Recent left academic work on the consequences of economic restructuring and local labour market change in old industrial cities has been important in emphasising the role of local context and contingency in the shaping of labour market outcomes. However, in such accounts agency is often limited to capital and state actors, albeit working across scales from the local upwards. There is little sense of agency for individuals and communities in the midst of economic restructuring. Instead, they are usually treated as passive victims of deeper underlying processes. In this paper, our purpose is to highlight the autonomy and agency of workers, people and communities in old industrial cities. Rather than starting from the perspective of capital, our starting point is to emphasise how those experiencing economic change forge strategies and practices for “getting by”. This leads us to call for a re‐theorisation of labour agency, drawing upon the Autonomous Marxist tradition and the more recent work of Cindi Katz, in order to offer fresh insight into the agency of labour and the prospect for recovering a class politics based upon lived experience over reified abstractions.

Recent years have witnessed changes in the discourses and practices of urban policing towards 'quality-of-life offences' and the presence of unwanted groups (beggars, drug-users) in city centres. The authors argue that the change towards a more 'law-and-order' style of law enforcement, often referred to as Zero Tolerance Policing, has to be examined not solely as a means of crime prevention but also in the context of interurban competition. Thus, it constitutes a moment of the urban political economy, often referred to as urban entrepreneurialism : especially for old industrial cities, safe and clean city centres are regarded as a necessary asset for competition and image promotion. These arguments are developed by discussion of two empirical studies: Glasgow, Scotland, and Essen, in the Ruhr region in Germany.

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Based on the authors’ experiences as German‐language speakers working at different stages of their careers within Anglo‐American human geography, this article reflects on the workings of (foreign) language, not only through academic publications but more widely in research contexts and everyday work. This is done by three personal observations, highlighting the relevance of (foreign) language interactions in terms of research practice as well as the poetics and politics of language. We argue that a wider recognition of language in the practical terms of academic work is called for in the light of an increasing ‘internationalization’ of academia.

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