered the full development of a national, regional, urban or local neo-liberal regime. This means that there are contexts which are more favourable than others, both institutionally and in their regulations. It also brings up another crucial problem: the interscalar institutional articulation. Local neo-communitarian regimes can only have a socially innovative impact in so far as the other regimes at higher spatial scales do not interfere where they actually have the authority to do so. Such a case would be the colonisation of local civil society to meet neo-liberal, higher-scale interests that in the end run counter to the local interests. Ideally, interests are articulated or contested, and subsequently weighed between the different scales (see, for example, Swyngedouw, in this issue; Moulaert et al., 2000, ch. 5). 5. A Concept of Civil Society Fit for Social Innovation In his conception of the bürgerliche Gesellschaft [civil society], developed in his Philosophy of Rights when analysing the early modern states, the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel stated that the experience of voluntary collective activity for a common purpose in associations produces new forms of solidarity and egalitarian participation, membership and Sittlichkeit [ethical life]. This concept is today largely supported by social capital research, which states that a high level of associability creates trust and solidarity within groups and associations (Putnam, 1993, 2002). The pre-condition for voluntary association is the right to associate, to express freely and to be personally free. These legal rights are granted by a liberal democratic state, which therefore builds a possible context for civil society. This legality is the expression of a self-imposed limitation of state power to that of civil society and households. Cohen and Arato find that the Hegelian theory is crucial because it reconstructs civil society in terms of the three levels of legality, plurality and association, and publicity and because Hegel sees the link between civil society and state in terms of mediation and interpenetration (Cohen and Arato, 1992, p. xiv). In Sittlichkeit (ethical life), produced and reproduced within this sphere the norms of a society s public life...[are] sustained by our action, and yet as already there...is no gap between what ought to be and what is, between Sollen and Sein (Charles Taylor; cited in Cohen and Arato, 1992). There is no clash possible between the universal and the particular will. It is a common agreement on values, rules and orientations within bürgerliche Gesellschaft, which is even defined as ethical life itself. These rules are referred to, and used as a common starting-point for collective action, which at the same time reproduces Sittlichkeit.

11 SOCIAL INNOVATION 2017 The second important dimension of this concept is the notion of publicness or openness. Only in the public sphere can the particular interests be mediated against each other to form the general interest of a more cohesive society. This can be translated into socially innovative urban development in that a strong civil society with the virtues ascribed by Hegel s philosophy, needs the possibility to enter the public domain and to deliberate issues with other social forces, the state (local, regional, national, international), as well as the economy. Integrated area development, a multidimensional approach to urban development which seeks to involve all these actor spheres into policy-making and urban development, explicitly attempts to create such a public domain. Here, all actors are deliberately asked to participate by the programming state, or the state by the leading civil society agents (Moulaert, 2000, ch. 4). Thus, the intermediation of interests, the exchange of ideas, is accommodated as one of the strategic as well as one of the operational objectives (see, for example, DIfU, 1998, for the German programme). It is important, then, to check whether this encouragement of publicness or openness includes the excluded, and thus overcomes exclusion, or whether it limits social innovation. The state here has the role of steering this publicness, which is needed to mediate interests. Social movements aspire to gain power by attracting followers, in order to be able to force the state into allowing public deliberation of formerly excluded issues. The stronger the movement, the better the chances of influencing the state in that direction. The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has conceptualised a public sphere of communicative action and deliberation in which, according to a more or less supportive institutional framework, the process of political opinion and will formation take place. In this concept, a consensual political will can be reached through on-going deliberation, between all social groups (Habermas, 1965). Crucial questions towards identifying whether an urban governance arrangement is socially innovative are: whether a particular public sphere in a fragmented society contains a more pluralist image of the available groups than before; and, whether power relations therein allow for open deliberation in, ideally, free-speech situations. A third issue is how the obstacles to communication among groups with varying values and orientations as well as culturally transmitted codes of communication, are targeted in the deliberation process. Deliberation on the question of civility of values is not an easy task, especially where the means of communication between civil groups is brittle. Jessop s condition of a less competitive space struck by deindustrialisation, and thus less aspiration within the local state to promote market actors to the detriment of social policy, is thus in favour of a neocommunitarian approach which gives some space for socially innovative movements and action groups to promote their issues of social justice and social inclusion. At the same time, the state can gain by reducing the social costs of deindustrialisation through the innovative problem solutions provided by social economic initiatives and other local social movements. Hegel s normative concept of a civil society is to a certain extent ahistorical. Gosewinkel and Rucht (2004) claim convincingly that civil society cannot be looked at independently from its historical context. For them, unlike Hegel s conception of an externally given ethical life, that life is pursued within a specific civil society and informed by a collective historical experience, or (at least) the common reference to a historical context. In reality, this collective spirit may have any value one can think of, but it needs to show particular qualities in order to be collectively considered as civil society. Moreover, this qualification should be the outcome of a society-based public communication process, which in reality often only reaches sections of the constituency. At least, an agreement on the very foundations of association and voluntariness, the reproduction of citizenship and personal rights, is necessary for values to be considered civil. This excludes overtly authoritarian,

