International Journal of Urban and Regional Research

DOI:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2010.00985.x

‘Not Relevant to the System’:

The Crisis in the Backyards
MATTHIAS BERNT and DIETER RINK

Abstract ijur_985 1..8

This essay provides insights into the crisis unfolding in the ‘backyards’ of globalization,
that is, in regions that are largely abandoned in terms of capital and are characterized
by de-industrialization and depopulation. We take Eastern Germany as an example to
examine how the crisis manifests itself in this context. We look at the turmoil around the
failed sale of the Opel car company, the acquisition of pre-fab housing estates by global
investors and risky financial transactions by municipal companies to show how crucial
decisions about the fate of urban regions have become widely disembedded from local
democratic structures. We argue that regions that are ‘not relevant to the system’ are not
only particularly hard hit by the current crisis, but are also at considerable disadvantage
when attempting to mobilize power to achieve solutions that are adequate to solve their
problems.

Introduction
How does the current financial crisis affect urban development? Whatever the answer
might be, it is obvious that this question cannot be answered in a ‘one-size-fits-all’
manner. Moreover, an appropriate answer implies the clarification of what the term
‘crisis’ refers to in this instance, and how the relationship between economic and urban
development might be conceptualized.
First, it is important to distinguish the everyday use of the term ‘crisis’ as a synonym
for decline, crash, doom or failure from the concept of ‘crisis’ that implies the dialectical
moment at which the inherent contradictions of a system break free and cause the
transformation of the existing totality into a new one. This moment has found particular
attention during the ongoing global financial crisis. In the wake of current turmoil, many
commentators seem to pin their hopes on the impending end of neoliberalism, in some
cases even of capitalism, and augur the dawn of a renewed ‘New Deal’ of state
interventionism. While it is still too early to ascertain whether these predictions may
come true, we find that too often arguments overemphasize the moment of disruption,
which is implied in the meaning of ‘crisis’. The dialectical meaning of the Hegelian term
Aufhebung (which concurrently means abolishment, preservation and raising to a higher
level) is not very clear. By contrast, we understand a crisis as the moment at which
institutionalized forms of regulation fail, yet at the same time are preserved and replaced
in a way that builds on what already exists. A crisis thus reveals the central contradictions
of the form that is in crisis and also opens the way to new forms of regulation — but it
does so on the basis of existing forces. As a consequence, new forms that need to be
developed as a solution to the crisis are not predetermined. Rather, they are an outcome
of political struggles, ‘une trouvaille’ (Lipietz, 1985), in which certain alternatives win
through against others. A number of crisis solutions are thus conceivable, ranging from
a disruption of existing forms to their intensification (see Brenner et al., 2010).

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2 Debate

Secondly, we conceptualize urban development as being largely determined by

contradictory movements of capital that is invested in, or withdrawn from, existing
spatial configurations. David Harvey (1982; 1985) and others have pointed out how
urban and regional development in capitalism is characterized by uneven geographical
development and a see-saw movement of de- and reterritorialization as a means to
overcoming problems of over-accumulation. Thus, whatever developments take place, in
capitalism they can be expected to be articulated unevenly across localities, places and
scales. Against this background we argue that the current crisis should be understood as
a crisis of the actually existing mode of a capitalist production of space, that is, an urban
crisis, which is exercised in regionally specific and different ways at the same time and
will presumably lead to geographically diverse solutions.
In summary, we conceptualize the recent crisis as being not only rooted in the existing
forms of regulation, and opening the way to new forms, but moreover we expect that the
establishment of these new forms is (1) not predetermined and (2) spatially uneven. We
argue that regionally diverse forms of regulation can emerge from the crisis, depending
both on the political struggles and the way in which a region is embedded in the global
economy. Thus, very different scenarios are conceivable, ranging from increased
redistribution and ecological interventionism to intensified forms of exploitation.
While this view might seem self-evident to many urban scholars, it is not yet very
prominent in the German discussion about the current crisis. Discussions that relate
economic developments and urban issues are still largely absent here, and there is a
dominant tendency to see the crisis mainly as a turmoil of financial markets that is
resulting in problems for the economy. As a consequence, public intervention has
concentrated on rescuing financial institutions and supporting certain branches (namely
car producers with car-scrapping schemes); the government’s position is that this flurry
of state intervention should be the exception and not be replicated in other sectors.
German chancellor Angela Merkel summarized this succinctly when she declared in a
parliamentary debate: ‘There are financial institutions which are relevant to the system
and must be rescued. But there is no such thing as industrial institutions relevant to the
system’.
In this essay we argue that the notion of sectors being ‘relevant to the system’ and the
implication therefore that other sectors are irrelevant to the system does not only apply
to different economic sectors but also to urban regions. We use Merkel’s distinction to
discuss the implications of the crisis for various East German regions characterized by
de-industrialization, depopulation and abandonment in terms of capital and expose how
the idea of sectors being ‘relevant’ or ‘irrelevant’ to the system intensifies problems there.
We concentrate on various ‘hotspots’ in which developments illuminate current
constellations. However, it should be noted that, as the crisis is still unfolding, this
examination can only be preliminary and far from comprehensive.

