Securing an urban renaissanceCrime, community, and British urban policy

Atkinson, Rowland; Helms, Gesa

doi:10.1332/policypress/9781861348159.001.0001

Cited by 16 publications

(18 citation statements)

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“…Indeed, urban regeneration itself, as a policy agenda to address inner-city failure, is coming under increased criticism in the UK and elsewhere (see Atkinson, 2004;Atkinson and Helms, 2007;and Porter and Shaw, 2009). The addition of sustainability, then, to urban regeneration policy, can be similarly analysed in terms of whether it enhances, or not, the delivery of sustained socioeconomic and environmental benefits to cities.…”

Section: Sustainability and Urban Policymentioning

confidence: 99%

Conceptualising Sustainability in UK Urban Regeneration: a Discursive Formation

et al. 2010

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Despite the wide usage and popular appeal of the concept of sustainability in UK policy, it does not appear to have challenged the status quo in urban regeneration because policy is not leading in its conceptualisation and therefore implementation. This paper investigates how sustainability has been conceptualised in a case-based research study of the regeneration of Eastside in Birmingham, UK, through policy and other documents, and finds that conceptualisations of sustainability are fundamentally limited. The conceptualisation of sustainability operating within urban regeneration schemes should powerfully shape how they make manifest (or do not) the principles of sustainable development. Documents guide, but people implement regenerationand the disparate conceptualisations of stakeholders demonstrate even less coherence than policy. The actions towards achieving sustainability have become a policy 'fix' in Eastside: a necessary feature of urban policy discourse that is limited to solutions within market-based constraints. IntroductionUrban regeneration has a substantial impact on all three dimensions, sometimes known as pillars, of sustainability: society, economics and environment; it is therefore an activity of considerable importance to achieving a more sustainable society. The UK government has integrated the goal of sustainability into urban regeneration policies, yet the proliferation of definitions and conceptualisations of sustainability render the term so poorly understood and slippery that it can be easily pressed into the service of almost any ends. It can, as a result, rather neatly service the 'growth-first' and 'develop-at-almost-any-cost' philosophies that remain dominant in the UK. We contend that despite a raft of government policies, practice-based studies, models and demonstrators of best practice, checklists and indicators, sustainability has yet to make a serious influence on the approach to the redevelopment of land. More importantly, as we investigate closely in this paper, the conceptualisation or 'rationality' of sustainability operating within specific urban regeneration schemes powerfully shapes how those schemes make manifest (or do not make manifest) the principles of sustainable development. To move towards more sustainable developments, one must overcome the challenge of developing an integrated and nuanced understanding of sustainability to translate the concept into implementation.

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Section: Sustainability and Urban Policymentioning

confidence: 99%

Conceptualising Sustainability in UK Urban Regeneration: a Discursive Formation

et al. 2010

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“…Recently a 'crime is bad for business' narrative has entered the entrepreneurial city discourse (Atkinson and Helms 2007).…”

Section: The Entrepreneurial City Thesismentioning

confidence: 99%

Gin and Tonic or Oil and Water: The Entrepreneurial City and Sustainable Managerial Regeneration in Manchester

Leary

2008

Local Economy

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This paper explores the notion of local urban policy hybridity in Manchester, England. It presents the findings of qualitative research set in the context of the parallel entrepreneurial city and sustainable regeneration debates. The research objective was to examine the extent of Manchester's conversion to the politics of the entrepreneurial city on the assumption that this signals a departure from efforts towards the city's achievement of sustainable regeneration and social equity goals. Manchester was selected because it has been held up as an iconic entrepreneurial city. The continuing entrepreneurial city debate, instigated by David Harvey in the 1980s, runs alongside that of sustainable regeneration in ways that are seen as sometimes complementary but usually contradictory. The software package NVivo 7 was used to assist with data analysis. The methodological approach was based loosely on the grounded theory approach of Strauss and Corbin: the approach of the analysis mainly followed the qualitative interpretive approach of discourse analysis. Key community strategy documents are found to interweave elements of the entrepreneurial and managerial governance discourses and also incorporate conceptual elements that have emerged recently such as a concern with crime, sustainability and community involvement. The paper provides valuable insights into the hybrid nature of Manchester's actually existing local community strategies which feature a robust adherence to the managerial mode of local urban policy.

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“…This work, however, has made very few connections to the growing body of work on the interface between policing the city and urban redevelopment (e.g. Mitchell, 2003;Helms and Atkinson, 2007), or the related work on urban revanchism (e.g. Smith, 1996;Hubbard, 2004a).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Unlike most consequential thinking on punishment -which seeks to avoid future crimes and reoffending -a central goal of urban revanchism is to avoid further declines in capital accumulation and inward investment. Here the targets of urban revanchism are framed as barriers to local economic development as their presence may discourage people from visiting, living and investing in the area (see also Cook and Whowell, 2011;Mitchell, 2003;Helms and Atkinson, 2007). As Smith (1998, p. Together with the work of Don Mitchell (2001Mitchell ( , 2003 and Mike Davis (1990),…”

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confidence: 99%

A vengeful education? urban revanchism, sex work and the penal politics of john schools

Cook

2015

Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography

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This paper considers how useful the urban revanchism thesis is in helping us understand the John School, a 'mobile' educational programme that has been rolled out in the United States, Canada, the UK and South Korea which teaches those arrested for soliciting for the purposes of buying sex the negative consequences of their actions. The paper begins by unpacking the urban revanchism thesis and bringing it into dialogue with ideas on punishment. It then draws on a case study of one English John School in the anonymised town of Redtown. It demonstrates that the operations and rationales of the Redtown John School have traces of revanchism and that they are also infused by ideas and practices of care. As a result it argues that the urban revanchism thesis illuminates some important aspects of the Redtown John School while silencing or misreading others. The paper concludes therefore by calling for future research to think more broadly about punishment (rather than revanchism) in the city and its entanglements with care.

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Securing an urban renaissanceCrime, community, and British urban policy

Cited by 16 publications

References 1 publication

Conceptualising Sustainability in UK Urban Regeneration: a Discursive Formation

Conceptualising Sustainability in UK Urban Regeneration: a Discursive Formation

Gin and Tonic or Oil and Water: The Entrepreneurial City and Sustainable Managerial Regeneration in Manchester

A vengeful education? urban revanchism, sex work and the penal politics of john schools

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