5 results
two - Urban policy and communities
- Edited by Dave O'Brien, University of Edinburgh, Peter Matthews, University of Stirling
-
- Book:
- After Urban Regeneration
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 01 September 2022
- Print publication:
- 11 November 2015, pp 9-26
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Introduction
In one form or another, all UK governments since 1945 have pursued policies aimed at addressing urban problems. A concern with community has been evident throughout, although the assumptions about how communities would be engaged with, and benefit from, these policies have varied enormously. In the first two decades after the end of the Second World War, communities were regarded as the passive beneficiaries of planned decentralisation to new towns and the replacement of ‘slums’ with modern public housing. Partly due to the backlash against such policies, the late 1960s witnessed the emergence of neighbourhood-based, often experimental, urban policy initiatives designed to address what Home Secretary James Callaghan described as the ‘deadly quagmire of need and apathy’ in some innercity communities. Since then, there have been numerous shifts in the way in which communities are framed by urban policies, with some initiatives framing ‘communities’ as the solution and others promoting them as the problem. As this chapter demonstrates, this shifting approach to community reflects a deeper set of long-run tensions in urban policy, with policy change tending to emerge as a response to previous policy failure.
The chapter is divided into three main sections. The first section provides an overview of urban policy, with an emphasis on understanding the key shifts in policy since the first area-based initiatives (ABIs) were established in the late 1960s. The tendency for urban policy experiments to serve as a barometer of political and ideological change is noted and the consequences for policymaking are highlighted, with particular emphasis on the circular nature of urban policy debate. The second section examines in more detail the turn, or, more accurately, return, to community in urban policy from the early 1990s onwards. It is shown how community involvement, and ultimately community leadership, came to be seen as the solution to previous policy failure. Yet, it is argued, urban policies continued to repeat the mistakes of past initiatives by misrepresenting the causes of neighbourhood decline. The final, short section briefly examines the contemporary urban policy context. For the first time since 1968, there are effectively no ABIs in England and national government policy has shifted from targeted intervention to a philosophy of general ‘facilitation’.
Two - The politics of sustainability: democracy and the limits of policy action
- Edited by Hugh Atkinson, London South Bank University, Ros Wade, London South Bank University
-
- Book:
- The Challenge of Sustainability
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 25 February 2022
- Print publication:
- 03 December 2014, pp 43-62
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Introduction
This chapter examines the vexed issue of whether democracy represents part of the problem or part of the solution for efforts to forge an ecologically sustainable future. This is a debate that first emerged in the 1970s and that has recently been rekindled by the failure of national governments to reach international agreements with respect to reductions in carbon emissions and climate change mitigation. In response to this debate, the chapter offers two central arguments. First, it advances the view that Churchill's famous maxim ‘Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others which have been tried from time to time’ clearly applies to sustainability issues. Second, it proposes that governing for sustainability will require an active, urgent process of policy learning to ensure that the advantages of democratic approaches can be harnessed. These lessons will need to inform the framing of environmental policy at all levels of decision-making.
This first half of the chapter reviews the debate about authoritarian versus democratic approaches to environmental problems. It notes that many of the same shortcomings of existing representative democracy with respect to sustainability are identified by both schools of thought. The central point of disagreement relates to whether further ecological degradation is best achieved by limiting democracy or by deepening and extending it. The second half of the chapter then turns to examine the relative merits of democracy and non-democracy from both a theoretical and empirical perspective. The weight of evidence points clearly to the conclusion that democratic decision-making provides the preferred route to a sustainable future, if only as the ‘least worst’ option. Having concluded that democracy offers relative advantages over authoritarian approaches, the remainder of the chapter addresses the question of how democracies can better adapt to the challenges of sustainability.
Democracy and sustainability: two schools of thought
Even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while. (James Lovelock, cited in Hickman, 2010)
three - Reinventing cities in a restructuring region? The rhetoric and reality of renaissance in Liverpool and Manchester
- Edited by Martin Boddy, Michael Parkinson
-
- Book:
- City Matters
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 20 January 2022
- Print publication:
- 19 May 2004, pp 33-50
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Governing urban change in England’s North West
The cities of Manchester and Liverpool in England’s North-West region have historically had a symbiotic, if fractious, relationship with each other that was critical to the UK’s early industrial ascendancy. Manchester was the key manufacturing centre, and Liverpool was the distributive hub providing a crucial link with the (colonial) trading world. By the closing decades of the 20th century, both were beset by the precipitous decline in ‘traditional’ industries that was typical of UK cities in crisis (Turok and Edge, 1999). In both cities, new political leaderships elected during the mid-1980s followed a course of practical and symbolic opposition to virtually every attempt by a Conservative national government to tackle its understanding of ‘the British disease’ (Parkinson, 1985; Harding, 2000). And yet, by the end of the 20th century, Liverpool and Manchester were popularly seen as divergent in both their development trajectories and the manner in which they were managed. On the one hand was Manchester, a now ‘pragmatic’ but still Labour-dominated city that has been seen as a paragon of renaissance and policy innovation by successive Conservative and Labour national administrations and which feels justified in proclaiming itself the de facto regional capital. On the other was Liverpool, a city that struggled to overcome the legacy of the militant-led, Trotskyite-influenced Labour administration of the mid-1980s and was beset by political indecision and lack of strategic direction. Arguably, as a result, it lost ground to its regional neighbour 30 miles along the M62 motorway.