Hotspot 1: Postfordist dependencia in Eisenach

The first place we examine is Eisenach, a city of 44,000 inhabitants in southern
Thuringia. Eisenach has had a car-manufacturing tradition since 1896 and was one of the
leading car producers in the Eastern Bloc, employing more than 9,000 workers in the
‘VEB Automobilwerke Eisenach’ alone. After the reunification of Germany, the factory,
like nearly all former East German industrial companies, was closed and sold to the Opel
Corporation, which is itself a traditional German car producer and a subsidiary of
General Motors (GM). Opel invested heavily and, with the support of massive public
subsidies, opened a super-modern car-production plant in 1992 in which compact cars
such as the Opel Vectra and Opel Corsa were assembled. This investment development
led to the rise of the southern Thuringian region as an economic cluster based on modern
technologies and wage differentials between Eastern and Western Germany. In stark

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contrast to most of Eastern Germany, which was widely de-industrialized (see Bernt,
2009), Eisenach gained a reputation as a kind of ‘model student’ and was considered one
of the few examples of towns that had thus far managed the transformation from a
socialist to a capitalist economy successfully. Opel is pivotal to the region, providing
1,800 jobs at its main factory, in addition to 7,000 jobs with subcontractors and an
unknown number of casual staff. As a result, Eisenach became a regional cluster for car
production. It offered the highest concentration of industrial jobs in all of Germany. The
importance of Opel’s car-production factory for the entire regional economy can hardly
be overstated; in fact, Opel Eisenach yields about a fifth of the total industrial production
of the federal state of Thuringia.
The current crisis has dramatically challenged this situation — not so much as a result
of lack of demand for the Opel Corsa, but as a consequence of the malaise of GM in
Detroit. The logic of GM’s involvement in Opel Eisenach is interesting. As it is the parent
company of Opel, the patent rights for vital components of Opel cars lie with GM. As a
consequence, Opel is obliged to transfer patent licence fees to Detroit in triple-digit
million amounts annually. Moreover, GM instead of Opel is the holder of all assets
connected to Opel, and the parent company has used these assets as financial securities.
Thus when GM got into trouble in the wake of the financial crisis, there was an
immediate danger that Opel might be drawn into the maelstrom too. If GM were to go
bankrupt, the consequences for the regional economy of Thuringia would be devastating.
In order to cover the debts of GM, Opel would need to cut costs through wage cuts, mass
lay-offs and factory closures, and eventually by selling the valuable parts of its
corporation to financial investors. The suppliers situated around the Opel production
plant in Eisenach would be hardest hit, as their operations are totally dependent on Opel.
Most likely, this would lead to a disintegration of regional supply chains in which even
profitable companies would be seriously affected. The result of GM’s problems in
Detroit would thus be a razing of industrial structures in Thuringia.
From this perspective, the fate of Opel has been arguably one of the top issues in
Germany’s politics in the past two years, and the course of debates and the alternatives
discussed provide interesting insights into the realities and power balances of capitalism
today.
It is a fact that, although all political parties widely agreed about the disastrous social,
economic and regional consequences of the possible ruin of Opel, the issue of whether
the state should intervene at all was strongly contested throughout 2009. Whereas the
German government reacted immediately when the German bank Hypo Real Estate got
into trouble, providing a deficiency guarantee of 52 billion euros overnight, proposed
government support for one of the few remaining industrial cores in Eastern Germany
encountered enormous opposition. A major part of resistance towards state intervention
therefore was purely ideological and indicated the extent to which a neoliberal world
view has become the dominant ideology of political discourse: the leading argument
against state intervention, brought forward on a myriad of occasions (and disregarding
the realities of public involvement in all kinds of private enterprises) was that the state
should refrain from intervention to prevent the ruin of Opel because ‘the state is only the
second best entrepreneur’, public subsidies are ‘poison’ to the market economy and a
‘downward spiral’ that will lead to socialism. Even in the current crisis, laissez-faire was
portrayed as the best solution from which government should deviate only in
extraordinary, closely defined situations.
Thus, in stark contrast to the immediacy of government intervention when banks got
into trouble, it took from autumn 2008 until spring 2009 before the German government
really became involved. Government support for Opel was strongly contested and many
commentators argue that it was only the pre-election situation that led to the fate of Opel
becoming a top issue in German politics. As a result, the German federal government
eventually decided to support the separation of Opel from GM and to assist in selling the
company to a new investor by means of a state-run rescue company, extensive subsidies
for the purchaser and a bridging credit for GM. After extensive quarrelling about whether

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4 Debate

easing the bill for the German taxpayer or protecting as many employees as possible
against job losses should be given first priority, and which purchaser (depending on the
way this question is answered) would be the best bidder, the German government finally
decided to support the sale of Opel to Australian–Canadian component supplier Magna,
which was backed by the Russian Sberbank and which planned 10,000 redundancies
across Europe and demanded social concessions, ‘wage renunciations’ and state support
to the tune of 4.5 billion euros. Thus, less than two decades after extensive state subsidies
were used to restructure the former ‘volkseigen’ (nationally owned) ‘Automobilwerke
Eisenach’ to make them attractive to Opel, millions were once again to be spent to avoid
them being razed.
However, this was by no means the end of the story. During the autumn of 2009
two simultaneous developments eventually turned the entire situation around: first, the
EU Competition Regulatory Authority in Brussels announced an objection to the
allocation of national subsidies to individual enterprises as a form of ‘market
distortion’ and demanded that aid pledges not be linked to a particular bidder.
Secondly, and more importantly, on 1 June 2009 GM filed for Chapter-11 bankruptcy
proceedings. As a result, GM is now temporarily majority-owned by the United States
Treasury and to a lesser extent by the Canadian government, with the US government
investing a total of 57.6 billion dollars to revive the Detroit-based car producer. This
eased the situation considerably for GM, which had been fairly cash-strapped until its
bankruptcy.
Backed by US government involvement, GM surprised the German political
landscape again in November 2009 by suddenly reversing its plan to sell Opel and
deciding to retain full ownership. At the same time, the company demanded 1.5 billion
euros in support from the German government, arguing that this amount was
considerably lower than the one promised to bidders in the previous sales negotiations.
Moreover, based on the plans of Magna, GM announced that it was going to cut 9,000
jobs throughout Europe and close factories. Since then, the future of Opel has once again
opened up, and a new round of bargaining between Opel and the German government has
begun, the outcome of which is not yet certain.
What does this story reveal about the relationship between the current global crisis
and urban development? We believe that, although the details of GM’s restructuring
plans are not yet clear, it shows how decisions about the future of entire regions have
become totally disembedded from local circumstances and have shifted to be at the
mercy of global players’ opaque calculations. Even companies that are bankrupt still
have the capacity to blackmail national and regional governments with the social
consequences of their own ruin and to gamble for extensive public subsidies, mass
lay-offs, redundancies and wage cuts. This leads to protectionist competition in which
national governments compete to save international corporations from bankruptcy,
hoping that the burden of restructuring will be shifted to other regions. The consequences
for the affected regions of losing this game are obvious: high unemployment rates and
increased poverty, a dramatic decrease of incomes, abandonment, poverty, crime and
general deterioration of local living conditions are the usual characteristics of
de-industrialization. These can be studied in ‘rust-belt’ regions all around the world. That
this kind of future, in contrast to the business of the financial sector, is considered ‘not
relevant to the system’, speaks volumes.

Hotspot 2: Venture capital for pre-fabs —

downfiltering and Level One
Another event arising from the financial crisis in Eastern Germany is considered ‘not
relevant to the system’ either: the bankruptcy of Level One, one of the leading financial
investors in the notorious ‘low-demand’ housing stock of the region.

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Debates and Developments 5

Totally unknown until 2005, this Austrian company with addresses in London, Jersey
and the Cayman Islands used loans from Credit Suisse, J.P. Morgan and the Royal Bank
of Scotland to buy more than 28,000 flats all around Eastern Germany. Its business model
is a perfect example of the economic use of ‘leverage effects’. It is based on taking
low-interest loans, reinvesting the proceeds in budget-price apartment buildings and
earning a rate of up to 9% return on the difference between rents paid by the tenants and
the cost of the interest. The preconditions for this kind of business are thus low interest
rates, low base prices and a steady cash flow from the rents paid for the apartments
purchased.
Level One mastered this model and, within three years, became a major landlord in
many pre-fab neighbourhoods all around Eastern Germany. These housing estates, which
were constructed on the urban periphery during the era of socialism, are usually
considered difficult markets characterized by high vacancy levels, at best moderate
incomes and a rapidly ageing population. However, for Level One they provided
excellent investment conditions.
The company purchased whole blocks of pre-fab flats in neighbourhoods such as
Berlin-Hellersdorf, Dresden-Prohlis, Leipzig-Grünau and Halle-Neustadt at bargain
prices. It kept maintenance and renovations low-key and let the apartments to low-
income tenants at very competitive prices. This model soon became very popular both
among investors and low-income tenants. However, it had highly problematic
implications for urban development in Eastern Germany’s ‘shrinking cities’. Level One,
‘slumlording’ its housing stock, facilitated the concentration of low-income households,
accelerated socio-spatial polarization, catalyzed the downfiltering of middle-class
neighbourhoods and blocked all planning efforts to rebuild the neighbourhoods for a
smaller population size (see Bernt, 2009). The results of Level One’s successful business
model for urban planning were thus devastating and led to a disintegration of existing
communities and effectively blocked public intervention.
With the outbreak of the financial crisis, the model reached its limits. As a result of a
new assessment of securities and rising credit costs Level One was forced to declare
bankruptcy at the end of 2008. The bankrupt investment company’s property was
transferred to a trustee. The consequence of this bankruptcy for tenants was an
immediate stop of all services, including house cleaning, mail service and maintenance.
Even worse future consequences are under discussion: given the current crisis and an
average vacancy of about one sixth of the housing stock in most East German cities, the
acquisition of peripheral pre-fabs can only be made lucrative at debt-free low prices and
with a continuous return on investment. Thus, even if the trustee were to succeed in
finding a new purchaser for the properties at all, this buyer would most likely be an ‘asset
stripper’ working with a business model fairly similar to the one used by Level One.
Within such a constellation, a new chain reaction of downfiltering becomes foreseeable:
if, owing to low real estate prices, the new buyers offer tenants extremely low rents, this
is likely to cause a further mass exodus of people living in apartments that are owned by
‘healthy’ housing firms, thus putting these firms under economic pressure. This, in turn,
could lead to further bankruptcies, whereby assets can be put in the market for bargain
prices and once again be ‘stripped’ for quick returns, causing a deflationary spiral to the
bottom. Under these conditions, the bankruptcy of venturous companies in particular will
not solve, but will rather intensify the problem. Since 2000, more than 600,000
residential apartments have been sold to companies such as Level One in Germany,
therefore the signs of intensified price competition, with attendant hazards for urban
development, are clearly visible.

Hotspot 3: Casino budgets in Leipzig

Private-capital firms were not the only ones who gambled for quick profits. German
municipal administrations became involved to an astonishing degree in the risky business

