In this section the focus is on key examples of the kind of policies and practices that mark out the newly criminalised urban policies, operating through a combination of policing, anti-social behaviour strategies, and partnership working by a broad range of agencies and actors. These agencies and actors have the task to work in accordance with new targets, co-working protocols, or broader urban visions in fields that are at least to some extent concerned with urban problems and disorder.

In the first part of this volume we saw how residential spaces and housing has continued to be central to urban policy. In this section Johnstone and MacLeod (Chapter Five) expand on this theme by arguing that urban policy addressing the criticism levelled at design in the renaissance blueprint, as well as its middle-class orientation, raises questions about the extent to which recent urban policies address the social organisation of the city. Johnstone and MacLeod focus on the inner suburbs, rather than council estates, and see the sustainable communities plan as a possible means of alleviating the inequalities suggested by the urban renaissance documentation. Critically they argue that if we accept that anti-social behaviour might be stemmed by reducing residential turnover, thereby building local social bonds, the sustainable communities plan may be effective by its efforts to create places people want to live and remain in.

Perhaps the most visible impact of the New Labour criminal justice legislative programme has been the 1998 Criminal Justice Act. This Act was used to create the Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO), among a range of other orders designed to regulate and control behaviour. ASBOs are now well-discussed and researched (Burney, 2005; Flint, 2006) but were set up particularly to tackle problems in residential neighbourhoods and as a tool for local governments and social housing providers to deal with perceived problem tenants. Of course a key result of this initiative has been to provide a discretionary tool to regulate behaviour that has been unevenly distributed in its implementation. Local authorities, like Manchester City, have become hotbeds for their use and the range of conduct considered ‘anti-social’ has highlighted the interplay of a discretionary tool with local community assessments of acceptability and civility.