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Between 1933 and 1940, Manchester received between seven and eight thousand refugees from Fascist Europe. They included Jewish academics expelled from universities in Germany, Austria, Spain and Italy. Around two hundred were children from the Basque country of Spain evacuated to Britain on a temporary basis in 1937 as the fighting of the Spanish Civil War neared their home towns. Most were refugees fleeing Nazi persecution in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. As much as 95% of the refugees from Nazism were Jews threatened by the increasingly violent anti-Semitism of the Nazi regime. The rest were Communists, Social Democrats, Pacifists, Liberals, Confessional Christians and Sudeten Germans. There have been several valuable studies of the response of the British government to the refugee crisis. This study seeks to assess the responses in one city—Manchester—which had long cultivated an image of itself as a ‘liberal city’. Using documentary and oral sources, including interviews with Manchester refugees, it explores the work of those sectors of local society that took part in the work of rescue: Jewish communal organisations, the Society of Friends, the Rotarians, the University of Manchester, secondary schools in and around Manchester, pacifist bodies, the Roman Catholic Church and industrialists from the Manchester region. The book considers the reasons for their choices to help to assesses their degree of success and the forces which limited their effectiveness.
a city which prided itself on its liberality and housing the largest Jewish population in provincial Britain, the consciences of people and organisations, Jewish and non-Jewish, were sufficiently ‘burdened’ to elicit practical measures of help for refugees from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, the vast majority of them Jewish. Since it began to develop a distinctive identity after the debacle of Peterloo in 1819, Manchester came to be seen by its new middle class of merchants, manufacturers and professional men as the quintessential ‘liberal city’. The
On Labor Day in 1988 two hundred hungry and homeless people went to Golden Gate Park in search of a hot meal, while fifty-four activists from Food Not Bombs, surrounded by riot police, lined up to serve them food. The riot police counted twenty-five served meals, the legal number allowed by city law before breaking permit restrictions, and then began to arrest people. The arrests proceeded like an assembly line: an activist would scoop a bowl of food and hand it to a hungry person. A police officer would then handcuff and arrest that activist. Immediately, the next activist in line would take up the ladle and be promptly arrested. By the end of the day fifty-four people had been arrested for “providing food without a permit.” These arrests were not an aberration but part of a multi-year campaign by the city of San Francisco against radical homeless activists. Why would a liberal city arrest activists helping the homeless? In exploring this question, the book uses the conflict between the city and activists as a unique opportunity to examine the contested nature of urban politics, homelessness, and public space, while developing an anarchist alternative to liberal urban politics, which is rooted in mutual aid, solidarity, and anti-capitalism.
: The connective devices between the city of fragments and wholes operate across the liberal city and the ‘city in the wild.’ The liberal city has a global resonance, even if it is understood in different ways across world-regions. It is the city of rights, state institutions and processes, planning and policy processing, distributions of land
of neoliberalism and therefore a search for a precise neoliberal urban policy. Good examples are identified in London, for instance, because of the Public-Private Partnerships used to finance transport that marginalise the democratic process and give financial priority to the private sector. Massive cuts for local authorities oblige them to sell land and to make dodgy deals with private developers despite their wishes. Discipline and coercion are central to neoliberalism. However, within European cities, in classically liberal cities, by and large, most urban
23 Conclusion: the victims of Fascism and the liberal city It was probably the case with the Manchester of the 1930s, as it certainly was in earlier years, that the parts did not quite add up to the desired whole. The city cannot be described, without strong reservations, as the ‘liberal city’ which Manchester’s articulate middle-class believed it to be. In the 1880s and 1890s immigrants from Eastern Europe, while welcomed by a liberal paper like the Manchester Guardian, and by a liberal-minded elite, had been met by an outburst of anti-alien and anti
of liberal city spaces can help to explain the targeting of the World Trade Center by Terror in 2001. And we saw in the works of Negri the attempt to develop an alternative account of life in terms of its absolute immanence, its refusal of transcendence, and how such an account of life can be used problematically to legitimate a form of resistance to liberalism which simultaneously refuses the strategies and tactics of terrorism. [ 127 ] 2935 The Biopolitics 12/9/06 11:06 Page 128 The biopolitics of the war on terror Yet, ultimately, in the unravelling of
economy and Marxian poststructuralism. Critical Discourse Studies , 9 , 2 , 133–47 . Stanley , L. ( 2014 ) ‘We’re reaping what we sowed’: Everyday crisis narratives and acquiescence to the age of austerity. New Political Economy , 19 , 6 , 895–917 . Stationery Office ( 2011 ) Unlocking growth in cities . London : HM Stationary Office . Storper , M. ( 2016 ) The neo-liberal city as idea and reality. Territory, Politics, Governance , 4 , 2 , 241–63 . Swyngedouw , E. ( 2011 ) Interrogating post-democratisation: Reclaiming egalitarian political
, creating an image of a dynamic, modern, neo-liberal city that has left its troubled past behind (O’Dowd and Komarova, 2009 ). Moving outside the local residential neighbourhoods and into city-centre spaces and places reveals the invisibility of children and young people in urban planning. Matthews ( 1995 ) highlights how teenagers between the ages of 14 and 18 are virtually absent from
similar critique about knocking down a straw man of one's own making came from Geoffrey Hosking, in The Journal of Modern History 69, no. 4 (1997): 897–98. 84 See the acknowledgments in his dissertation book: Robert W. Thurston, Liberal City, Conservative State: Moscow and Russia's Urban Crisis, 1906–1914 (Oxford, 1987), vii. 85 Thurston, Life and Terror , xi–xii. 86 Abbott Gleason in The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 28, no. 1 (1997): 133–35. 87 Positive reviews came nearly exclusively from the UK. See Chris Ward in Slavic