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of financial transactions and speculation too — and are now being severely punished by
the economic recession.
A good example of such a gamble can be found in the city of Leipzig. An industrial,
administrative and service centre of the former German Democratic Republic, populated
by more than half a million inhabitants in 1990, Leipzig was especially hard hit by the
collapse of economic structures following the reunification of Germany, as well as by
suburbanization and demographic imbalances (Nuissl and Rink, 2005). It experienced
the loss of about one fifth of its population and is characterized by a high level of housing
vacancies, widespread unemployment and the abandonment of large parts of its housing
stock. The consequence of this situation for the municipal budget is severely detrimental:
low tax revenue on the one hand, and high remaining expenses on the other hand.
Against this background, Leipzig was urged to find new sources of revenue, and it has
made extensive use of ‘creative’ financing instruments since the mid-1990s. The city
vigorously participated in ‘cross-border leasing’ arrangements and is now particularly
hard hit by the problems arising from these in the wake of the financial crisis. ‘Cross-
border leasing’ (CBL) arrangements are leasing arrangements whereby the lessor and
lessee are situated in different countries and use this situation to arbitrage the difference
between tax laws in these countries. In a CBL transaction an investor — usually a US
company — leases an asset upfront from a foreign entity — in this case a German
municipality. The owners immediately lease back this asset from the investor, so that they
still own and operate the asset. The US investor gains a quick return for writing off the
upfront lease payment. Put bluntly, CBL arrangements are a form of cross-Atlantic
public–private partnership in which a private US investor collaborates with a European
state agency (the municipality) to shelter taxes against the US State.
The CBL model became extremely popular around the turn of the millennium among
German municipalities which, as a result of de-industrialization and population losses,
were in dire straits. Consequently, Germany became the EU market leader for CBL
arrangements. Leipzig played in the top group of this tax-avoidance league and
altogether the city, or its enterprises, such as its transportation company and utility
companies, closed eleven contracts with private investors. Incorporated assets comprised
streetcars, the tramway grid, the sewage plant, parts of its canalization, the drinking-
water network, as well as the Leipzig Trade Fair and the municipal hospital. No exact
data are available but estimations by independent experts assume that the volume of
Leipzig’s CBL contracts add up to about 4 billion euros — nearly four times the volume
of Leipzig’s municipal budget.
Although the implications of this business for the financial autonomy of the city were
immense, hardly any of these transactions were discussed in public. In fact, as recent
local debates reveal, neither the treasurer nor the council members had sufficient basic
knowledge of the contracts they were signing, they did not read the small print, and many
did not even understand enough English to be able to read the often 1,500-page-long
contracts. It therefore comes as no surprise that Leipzig, like most other municipalities,
has been more or less outmanoeuvred by its ‘partners’, and the distribution of risks and
benefits in these highly complex arrangements turned out to be greatly uneven.
Since the financial crisis has unfolded, the contracts have increasingly raised public
concerns, stimulated debates about the responsibilities of municipal decision makers,
and, in the case of Leipzig, even led to criminal proceedings against top managers of
city-owned companies. The main point of concern is that in most contracts the American
Insurance Group (AIG) served as the fiduciary service company and that these contracts
usually included an obligation for the lessee (that is, the municipality) to balance a
downturn in the credit rating of the insurer with additional securities. Since the insurance
giant AIG proved to be a blatant speculator in subprime mortgages and a major holder of
‘toxic’ assets during the recent crisis, the rating of AIG fell markedly, and this condition
has now become unexpectedly relevant. Consequently, the cities either have to find a new
insurance underwriter — which is only possible at high rates in the current market — or
provide additional securities.

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Debates and Developments 7

Interestingly, a handful of municipal managers have clearly been aware of this

problem from the outset. With the intention of shielding their assets against the inherent
risks of CBL transactions, these managers undertook even riskier transactions by
contracting additional insurances in the form of Credit Default Swaps (CDSs). These
were organized in packages with asset-backed securities, called Collateralized Debt
Obligations (CDOs), so that eventually the attempt to insure CBL transactions led to the
acquisition of even more risky CDOs. Among these ‘innovative’ financial instruments,
distributed among others by the Swiss UBS corporation, were bonds of US companies
such as MBIA and Merrill Lynch, and even a gambling house in Las Vegas. Altogether,
Leipzig concluded contracts with a volume of 292 million euros that, as early as 2009,
had incurred losses of 103 million euros. In March 2010, UBS again posted losses of 84
million euros. Altogether the city anticipates losses of at least 255 to 284 million euros.
The losses of Leipzig’s gambling tour will therefore most likely exceed the gains by far.
Given that the tight budgetary situation was precisely the reason that most cities
engaged in CBL arrangements, this situation has led to enormous difficulties. In the case
of Leipzig, which had debts of 842 million euros in 2008, the budgetary situation is so
precarious that the city has several times been close to forced administration by the state
of Saxony. The city neither holds disposable capital nor many properties that have not yet
been mortgaged (verpfändet), and the provision of additional securities would therefore
only be possible if drastic austerity measures are taken, and dramatic cuts are made in
social spending and services.
In the long run, another problem of the CBL arrangements could become even more
pressing: as the assets that the city is leasing back have been transferred to the property of
the participating investor, all modifications reducing their value now require special
approval by the investing company. This is particularly problematic for shrinking cities
such as Leipzig, which have lost many inhabitants and are now burdened with an oversized
infrastructure, enormous fixed costs and an unhealthy imbalance between expenditures for
maintenance and decreasing consumption. While on the one hand Leipzig urgently needs
to adjust its infrastructural network to its reduced population size, on the other hand this
process could result in lowering the values of the leases and thus in the need to provide
additional securities (that is, more municipal assets to be leased) for the CBL investor. The
engagement in CBL arrangements has thus led to a situation in which the participating
municipality cannot govern its local matters on its own anymore, and municipal planning
has effectively become a pawn in global financial markets.

