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After Urban Regeneration is a comprehensive study of contemporary trends in urban policy and planning. Leading scholars come together to create a key contribution to the literature on gentrification, with a focus on the history and theory of community in urban policy. Engaging with debates as to how urban policy has changed, and continues to change, following the financial crash of 2008, the book provides an essential antidote to those who claim that culture and society can replicate the role of the state. Based on research from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Connected Communities programme and with a unique set of case studies drawing on artistic and cultural community work. The book sets out the argument that post-2010, UK urban policy has ended what was termed “regeneration” policy. In the current context, driven further after May 2015, communities, towns and cities are left to fend for themselves. The book concludes by arguing the role of the university in its relationship with urban communities also has to change with this context. The resources of universities can help local communities better understand the challenges they face and possible solutions.

Despite the improved supply and quality of housing in the United Kingdom and Europe over the last sixty years, the future of housing remains uncertain. Will the supply of new housing meet demand? Is decent, affordable housing an achievable goal? How far will governments seek to shape the market? How will they respond to demographic pressures in different parts of the country? Will housing wealth become a central issue in wider debates about the future of public services? This book looks at the big questions affecting the future of housing as a key indicator of social and economic well-being in the twenty-first century. It brings together contributions by housing experts who explore a wide range of themes and issues affecting the prospects for the coming twenty years or more. Drawing on the evidence of the past and present, the experts analyse the implications of current trends to consider how markets and governments might respond to the challenges ahead. The book is not a work of prophecy or a manifesto for action. It is designed to stimulate and contribute to informed debate about possible futures and what can be done to influence what happens.

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.

Drawing on practices and theories of environmental justice, this book describes China's contribution to global warming and analyses its policy responses. Contributors critically examine China's practical and ethical responsibilities to climate change from a variety of perspectives. They explore policies that could mitigate China's environmental impact while promoting its own interests and meeting the international community's expectations.

In 2015, one hundred years passed since Robert Park penned his seminal article “The City: Suggestions for the investigation of human behaviour in the city environment” in the American Journal of Sociology. It provided an agenda for the Chicago school of urban sociology, which came to shape urban research for decades to come. Since 1915 much has changed, both in the urban world itself and in the urban research that reflects on those transformations. In today’s world of global cities, cities around the world have undergone dramatic development, and nowhere as dramatic as in China. In the world of urban research, Park’s human ecology approach has lost the appeal that it once had. Against this background, in this book specialists on urban China reflect on the relevance of Park’s article on “The City” – for cities in China, for urban research, and for questions about studying the social life of the city. The aim of the book is to take Park’s article as a point of departure for critical reflection on both the research on urban China and on the issues that Chinese cities face. The book offers readers a timely respite from the eruption of urban China research, to reflect on what the city in China contributes to urban studies more generally. Despite the shared starting point, the contributors represent a range of perspectives that would disrupt any notion of monolithic “Chinese school” while also pointing the way towards recurrent challenges, topics and approaches relevant for a contemporary urbanism.

This book provides a review of the findings of the largest-ever programme of cities research in the UK, the Economic and Social Research Council's ‘Cities: Competitiveness and Cohesion programme’. Chapters present the findings of this wide-ranging programme, organised around the themes of competitiveness, social cohesion, and the role of policy and governance. The book develops understanding of key processes, issues, and concepts critical to cities and urban change, and examines a large body of evidence on a wide range of policy issues at the heart of current debates about the performance of cities and the prospects for urban renaissance.

Seen through the eyes of parents, mainly mothers, this book tells the eye-opening story of what it is like to bring up children in troubled city neighbourhoods. The book provides a unique insider view on the impact of neighbourhood conditions on family life and explores the prospects for families from the point of view of equality, integration, schools, work, community, regeneration, and public services. This book is based on yearly visits over seven years to two hundred families living in four highly disadvantaged city neighbourhoods, two in East London and two in Northern inner and outer city areas. Twenty four families, six from each area, explain over time, from the inside, how neighbourhoods in and of themselves directly affect family survival. These twenty four stories convey powerful messages from parents about the problems they want tackled, and the things that would help them. The main themes explored in the book are neighbourhood, community, family, parenting, incomes, locals, and the need for civic intervention.

Since the turn of the 21st century, there has been a greater pace of reform to planning in Britain than at any other time. As a public sector activity, planning has also been impacted heavily by the wider changes in governance. Yet whilst such reform has been extensively commented upon within academia, few have empirically explored how these changes are manifesting themselves in planning practice. This book aims to understand how both specific planning and broader public sector reforms have been experienced and understood by chartered town planners working in local authorities across Great Britain. After setting out the reform context, successive chapters then map responses across the profession to the implementation of spatial planning, to targets, to public participation and to the idea of a ‘customer-focused’ planning, and to attempts to change the culture of the planning. These correspond to the four key themes of reforms to, or heavily affecting of, the planning system over the past decade: process, management, participation and culture. The aim of this book is to explore how planners have responded to them, and what this reveals about how modernisation is rolled-out by frontline public servants. Drawing on a neo-institutionalist frame, we conclude that ‘the coalface’ plays a vital role in shaping the contours of modernisation and argue for a more nuanced approach that simply looking at structures and policy discourses from a state-centred approach.

There is an alleged crisis of cohesion in the UK, manifested in debates about identity and ‘Britishness’; the breakdown of social connections along the fault lines of geography, ethnicity, faith, income, and age; and the fragile relationship between citizen and state. This book examines how these new dimensions of diversity and difference, so often debated in the national context, are emerging at the neighbourhood level. Contributors from a range of disciplinary backgrounds critically assess, and go beyond the limits of, contemporary policy discourses on ‘community cohesion’ to explore the dynamics of diversity and cohesion within neighbourhoods and to identify new dimensions of disconnection between and within neighbourhoods. The chapters provide theoretically informed critiques of the policy responses of public, private, voluntary, and community organisations and present new empirical research evidence about the dynamics of cohesion in UK neighbourhoods. Topics covered include new immigration, religion and social capital, faith schools, labour- and housing-market disconnections, neighbourhood territoriality, information technology and neighbourhood construction, and gated communities.

Community safety emerged as a new approach to tackling and preventing local crime and disorder in the late 1980s and was adopted into mainstream policy by New Labour in the late '90s. Twenty years on, it is important to ask how the community safety agenda has evolved and developed within local crime and disorder prevention strategies. This book provides the first sustained critical and theoretically informed analysis by leading authorities in the field. It explores the strengths and weaknesses of the community safety legacy, posing challenging questions, such as how and why has community safety policy making become such a contested terrain? What are the different issues at stake for ‘provider’ versus ‘consumer’ interests in community safety policy? Who are the winners and losers and where are the gaps in community safety policy making? Do new priorities mean that we have seen the rise and now the fall of community safety? The book provides answers to these questions by exploring a wide range of topics relating to community safety policy and practice, including: anti-social behaviour strategies; victims' perspectives on community safety; race, racism, and policing; safety and social exclusion; domestic violence; substance misuse; community policing; and organised crime.

The premise of the book is that building and construction practices are insensitive to the needs of many people, and implicated in the widespread despoliation and degradation of ecological systems and the environment. From the construction of transport networks and major commercial and residential property in rapidly urbanising countries, to the popularisation of self-build and home improvements, we are living in a period of incessant and unprecedented building. Few places are untouched by construction and infrastructure projects that are part of an ideology of building that has little regard to what is needed and, instead, are shaped by political and economic values that regard building and construction as ‘a good thing’. Using examples from around the world, the book identifies the mentalities of construction and building that are failing people and places in many different ways, and calls for radical changes to city living and environments by building less, but better.