12 2018 JULIA GEROMETTA ET AL. anti-democratic aspirations in associative, public activity, such as in right- or left-wing extremist groups, which collide with personal freedoms (Gosewinkel and Rucht, 2004; Roth, 2003). 6. Conclusion: Inequality and Social Exclusion and Their Challenges for Social Innovation in Local Urban Governance Within fragmented cities with heterogeneous social groups as well as within distressed neighbourhoods where often socially and ethnically diverse groups live together involuntarily, values and orientations are likely to be heterogeneous and conflicting. Today, we cannot think of civil society as homogeneous unity. Inequality is a central characteristic of any society and might be reproduced by civil society s actions. It was exactly this problem that was tackled by the modern welfare state: to organise redistribution of political, economic and cultural resources, which the family was unable to manage in complex modern societies. We must take into account that the ability to act in the public sphere is distributed unevenly among different segments of the overall civil society. Who produces the general interest, the common values, that find entry into policy-making? Following the social capital approach, this depends on the position of the individual in social space (Bourdieu, 1983) which, in turn, is structured by different qualities of social capital among and between groups, especially bonding social capital and bridging social capital (Putnam, 1993). Problems in the creation of an inclusive public are addressed in Putnam s approach through the availability and quality of network bridges between different social milieux 3 and through the role of gatekeepers that control these bridges. Conflicts can be thought of in a dynamic way as articulated problems linked to changes in the qualities of networks, as closures, or openings of bridges, intensifying or retarding flows between groups (see also Moulaert and Nussbaumer, in this issue). These milieux, within the local contexts and resource structures in which they are embedded, produce elements of a civil society, which may or may not eventually merge, resulting in more or less integrated local civil societies. They are constituted by social networks, common frames of reference, values and orientations. In the case of fragmentation and social exclusion between various social milieux, there is a lack of connection and deliberation of shared values, symbols, frames of reference and orientations within them, as has been shown in Germany in the relationships between the alternative and the traditional workers milieux (Ueltzhöffer, 2000) and is apparent between ethnic milieux in places where social relations are ethinicised. 4 Socio-spatial segregation, and the development of exclusionary spaces (see section on social exclusion), are certainly not favourable to the mediation between the milieux. Great gaps between resource availabilities, common frames of reference, or several different, potentially conflicting milieux are contexts which need specific attention by policy-makers and in local governance. The political-constitutional arrangements between civil society and the state define the structure of the public sphere, where general interest is deliberated and procedurally agreed upon. Forms of exclusion and integration, which become visible in the social milieu structure of a local society and their available social capital forms, define participation of groups within the segment of the public sphere, which is the civil society. Just to rely on the power of civil society would therefore not lead to social innovation, but result in the reproduction or even in the deepening of inequality. A plurality of social milieux with their own associations and collective spirits that derive from a variety of shared historical experiences, and common frames of reference, are what constitute contemporary urban societies. It becomes crucial for social innovation, if and how the plural structure is either causing fragmentation or producing a shared sphere of reciprocal responsibility and solidarity. It is an empirical question, and a question of

13 SOCIAL INNOVATION 2019 the local political culture, whether elements of a communal spirit, supporting inclusive politics in an urban environment, are still alive (Le Galès, 2002), but there is evidence that this is the case in a variety of localities all over Europe (Moulaert et al., 1997; Jessop, 2002). The theoretical construction of a civil society, that could play an important role in fighting exclusion, remains paradoxical to a certain extent: self-help and associations are usually built on common interests of the group members and, in such a perspective, they represent particular interests. But they all have to refer to a common frame of mutual respect and acknowledgement, and this means in the last instance a reference to the overall constitution of a coherent society, sharing some common values of non-violent co-operation and social cohesion (Gemeinwohl). So each particular group also has non-particular interests and orientations, which must be stressed in forming an integrated civil society. Social innovation in governance at a local level, taking into account civil society, will only hold good when new links are established between excluded and integrated segments of the local society and when the public sphere is enriched by the participation of the formerly excluded social groups. The more pervasive is the local social exclusion, the more difficult will be the process and, in the case of multiplex places, it is likely to bring conflict. Some capacity among civic actors to exchange information will be required. Plurality is a constitutive element of a socially innovative civil society, in contrast to the dominant perception of civil society as a middle-class homogenised sphere in charge of defining Gemeinwohl, representative of the whole of society. Social economy and community exchange of help, information and goods are easier to organise within a social milieu. Common frames of reference can serve as a resource to promote cohesive ties within a milieu. State structures that promote local social economies should take this factor into consideration, but also always consider the dialectical relationship between bonding and bridging network relationships. An inclusive civil society is not just a given. So, the remaining question is: how to create it? To reconstruct social relations at a local level would be real social innovation. And these relations could be the basis of new forms of a social economy, which could overcome the fragmentations and divisions imposed by the global, post-fordist economy. Notes 1. Social innovation is a new approach, which has been developed (among others using the same notion) by the research group behind this special topic, SINGOCOM. SINGOCOM is an acronym for a research project called Social innovation, governance and community building, funded by the European Commission under Framework V, Targeted Socio-economic Research Programme. 2. Bourdieu (1976, 2000) distinguishes between physical and socially appropriated space. Social space is a structure of parallel social positions, whose reality is being inscribed into physical space. It is a system of relations between the positions of different social groups. The ability to dominate the appropriated space depends on capital (economic, cultural, social). Actors occupy multiple places within multiple relatively autonomous fields that together constitute their status, class, social position: in sum, their place within society. 3. For an introduction to the social milieu approach in social science, see, for example, Vester et al., In Germany as a Herkunftsgemeinschaft [a society of descent] especially, integration of immigrants is considered to be a task for the immigrants alone. In a concept of nation as a Herkunftsgemeinschaft (Muench, 1997; cited in Gestring and Bremer, 2004, p. 259), which is at least culturally, if not ethnically homogeneous (the latter argument is no longer dominant in the contemporary political debate for reason of incredibility), exclusion processes, which may be at least partially explained by this discrimination, have led to a certain ethnic revival among some of the younger migrants of the second generation (Heitmeyer et al., 1997; cited in Gestring and Bremer, 2004, p. 263).

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