Neighbourhoods Mobilise the Troops - Community Organising, Violence and Governmentality

The article reflects on the difficult relation between community work against domestic violence and local crime prevention under the conditions of the neoliberal state that cuts down on social benefits and promotes self-help, active citizenship and self-responsibility instead while at the same time restoring the punishing state with its strict regime of law-and-order. The author describes a project Tarantula - she started herself while being a social worker in Hamburg, Germany. Tarantula was aimed at strengthening social networks and the neighbours' willingness to get involved in favour of affected women. Although conceptualized as an emancipatory approach referring to community organizing in the tradition of social movements it is questionable whether and how this can really work in the current situation. At present, the field of crime control is being reconfigured as a result of political and administrative decisions, which, for their part, are based on a new structure of social relations and cultural attitudes. The demolition of the 'welfare state' means the re-coding of the security policy that facilitates the development of interventionist techniques that govern and control individuals through their own ability to act.

Marginalized Youth, the ‘Modern’ Professional and the ‘Modern’ Workplace: A note on the Need for a Critical Approach to ‘Modernizing’ Strategies

This paper briefly examines plans to ‘transform’ social work services for socially marginalized children and young people in England. More specifically, it will focus on moves to privatize social work services for children and young people who are in public care, or ‘looked after’. In what follows, the focus will be on how the promotion of ‘social work practices’ (SWPs) – the name of these envisaged new structures – is discursively embedded in the idea the idea that ‘liberation’ and worker fulfillment can only be delivered within a privatized sphere. In this context, it will be maintained, the work of Boltanski and Chiapello may help to illuminate how the government and other primary definers are seeking to ‘win hearts and minds’ for further neoliberal ‘transformations’ within Children’s Services in England.

Dutch boundaries

In many schools of architecture the 1970s have been an important watershed for the way in which architecture was taught. For example, recent studies have stressed the importance of Aldo Rossi for the changes in the teaching of architec-ture at the ETH in Zürich that before was based on orthodox modern principles. A similar struggle between an orthodox conception of modernity and its criticism took place at the architectural faculty of Delft, in the Netherlands. Although Delft is an important European school of architecture, the theoretical work produced during this period is not largely known outside the Netherlands. This is perhaps due to the fact that most studies were published in Dutch. With this article, I intend to make the architectural theory developed during this period known to a larger public. The article describes the intellectual journey made by Dutch stu-dents of architecture in the 1970s and 1980s. This was the quest to receive recognition for the intellectual substance of architecture: the insight architecture could be a discourse and a form of knowledge and not only a method of building. Specifically, the work of the architectural theoretician Wim Nijenhuis is highlight-ed. However, as I point out in this article, the results of this journey also had its problematic sides. This becomes clear from the following sentence taken from the dissertation of Wim Nijenhuis: "The search for metaphysical fiction and the tendency towards a technological informed absolute through fully transparent and simultaneous information, should be contested by a fantasy dimension, that does not wish to 'overcome' a given situation and that does not rely on 'creativi-ty' (that would still be historical and humanistic)." Texts like this have a hermet-ic quality that is not easy to comprehend for an architectural public. Even more, there is an important debate looming behind these sentences. As an important outcome of their quest the architectural students in Delft asked themselves: how do we give form to architectural theory once its claim to truth is exposed as an illusion? For Nijenhuis, the discourse about architecture is a mere 'artful game with words': a fiction, besides other forms of fiction like poetry or literature. The question is then if we have not entered the realm of total subjectivity and relativ-ism with this position. From what can the discourse of architecture derive its authority after the death of God?