Older people in the countryside are vastly under-researched compared to those living in urban areas. This co-authored volume describes the impetus for and principal findings and policy implications of the Grey and Pleasant Land (GaPL) project, a recent major interdisciplinary study of rural ageing in southwest England and Wales. The topic of this research is older people’s participation in rural community life, in particular the ways in which rural elders are connected to their communities and their contributions to rural civic society. This volume offers a unique interdisciplinary perspective on this issue focusing on older people’s role as assets in rural civic society and demonstrates how the use of diverse methods from across disciplines aims to increase public engagement with this research. The authors examine the ways in which rural elders are connected to community and place, the contributions they make to family and neighbours, and the organisations and groups to which they belong. Highly topical issues around later life explored through these perspectives include older people’s financial security, leisure, access to services, transport and mobility, civic engagement and digital inclusion – all considered within the rural context in an era of fiscal austerity. In doing so, this book challenges problem-based views of ageing rural populations through considering barriers and facilitators to older people’s inclusion and opportunities for community participation in rural settings.

Described by the National Crime Agency as a ‘significant threat’, county lines involve gangs recruiting vulnerable youth to sell drugs in provincial areas. This phenomenon has impacted local drug markets, increasing criminal activity and violence. Exploring how county lines evolve, the book reveals extensive criminal exploitation and control in the daily ‘grind’ to sell drugs. Drawing upon extensive interviews and case studies, the book gives voice to users and dealers, providing an in-depth analysis of techniques, relationships and ‘trapping’. The book examines how London-based urban street gangs establish county line drug-supply networks into the Home Counties. It draws upon two principle theoretical perspectives: social field analysis and street capital theory. It then traces the emergence of county lines, noting operational and cultural shifts in drug supply and distribution, and assesses the question of who joins a county lines. The book moves on to examine how the actual processes of county lines drug-supply networks work in reality, looking at the internal dynamics, and it evaluates the complex set of inter-personal relationships between the user community and county line operatives. It then focuses on the families of those involved in county lines, looking at how violence and intimidation often reverberates back into families. The book concludes that in the United Kingdom, the social fields of the urban street gang and of drug distribution markets, are rapidly evolving; it is important to consider how the relational boundaries of these social fields are interacting with the social field of organised crime. With county lines now a critical issue for policing and government, this is an invaluable contribution to literature on gangs, youth violence and drugs. The book begins by describing how the research study was conducted.

This book explores the policy and social frames through which citizens and wider communities are being engaged with culture as a tool to mitigate the effects of social exclusion and deprivation. The study is based on an inter-disciplinary four-year research project investigating those individuals and organisations whose mission is to use culture, instrumentally, to help deprived communities in a variety of different ways. The project sought to examine the different scales of activity involved within cultural intermediation, examining national policy and practice, but grounded within specific community-level case studies. Although a number of sites across England were examined, two field sites in particular were the subject for a deep ethnographic engagement, including active interventions. These were Birmingham, with a focus on the Balsall Heath neighbourhood and Greater Manchester, with detailed work being undertaken in the Ordsall ward of Salford. These case studies feature throughout much of the book as a lens through which to see the impacts of wider policy trends. Research was undertaken during a period of quite dramatic change in policy and governance within the UK’s cultural sector. These changes were driven by one of the biggest experiments in refiguring the role of the public sector within the UK since 1945, as post-credit crunch governments have responded to the challenges of a struggling global economy by employing the discourse of ‘austerity’. As this book shows, what has emerged is a cultural intermediation sector that has refined its practices, adopting new funding models and arenas of activity.

Throughout the developed world, governments have invested substantial sums in local and regional economic development. Many have spent heavily on local-development agencies and strategies to bolster competitiveness within world markets. What has been the impact of these actions? How effective are the strategies and processes employed by development agencies? How well funded are development efforts in one nation compared to another, and how are their objectives defined? This book addresses these questions. It explores the impact and functioning of economic-development agencies; contributes to the emerging literature on economic-development agencies by reporting on the results of a cross-national survey of economic-development practitioners; compares the ‘institutional architectures’ of economic development in Australia, England, the United States, and Northern Ireland; and analyses how these institutional arrangements affect individual agencies and their regions. The book provides the reader with a greater appreciation of how local and regional economic-development systems operate in different economies and aids understanding of what makes the economic development system in each nation unique. It challenges ideas about the uniformity of economic-development efforts and encourages practitioners and policy makers to experiment with and explore strategies used elsewhere.

