4 - Access and Agency

Summary

City institutions engage with language provisions in order to ensure equal access to services. Global provisions are intertwined with local knowledge resources introduced by individual agents. As UK austerity measures post-2012 led to a reduction of resources and specialised provisions, institutions began to rely more and more on the deployment of local individualised knowledge in response to communication challenges. Multilingual spaces became in some areas improvised and driven by the agency of both institutional agents and clients. The city’s day-to-day operations can be seen as a space of resistance to monolingual ideologies, born out of the necessity to provide front-line services to all and tightly embedded into the shared experience of a multilingual reality. But city-based institutions have limited powers to legislate or to fund operations.