Public libraries between scarce financial resources and communal public service provision

公共图书馆是一项重要的公益性公共服务，作为社会基础设施的一部分，有助于实现教育公平。它们植根于社区和国家的教育政治，以及更普遍的国家福利背景。鉴于财政资源稀缺和紧缩政策，公共图书馆等志愿社区服务必须越来越多地证明其服务和结构的合理性，并以更经济的方式组织它们。因此，这些机构多年来一直在进行结构调整，除了所提供的服务外，还影响到行为者、组织和治理结构及其所在地。该项目将侧重于公共图书馆及其组织和治理的变化-也是地理-从政权理论的角度来看，在紧缩（政治）的背景下。因此，我们将有助于理论建设和批判性反思最近的辩论紧缩对城市社会基础设施的影响。公共图书馆为人文地理学提供了一个新的研究课题，它有助于在紧缩城市主义概念和经验争论的背景下发展迄今被忽视的社会基础设施研究。根据制度理论，实证的重点是有关的地方行为者、其各自的利益、目标和政治战略以及治理结构，包括相关的谈判和建立联盟的进程。此外，还将分析地方与非地方，特别是国家行为者和机构之间的相互作用（多层面视角）。为了整合当地公共图书馆的非本地和国家行为者和机构的作用，我们的研究旨在对不同国家福利背景下的定性案例研究进行国际比较。在我们的案例研究中，我们选择了波恩、莱斯特和马尔默，这三个欧洲城市的公共图书馆目前正在经历有趣的重组过程。

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.