Most of the expansive literature on social citizenship follows its leading thinker, T. H. Marshall, and talks only about the British state, often referring only to England. But social citizenship rights require taxation, spending, effective public services, and politics committed to them. They can only be as strong as politics makes them. That means that the distinctive territorial politics of the UK are reshaping citizenship rights as they reshape policies, obligations, and finance across the UK. This book explores how changing territorial politics are impacting on social citizenship rights across the UK. The contributors contend that whilst territorial politics have always been a major influence in the meaning and scope of social citizenship rights, devolved politics are now increasingly producing different social citizenship rights in different parts of the UK. Moreover, they are doing it in ways that few scholars or policymakers expect or can trace. Drawing on extensive research over the last 10 years, the book brings together leading scholars of devolution and citizenship to chart the connection between the politics of devolution and the meaning of social citizenship in the UK. The first part of the book connects the large, and largely distinct, literatures on citizenship, devolution, and the welfare state. The empirical second part identifies the different issues that will shape the future territorial politics of citizenship in the UK: intergovernmental relations and finance; policy divergence; bureaucratic politics; public opinion; and the European Union.

Social development work takes place in the grey area between government and the voluntary and community sectors. This book explores the ways in which front-line professionals working with communities identify and address the dilemmas inherent in the current policy context. Drawing upon original material, the book examines how ‘community engagement’ workers negotiate the ethical and emotional challenges they face; how they work through problems of community representation at interpersonal and team levels; how they manage the conflicting roles of local activist and paid worker and what role colleagues, management and others play when responding to such challenges. The book reconnects to, and updates, an important tradition in social policy that explores the dilemmas of ‘street-level’ work. It draws on contemporary political theory and current debates concerning the modernisation of governance and psycho-social perspectives on identity, values and agency.

This book distils lessons from work on neighbourhoods carried out within the Cities Research Centre of the University of the West of England over the past seven years. It offers a major contribution to academic debates on the neighbourhood both as a sphere of governance and as a point of public service delivery under New Labour since 1997. The book explores how ‘the neighbourhood’ has been used in policy in the UK; what the ‘appropriate contribution’ of neighbourhood governance is and how this relates to concepts of multi-level governance; the tensions that are visible at the neighbourhood level and what this tells us about wider governance issues. The book explores and reflects on the notion of neighbourhood governance from a variety of perspectives that reflect the unique depth and breadth of the Centre's research programme. Neighbourhood governance is examined in relation to: multi-level governance, city-regions, local government, mainstreaming, cross-national differences in neighbourhood policy, community, civil society, diversity, different conceptions of democracy, and evaluation and learning. In doing so, the book identifies useful conceptual tools for analysing the present and future contribution of policy to neighbourhoods.

How do people deal with diversity in deprived and mixed urban neighbourhoods? This book provides a comparative international perspective on superdiversity in cities, with explicit attention given to social inequality and social exclusion on a neighbourhood level. Although public discourses on urban diversity are often negative, this book focuses on how residents actively and creatively come and live together through micro-level interactions. By deliberately taking an international perspective on the daily lives of residents, the book uncovers the ways in which national and local contexts shape living in diversity. The book will be a valuable resource for researchers and students of poverty, segregation and social mix, conviviality, the effects of international migration, urban and neighbourhood policies and governance, multiculturality, social networks, social cohesion, social mobility, and super-diversity.

How people can be persuaded to take more control of their own lives continues to be a subject of policy and academic debate, and the contribution of active citizens to improving societal well-being is high across different policy agendas. But the promotion of community self-help raises a wide range of questions – for people working in neighbourhoods, for policy makers, for politicians, and for residents themselves – about how we promote engagement, what would motivate people to become active, and more fundamentally about the ongoing relevance and value of community activity. This book offers answers to these questions, based on detailed real-life evidence from over 100 community groups, each trying to combat neighbourhood problems. It presents a challenge to the existing thinking on contested debates, and proposes ways forward for community building.