Conclusion
What do these stories tell us about the nature of the current crisis? While the particular
dynamics driving each of the developments described above may be unique, there are
distinct patterns that suggest that these specificities in fact form part of a larger picture.
First, all these stories show that the successes that were achieved in revitalizing former
East German cities and regions that were abandoned by capital in the early 1990s have
only led to highly uneven, fragmented and unstable results. Previous rounds of
revalorization have been dominated by short-term, disconnected and vulnerable forms of
production of space, often in the form of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey,
2003), which did not result in coherent and sustainable spatial configurations. The
financial crisis is thus also a crisis of a particular mode of production of space. Secondly,
it is obvious that the dynamics of the crisis are more globalized and more interrelated
than ever before. Whether or not unemployment rises in Eisenach is decided in Detroit,
Brussels and Washington; whether pre-fab blocks in Grünau, Hellersdorf or Prohlis are
dilapidating or will be refurbished depends on calculations made in the Cayman Islands;
and whether or not the city of Leipzig will have to close libraries, community centres and
public pools will be governed from Manhattan. Thirdly, the establishment of a new mode

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8 Debate

of regulation will to a large extent be based on whether the affected entity is, or is not,
‘relevant to the system’. In this context, the lack of coherence and the unbound,
speculative nature of world-market integration that the ‘backyard regions’ experienced in
the previous round of accumulation becomes an immense political barrier, and finding
solutions that are in their interests is to a great extent doomed from the start.
We can thus only develop a pessimistic view on the implications of the crisis for urban
development in the ‘backyard regions’. We expect intensified triage to be conducted in
regions that are deemed ‘not relevant to the system’, resulting in disadvantaged spaces
increasingly being given up. The regions’ remaining industrial structures will increasingly
be razed, jobs will be lost and poverty and unemployment will grow. New rounds of
speculation fuel the disintegration and abandonment of still-valuable parts of the housing
stock and municipal capacities to deal with these problems will decline — altogether a
perfect recipe for organizing accelerated urban decay. Policy could deal with all these
problems — but only if power distribution is changed considerably, regional developments
are disembedded from global markets and the right to the city for people who live in it is
put before the profits of financial institutions and international corporations.

Matthias Bernt (berntm@irs-net.de), Leibniz Institute for Regional Development and

Structural Planning — Regeneration of Cities, Flakenstraße 28–31, Erkner 15537, Germany,
and Dieter Rink (dieter.rink@ufz.de), Urban and Environmental Sociology,
Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research UFZ, Leipzig 04318, Germany.

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Résumé
Ce texte fournit un éclairage sur la crise qui se développe dans les ‘arrière-cours’ de la
mondialisation, autrement dit dans les régions presque totalement délaissées par le
capital et marquées par la désindustrialisation et la dépopulation. Le cas de l’Allemagne
de l’Est permet d’examiner comment la crise se manifeste dans cet environnement. En
étudiant l’agitation autour de la vente avortée d’Opel, l’acquisition d’immeubles de
logements en béton préfabriqué par des investisseurs mondiaux et les transactions
financières risquées de sociétés municipales, il est montré comment des décisions
essentielles pour le destin de régions urbaines se sont largement dissociées des
structures démocratiques locales. Les régions ‘inintéressantes pour le système’ sont non
seulement particulièrement frappées par la crise actuelle, mais aussi nettement
défavorisées lorsqu’elles s’efforcent de mobiliser le pouvoir en place afin de mettre en
œuvre des solutions appropriées à leurs problèmes.

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research

© 2010 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.