The ongoing crisis in Europe has dramatic impact on the life in many Southern European cities: Unemployment, social deprivation, poverty, political instability, severe cuts in the welfare state budgets and a wide spread feeling of despair have eroded much of the social foundation of the cities.
In this book, contributors from Spain, Greece, Portugal and Italy provide an insight into the complex interference between the different aspects of the crisis. They show that the recent urban crisis is not purely a result of the budgetary problems of the nation state (»austerity urbanism«) but needs to be seen as multiple contestations. The Crisis of the City is therefore understood as a result of a changing nation state, cultural diversity, challenged urban planning and politics and a globalized economy.

Frank Eckardt completed vocational training from 1986 to 1988 as a wholesale and foreign trade clerk at Eisen und Metall AG in Gelsenkirchen and from 1990 to 1994 as a specialist in psychiatry at the Delft Psychiatric Hospital in the Netherlands. From 1989 to 1994 he lived in the Netherlands, where he also did his community service at the Rotterdam refugee agency. From 1994 to 1999 he studied Political Science, Modern and Medieval History and German Philology at the University of Kassel and received his doctorate in Political Science in 2002. He has been working at the Bauhaus University Weimar since 1999, initially as a research assistant, from 2002 as a junior professor and, since his habilitation in 2009, as a professor of urban social research. In 2007 he also held the Alfred Grosser Chair for Political Science at the Institut d'études politiques de Paris and was a substitute professor at the Goethe University in Frankfurt (Chair of Urban Sociology) in 2008 and 2009. Since the age of 15, Frank Eckardt has produced articles in the journalistic field for a wide variety of media. From 1995 to 2012 he wrote monthly and bimonthly articles for the magazine »Forum Kommune«.
Javier Ruiz Sánchez (PhD) is a professor for urban planning at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain.