This book presents the findings of a major Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) project into urban austerity governance in eight cities across the world (Athens, Baltimore, Barcelona, Melbourne, Dublin, Leicester, Montréal and Nantes). It offers comparative reflections on the myriad experiences of collaborative governance and its limitations.
An international collaborative from across the social sciences, the book discusses ways that citizens, activists and local states collaborate and come into conflict in attempting to build just cities. It examines the development of egalitarian collaborative governance strategies, provides innovative ideas and tools to extend emancipatory governance practices and shows hopeful possibilities for cities beyond austerity and neoliberalism.
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.
Urban Reflections looks at how places change, the role of planners in bringing about urban change, and the public’s attitudes to that change. Drawing on geographical, cinematic and photographic readings, the book offers a fresh incisive story of urban change, one that evokes both real and imagined perspectives of places and planning, and questions what role and purpose urban planning serves in the 21st century. It will interest urban and architectural historians, planners, geographers and all concerned with understanding urban planning and attitudes toward the contemporary city.
Following publication of the government’s White Paper on cities (2000), the question of what makes some cities more successful than others has become an increasingly important policy issue. This topical book tackles this question from differing perspectives.
Although previous work has explored particular facets of competitiveness, this volume is the first to do so in a systematic way that combines theory, evidence and policy implications. Bringing together leading experts on urban economic performance, it provides a new look at the issue of urban competitiveness and offers new insights into the factors that shape competitiveness.
City visions represent shared, and often desirable, expectations about our urban futures. This book explores the history and evolution of city visions, placing them in the wider context of art, culture, science, foresight and urban theory.
It highlights and critically reviews examples of city visions from around the world, contrasting their development and outlining the key benefits and challenges in planning such visions.
The authors show how important it is to think about the future of cities in objective and strategic ways, engaging with a range of stakeholders – something more important than ever as we look to visions of a sustainable future beyond the COVID-19 crisis.
The ‘smart city’ is often promoted as a technology-driven solution to complex urban issues. While commentators are increasingly critical of techno-optimistic narratives, the political imagination is dominated by claims that technical solutions can be uniformly applied to intractable problems.
This book provides a much-needed alternative view, exploring how ‘home-grown’ digital disruption, driven and initiated by local actors, upends the mainstream corporate narrative.
Drawing on original research conducted in a range of urban African settings, Odendaal shows how these initiatives can lead to meaningful change.
This is a valuable resource for scholars working in the intersection of science and technology studies, urban and economic geography and sociology.
This book explores relationships between war, displacement and city-making. Focusing on people seeking refuge in Somali cities after being forced to migrate by violence, environmental shocks or economic pressures, it highlights how these populations are actively transforming urban space.
Using first-hand testimonies and participatory photography by urban in-migrants, the book documents and analyses the micropolitics of urban camp management, evictions and gentrification, and the networked labour of displaced populations that underpins growing urban economies. Central throughout is a critical analysis of how the discursive figure of the ‘internally displaced person’ is co-produced by various actors. The book argues that this label exerts significant power in structuring socio-economic inequalities and the politics of group belonging within different Somali cities connected through protracted histories of conflict-related migration.
This book provides an innovative perspective to consider contemporary urban challenges through the lens of urban vacancy.
Centering urban vacancy as a core feature of urbanization, the contributors coalesce new empirical insights on the impacts of recent contestations over the re-use of vacant spaces in post-crisis cities across the globe.
Using international case studies from the Global North and Global South, it sheds important new light on the complexity of forces and processes shaping urban vacancy and its re-use, exploring these areas as both lived spaces and sites of political antagonism. It explores what has and hasn’t worked in re-purposing vacant sites and provides sustainable blueprints for future development.
This collection adds weight to an emerging argument that suggests that policies in place to make cities better places are inextricably linked to an attempt to civilize, pacify and regulate crime and disorder in urban areas, contributing to a vision of an urban renaissance which is perhaps as much about control as it is about the broader physical and social renewal of our towns and cities.
The book has three key themes: the theories, strategies and assumptions underpinning the securing of 'Urban Renaissance'; the agendas of current urban policy in the field of crime control; and, thirdly, the role of communities within these agendas. The book provides focused discussions and engagement with these issues from a range of scholars who examine policy connections that can be traced between social, urban and crime policy and the wider processes of regeneration in British towns and cities. The book also seeks to develop our understanding of policies, theories and practices surrounding contemporary British urban policy where a move from concerns with 'urban renaissance' to those of sustainable communities clearly intersect with issues of community security, policing and disorder.
Providing a rare disciplinary crossover between urban studies, criminology and community studies, "Securing an Urban Renaissance" will be essential reading for academics and students in criminology, social policy and human geography concerned with the future of British cities and the political debates shaping the regulation of conduct, crime and disorder in these spaces.
In the face of continuing challenges of urban decline, an increasing local policy activism can be observed in a number of European countries. The implementation of area-based initiatives (ABIs) for deprived urban areas, such as The ‘New Deal for Communities’ in England and the ‘Social City Programme’ in Germany, are examples of these New Localism(s). ABIs can be seen as test-beds for new forms of urban governance seeking to foster an active participation of residents and the Voluntary Sector.
Based upon a comparative research in two cities, Bristol in England and Duisburg in Germany, this book is the first to cross-nationally compare the impacts of ABIs in two deprived urban areas in England and Germany. It evaluates the impacts of these New Localism(s) on organisations and development actors at the neighbourhood level. Using a rich data-set and applying a hands-on methodology it applies a mixed method approach to help the reader with a wider spectrum of illustrations and is aimed at those studying and working in the field of urban regeneration and planning.
