Why is Austerity Governable? A Gramscian Urban Regime Analysis of Leicester, UK

Austerity has been delivered in the UK, without durably effective resistance. Read through a dialogue between Urban Regime Theory and Gramsci’s theory of the integral state, the paper considers how austerity was normalised and made governable in the city of Leicester. It shows how Leicester navigated waves of crisis, restructuring and austerity, positioning itself as a multicultural city of entrepreneurs. The paper explores historical influences on the development of the local state, inscribed in the politics of austerity governance today. From a regime-theoretical standpoint, it shows how the local state accrued the governing resources to deliver austerity, while disorganising and containing resistance. Imbued with legacies of past-struggles, this process of organised-disorganisation produced a functional hegemony articulated in the multiple subjectivities of “austerian realism”. The paper elaborates six dimensions of Gramscian regime analysis to inform further research.