The core objective of the Liverpool-Manchester Integrated Case Study (LMICS) was to assess the extent to which the effectiveness (or otherwise) of the structures and processes of urban governance had an independent impact, over time, upon the economic, social and environmental fortunes of the North West’s two principle metropolitan areas. While the study team remained resolutely sceptical about the anthropomorphic and heroic theory of history, which has it that cities can ‘pull themselves up by their own bootstraps’, this line of enquiry was useful in setting the context for the study. This was the case, not least, because the conventional wisdom about the development trajectories of the two cities over the last two decades strongly suggests that ‘governance makes a difference’.
2 - From World City to Pariah City? Liverpool and the Global Economy, 1850–2000
- from Part I - Regeneration
-
- By Stuart Wilks-Heeg, University of Liverpool
- Edited by Ronaldo Munck
-
- Book:
- Reinventing the City
- Published by:
- Liverpool University Press
- Published online:
- 28 July 2017
- Print publication:
- 31 December 2003, pp 36-52
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
At the heart of the paradigm shift that has been taking place in urban studies since the early 1970s is the notion that a fundamental restructuring of previous urban hierarchies has taken place as a result of the dynamics of economic globalisation. It is well known that this restructuring has had major implications for the role of cities and that it has given rise to distinct sets of winners and losers. Indeed, a range of studies carried out in the Europe context concur that the world cities of Frankfurt, Paris, London, Brussels and Amsterdam are the key beneficiaries of this process, while the likes of Naples, Duisberg, Le Havre, Liège and Liverpool consistently rank among those cities that have suffered most extensively (Cheshire et al., 1986; Cheshire, 1990; 1999; Lever, 1999; Dematteis, 2000; Brenner, 2000). Yet, if one city epitomises the consequences of economic decline arising from the reordering of urban economic functions, it is Liverpool. As Ronaldo Munck notes in the introduction to this volume, Liverpool's place in the contemporary urban studies literature is as a site of entrenched social problems, a city almost entirely disconnected from the more glamorous study of world city formation. Yet, as Munck notes, Liverpool's claim to ‘world city status’ in the early twentieth century would have been second to none. Indeed, as this chapter will show, Liverpool was a key node in the global economy that grew up around the British Empire from 1870–1914, vying with London and New York for international significance. Few cities, if any, can match Liverpool's dubious claim to have descended from ‘world city’ to ‘pariah city’ during the course of the twentieth century.
With the notable exception of the work of Anthony King (1990a; 1990b), the vast literature on world cities has largely failed to provide us with an understanding of the historical reasons for world city formation. It tells us even less about the reason for world city decline. This dearth of historical accounts of world cities is surprising, particularly as there is a clear context for such work. Braudel (1983) has argued that cities have always constituted key nodes in the world economy, with the centre of gravity shifting from Genoa and Venice in the sixteenth century to Antwerp and Amsterdam in the seventeenth and to London in the eighteenth.
ten - Economy, equity or empowerment? New Labour, communities and urban policy evaluation
- Edited by Rob Imrie, Mike Raco
-
- Book:
- Urban Renaissance?
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 20 January 2022
- Print publication:
- 21 May 2003, pp 205-220
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Introduction
You would be forgiven, reader, for approaching a chapter on policy evaluation with feelings of intense indifference. Policy evaluation may well suggest a purely bureaucratic or technical exercise, of interest only to those obsessed with the minutiae of policy design, research methodology and data collection. Such perceptions are undoubtedly underpinned by much of the literature on evaluation, which has tended to focus largely on technical issues such as measuring the net impact of policy intervention and of demonstrating causal links between policy change and policy outcomes. At the same time, however, a growing number of authors have emphasised the deeply political nature of policy evaluation and, in the specific context of urban policy, have shown how evaluators play a central role in what is invariably a highly contested policy context (Turok, 1991; Townley and Wilks-Heeg, 1999). Here, it has been argued that evaluation provides a focal point for competing visions of urban policy and that it is inextricably bound up with wider ideologies of urban policy intervention. Far from acting as detached and objective observers, evaluators may implicitly reinforce, subtly redefine, or, much more rarely, explicitly challenge the key ideological assumptions on which urban policy initiatives are founded.
Seen in this way, evaluation constitutes a critical issue in relation to the emerging discourses of community involvement in urban policy. The stress that New Labour has placed on the need for community leadership at all stages of the urban policy process has increasingly prompted observers to raise fundamental questions about the character and role of evaluation (see NCVO, 2000; Slowey et al, 2001; Sullivan and Potter, 2001). Do conventional evaluation approaches alienate local communities, rather than promote their involvement? If so, how can evaluation methodologies promote community involvement in line with wider policy objectives? Should community ownership of urban policy extend to evaluation? In other words, contemporary evaluation practice constitutes a key test of the extent to which governments are committed to community leadership in urban policy. It is with this issue of the relationship between the politics of policy evaluation and the role of local communities in urban policy that this chapter is concerned.