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In 2003 the Labour Government published its ambitious Sustainable Communities Plan. It promised to bring about a ‘step change’ in the English planning system and a new emphasis on the construction of more balanced, cohesive, and competitive places.
This book uses historical and contemporary materials to document the ways in which policy-makers, in different eras, have sought to use state powers and regulations to create better, more balanced, and sustainable communities and citizens. It charts the changes that have take place in community-building policy frameworks, place imaginations, and core spatial policy initiatives in the UK since 1945. In so doing, it examines the tensions that have emerged within spatial policy over the types of places that should be created and the forms of mobility and fixity required to create them. It also shows that there are significant lessons that can be learnt from the experiences of the past. These can be used to inform contemporary policy debates over issues such as migration, uneven development, key worker housing, and sustainability.
The book will be an important text for students and researchers in geography, urban studies, planning, and modern social history. It will also be of interest to practitioners working in central and local government, voluntary organisations, community groups, and those involved in the planning and design of sustainable communities.
This book documents and assesses the core of New Labour’s approach to the revitalisation of cities, that is, the revival of citizenship, democratic renewal, and the participation of communities to spear head urban change. In doing so, the book explores the meaning, and relevance, of ‘community’ as a focus for urban renaissance. It interrogates the conceptual and ideological content of New Labour’s conceptions of community and, through the use of case studies, evaluates how far, and with what effects, such conceptions are shaping contemporary urban policy and practice.
The book is an important text for students and researchers in geography, urban studies, planning, sociology, and related disciplines. It will also be of interest to officers working in local and central government, voluntary organisations, community groups, and those with a stake in seeking to enhance democracy and community involvement in urban policy and practice.
This book uses an international perspective and draws on a wide range of new conceptual and empirical material to examine the sources of conflict and cooperation within the different landscapes of knowledge that are driving contemporary urban change. Based on the premise that historically established systems of regulation and control are being subject to unprecedented pressures, scholars critically reflect on the changing role of planning and governance in sustainable urban development, looking at how a shift in power relations between expert and local cultures in western planning processes has blurred the traditional boundaries between public, private and voluntary sectors.
This chapter examines the relationships between governance capacities in London and future planning practices in the wake of economic austerity agendas. It describes the complex public-private sector entanglements that now exist in the city and the legacies left by earlier rounds of reform that have seen the wide-scale privatisation of welfare assets and services. It discusses the structural limitations that privatisation and private financing have placed on state capacities, and the broader implications of change for the future governance and management of London. It concludes with some reflections on wider understandings of localism, and the importance of asset ownership and management to the future of London’s sustainability.
This chapter examines the status and meaning of the term community in the context of New Labour’s urban policy in Great Britain. It discusses the government’s launch of a series of reform to reconstruct the relationships between civil society and the state based on new modern principles of flexibility, and evaluates the role that communities may play in the renaissance of Britain’s cities. The chapter explores the processes involved in defining communities and argues that despite the complexities and contingencies of community formation, all communities are characterised by boundaries of inclusion and exclusion.
This chapter looks at the form and character of the shift to sustainable community building through an assessment of the relationships between employment, labour-market building, and (sustainable) spatial communities. It evaluates the differences between these policy agendas and those of the post-war period that were outlined in Chapters Three and Four, and documents the ways the sustainable community has become the primary policy vehicle that delivers and implements its wider agendas. The chapter also presents an argument which states that the new agendas are premised on particular conceptions of (im)mobility and the relationships between place, employment, and community building.
This chapter discusses the relationships between New Labour’s (im)migration policy and their wider strategies for spatial development and social cohesion. It looks at the ways in which the government has sought to solve these problems and what its strategies have been. The chapter also discusses the growing role of the European Union and the wider politics of immigration and (sustainable) community building.
This chapter discusses the shift in reviewing the concept of the ‘key worker’ (KW) within the wider regional-policy changes from the end of the 1970s up to the present day. It explores the ways the new types of creative and entrepreneurial KWs were defined, and how their presence and/or creation was viewed as important to the creation of sustainable and competitive places and communities. The absence of such workers was presented as one of the key problems that the Development Areas (DAs) faced.
This concluding chapter combines all the key findings under the four themes that have helped shape the analysis. These themes are the imaginations of place and space; the processes, practices, and politics of mobility; the engendering of particular forms of citizenship and subjectivity; and the changing perceptions and realities of state capacities and modes of regulation. The chapter argues that in each case, a historical narrative has allowed new insights to be developed and the continuities and changes in policy emphasis to be established and contextualised. The latter portion of the chapter has a discussion of the directions that future research on spatial policy and governance might take, and the key questions that could inform such research.
In 2003 the Labour Government published its ambitious Sustainable Communities Plan. It promised to bring about a ‘step change’ in the English planning system and a new emphasis on the construction of more balanced, cohesive, and competitive places. This book uses historical and contemporary materials to document the ways in which policy makers, in different eras, have sought to use state powers and regulations to create better, more balanced, and sustainable communities and citizens. It charts the changes that have taken place in community-building policy frameworks, place imaginations, and core spatial-policy initiatives in the UK since 1945. In so doing, the book examines the tensions that have emerged within spatial policy over the types of places which should be created, and the forms of mobility and fixity required to create them. It also shows that there are significant lessons that can be learnt from the experiences of the past, which can be used to inform contemporary policy debates over issues such as migration, uneven development, key-worker housing, and sustainability.
