Public libraries between scarce financial resources and communal public service provision

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Britta Klagge
• Subject Area: Human Geography
• Term: from 2019 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 424608044

Public libraries are an important public service of general interest and, as part of social infrastructures, contribute to educational justice. They are embedded in communal and national educational politics as well as, more generally, national welfare contexts. In view of scarce financial resources and austerity politics, voluntary communal services such as public libraries have to increasingly justify their services and structures, and organize them more economically. As a result, they have been for many years in a process of restructuring, which affects, beside the offered services, also actor, organizational and governance structures as well as their locations. The project will focus on public libraries and the changes of their - also geographical - organization and governance, in the context of austerity (politics) from a regime-theory perspective. Thereby, we will contribute to theory building and critical reflection of recent debates on the implications of austerity on urban social infrastructures. For human geography, public libraries provide a new research topic, which helps to develop the so-far neglected research on social infrastructures against the background of debates on austerity urbanism conceptually and empirically. According with regime theory, the empirical focus is on the involved local actors, their respective interests, goals and political strategies as well as governance structures, including the associated negotiations and coalition-building processes. Furthermore, the interaction of local with nonlocal, especially national, actors and institutions will be analysed (multilevel perspective). To integrate the role of nonlocal and national actors and institutions for local public libraries, our research is designed as an international comparison of qualitative case studies in different national welfare contexts. For our case studies we chose Bonn, Leicester and Malmö, three European cities in which public libraries are currently undergoing interesting restructuring processes.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants