Books, Parks, Houses and Pedestrians – Planning for People in the City of Paris

By Andy Zieleniec

On Saturday June the 4^th the Guardian newspaper published a story concerning the official inauguration of a new interventionist planning development in Paris. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/04/paris-urban-planning)

The article reported on the official response to concerns with the decline in the number and variety of retail premises, specifically bookshops in the fifth arrondissement, the Latin Quarter. The city authorities have been buying up empty premises to let for affordable rents as bookshops or small publishing houses and cultural venues. The aim: to reverse a worrying trend which from 2000 to 2008 saw the number of librairies drop by 231 to 137.

A statement from the city authorities gives the raison d’être:

“The Latin Quarter remains the place in France with the highest density of literary and intellectual education, production and publication … Yet the presence of bookshops in the Latin Quarter is now under threat … Independent bookshops find themselves faced with competition from new forms of selling, like supermarkets and the internet.”

This may seem a strange approach or attitude to us in the UK where local authorities seem incapable and relatively impotent to stop the decline of our town and city centers faced with the demands and priorities of supermarkets and out of town retail parks. However, the French and in particular Parisian’s have a different perspective to what they consider the vitality and health of neighborhoods.

This was recognised in the 1960s by amongst others, the Situationists, led by Guy Dubord, those arch critics of functionalist and modernist architecture and town planning. An example being Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe who wrote in 1965 that:

“Centres of attraction may be made up of different elements. The essential (not the ideal) centre in the present-day structure of a city like Paris is the group of shops that constitute the indispensible equipment for daily life.” (in The Situationists and the City (2009) edited by Tom McDonough, London Verso, p. 75)

There is/was then a recognition that healthy and vibrant neighbourhoods needed a variety of retail shops based in and serving the communities in which they are located. That is, to some extent an emphasis on traditional ‘old-fashioned’ understandings that ‘urban villages’ as much as towns need their bakers, butchers, candle-stick makers and, at least for Paris, local bookshops.

However, this strategy of investing in bookshops is only the latest instalment of a concerted and coordinated strategy for the preserving and enhancing the physical, social, cultural and economic landscape of Paris. A distinct interventionist approach has been unveiled and rolled out to include a number of what might be called inventive and ideological attempts to shape and promote social inclusion and a more ‘people friendly’ city.

The driving force and architect of much of these developments is Bertrand Delanoë, the Mayor of Paris. First elected in March 2001 and re-elected in 2008, despite the trauma and anger expressed both in the riots of 2005 and for some by the heavy handed policing of them, he remains a popular politician for the policies and orientation in which he has sought to create plans for the urban renewal that is clearly influenced by his socialist principles.

Mayor Delanoë’ has also used housing as an attempt to socially integrate the Parisian population by buying up luxury properties, mainly in up-market areas of Paris, and making them available at lower rents to poorer tenants. This policy is based on the ‘Law for Solidarity and Urban Renewal’, passed by France’s Socialist Government in 2000, which makes it compulsory for communes of more than 50,000 people to have rent controls in at least 20 per cent of the housing stock by 2020. The aim behind this strategy is to attempt to reverse the trend of poorer people, especially younger families, abandoning the city altogether and creating ‘social variation’ to prevent neighbourhoods slipping into either very rich or very poor ghettos. However, this policy has had its critics, not least in the most affluent areas where there is some resentment amongst the wealthy residents of sharing their neighbourhoods with those not as ‘cultured’ and ‘civilised’ as themselves. (See http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/sep/14/france.jonhenley and http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/21/wealthy-paris-residents-nimbyism)

Delanoë has also gone further in his attempts to create more pleasant and people friendly environment in the city. He has initiated plans to restrict the use of private motor cars in the centre of Paris with the aim of ultimately eliminating all motor traffic on both sides of the river Seine to create a pedestrian walkway. Anyone who has wondered through the Luxembourg Gardens to the Louvre and sought an easy stroll to the Musee D’Orsay on the opposite bank will appreciate what an attractive proposition this might be avoiding the roar of the traffic and giving Paris back its river bank as a stroller’s paradise.

Computer generated Image of the proposed Seine Walkway (http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1985219,00.html)

In a complementary move to change the city centre Delanoë’s administration has introduced a pay-as-you-ride bike hire scheme, known as Vélib or vélo libre. This has proved a popular scheme in Paris and in other cities in which it has been tried. (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/6899082.stm)

Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00038/paris_cycle_38650s.jpg

Similarly, the adminstration of Mayor Delanoë has also invested in new green spaces such as  The Grands Moulins Park, renamed “Abbé-Pierre” Gardens, that was inaugurated on October 1st, 2009.

(see http://www.bg-21.com/en/news/inaugural-ceremony-gardens-abbe-pierre-presence-mayor-paris-bertrand-delanoe)

In a sense what Delanoë is attempting to do is to invest in the physical and social environment of the city as a means to change the quality of life of its inhabitants. Whether this is a form of environmental or social engineering is debateable. However it might be argued that his policies put into practice and reflect aspects of the social philosopher and seminal theorist of urban space, Henri Lefebvre’s claim for the ‘right to the city’ for all urban dwellers. For Lefebvre the “Right to the City” is a conceptualisation that aims to restructure and orient the power relations which underlie urban space, by transferring control from capital and the state over to urban inhabitants. Lefebvre argued that the “Right to the City” is the right to “urban life, to renewed centrality, to places of encounter and exchange, to life rhythms and time uses, enabling the full and complete usage of these moments and places.” (Henri Lefebvre, “The Right to the City” in Writings on Cities, Oxford, Blackwell, 1996 p.179: Originally published as Le droit à la ville, Paris, Anthropos, 1968.)

For Lefebvre, space is a social product that like commodities hides the social relations involved in its production. His theory of the production of space thus emphasises that not only do we need to know how spatial practices and representations of space are constructed but also how we use and shape space in our everyday lives. What is important for Lefebvre is the inter-relationship between all three elements. In modern societies capital and the state, that is power, seek to control how space is used and the meanings and values attached to it at the expense of the needs and priorities of everyday communal life in the city. Lefebvre demands that this relationship be re-balanced. Hence, his concept of the right to the city as a return to spaces and places of free interaction and being together.

David Harvey points out that Lefebvre’s concept is “not merely a right to access what already exists [in the city], but a right to change it after our heart’s desire”(Harvey, David, “The Right to the City,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 27.4, December 2003, pp. 939-41.) That is, we need to have the means and the opportunity to creatively use space for play, for leisure, for free association to ensure that the urban does not become an totally alienating and disassociated experience.

What Delanoë is attempting in Paris, as a response to changing economic circumstances is a reshaping of the physical and social landscape that prioritises a human perspective and experience by creating the means and methods of re-engaging with not only the city itself but with ones fellow citizens.

Whether this experiment will be a success remains to be seen but it should be applauded for its intent and effort. It would be interesting to see similar attempts in other more provincial and less favoured towns and cities in the UK as well as France that takes series account of their own history, topography, social, economic and political requirements. A new urban planning and regeneration strategy that is tailor made and locally sensitive as well as adopting ideas and innovations from elsewhere.

As Guy Dubord, like Lefebvre argued, what is needed is a “critique of human geography whereby individuals and communities must construct places and events commensurate with the appropriation not just of their labour, but of their total history.” La société du spectacle, 1967: The Society of the Spectacle, Zone Books 1995, p.126)

Apocalyptic City

Mark Featherstone

I recently watched the cinematic adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Akin to the book, the film presents the viewer with a post-apocalyptic scene, an imaginary depiction of the end of civilization, the end of culture, and the end of community. In short, the film perfectly captures the idea of the end of humanity. But perhaps more than anything what The Road talks to is the idea of the end of the city, the urban form that enables civilization, culture, and community, and allows us to be human. As Lewis Mumford saw, without the city there is no family, there is no tolerance, and there is no time for sentiment.

McCarthy’s work captures the impact of the end of the city, through its central premise, the road that must be walked, and the idea that in the wake of the collapse of the urban form humans have reverted back to being a nomadic species, permanently on the move, searching for food, struggling to survive. Mumford makes a similar point, but from the opposite direction. In Mumford’s view the city emerged once humans located a stable source of food and settled down. Once survival was secure everything else followed – civilization, culture, community, and humanity. Unfortunately, what else followed was what Mumford calls ‘purposeless materialism’ or desire, which as any psychoanalyst will explain, cannot be satisfied and is fickle in its choice of desirable objects. In many ways McCarthy’s The Road represents the end point of Mumford’s story, the point where ‘purposeless materialism’ has nowhere else to go, and collapses under its own weight.

In terms of the individual experience of the satisfaction of desire the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan captured this idea in the notion of jouissance. Lacan uses this term to describe the point where the self gives way to ecstasy and disappears. Similarly the philosopher Georges Bataille wrote about the limit experience and le petit mort or the small death which everybody experiences in ecstatic moments. But what does this have to do with the city, civilization, and the apocalypse?

Raised to the level of a social condition the Lacanian-Bataillean theory of the ecstatic explosion, or moment of orgasm, can be seen to refer to the terminal state of modern civilization, which we currently seem to be confronting in the form of over-population, excessive technologisation, de-humanisation, and environmental destruction, with the result that we may soon have to face up to the exhaustion of our society of progress, improvement, desire, and satisfaction in an ecstatic moment, an apocalyptic moment of revelation, where it becomes clear to us that there is nowhere else to go and that our current model of urban society is finished.

If this idea of exhaustion, the exhaustion of modernity, is exactly what post-modern thought is all about, then the idea of post-modernism has a very long history that we would have to date back to ancient Athens. We know that the very first philosopher of the city, Plato, understood the problematic of desire and urban society. In his Critias he wrote about the mythic city of Atlantis, a city of desire, luxury, and over-expenditure, which eventually sunk to the bottom of the sea under the weight of its own hubris.

What is McCarthy’s The Road about if it is not about surveying the catastrophic scene following the sinking of Atlantis, the catastrophic scene confronting the survivors of the apocalyptic burn out of modernity, and trying to imagine how it would be possible to survive under these conditions?

If this is in fact the case then what makes The Road so powerful is that in many respects it appears that we are approaching this situation today. For so many people in the world, who live on the edge of survival, the urban environment is already a catastrophic environment. For these people the city is about as far away from Plato’s shining utopia, the Republic, as it is possible to get. In fact it seems to strain the conceptual boundaries of the idea of the city to the very limit to continue to use it to describe the Platonic utopia and a place like Kinshasa, which is why we now talk of city-regions.

But of course the problem of calling a place like Kinshasa a city is not simply about size, as may be the case with Tokyo or Los Angeles, because what makes the capital city of the Democratic Republic of Congo strain the limits of the term city is the very lack of security, civilization, and humanity afforded so many of its inhabitants, such as the witch children abandoned to the streets to starve. Beyond this point, the point where the city as a centre of civilization starts to collapse, there is really only one way to go and that is the road, the place of nomadic life and the struggle to survive which characterises the lives of so many people in the world today, and approximately 2 million people in the DRC alone.

This is what The Road is about, the collapse of the city, culture, civilization, and society, the moment when the catastrophic condition that currently characterises the situation of so many people in the world, comes back and transforms the West into a wasteland. This apocalyptic vision of the collapsing city is, of course, embedded in so many of McCarthy’s works, such as No Country for Old Men, and in many respects characterises his Americanism, an Americanism perfectly suited to the post-9 / 11 landscape of our global asociety.

Under conditions of globalisation characterised by the war on terror, fear, and insecurity, we live in a state of existential anxiety that means that the city is endlessly teetering on the brink of collapsing back into the wilderness from whence it came. This is, of course, the classic story of the birth of American city in reverse, the classic story of the origins of America replayed in a new tale of the West and the collapse and reformation of the city, culture, and society from the ruins of what had passed into history. McCarthy finds his expression of redemption that refounds the city in the love of the father for his son, a love which endures even after the family has collapsed and the mother has departed, a love which survives the harsh conditions of the wilderness, where social relations dissipate before the law of self-preservation at all costs.

The final message of The Road, represented by the moment when the father dies and in doing so founds a new family, the basic unit of a new city and a new society, is that the end of the road, and the emergence of the city, and the civilization, culture, and society it sustains, are ultimately premised on the existence on something far more basic than a social contract, the kind of legal document thinkers such as Hobbes thought could give birth to a city. This thing, the thing that enables the city to endure, that makes it work in the worst possible conditions, is not something that can be legalised, written down, or made policy in fantastic documents that pretend to be realistic.

It is this truth that is perfectly captured by McCarthy in The Road in its most fundamental form, the truth that when everything else collapses, there is nothing left but the love of a parent for their child, and it is this that has to sustain the city, civilization, culture, and society.

New economic model? Paul Mason on Newsnight

Great report, followed up tomorrow, from Paul Mason, Newsnight’s Economics editor, focusing on what the future is for Britain’s economy.  Explored what happens out side the economic bubble in London, with a focus on Stoke on Trent (and compared with Margate).  Really good critical analysis and worth watching again if you can find it.  See Mason’s blog here.

Back to the Lottery? Conservatives and Urban Policy

Back to the Lottery? Conservatives and Urban Policy

By Dr Phil Catney

With the potential election of a Conservative government (minority or in coalition), it is worth taking stock of what a Cameron Administration would mean for urban policy. While the Conservatives’ approach to urban policy was for most of the past decade obscured by a mist that tends to fall over opposition party policies, over the past couple of years some of the contours of their potential approach are becoming visible. Debates over future direction are still being made, for example there have been divisions within the Shadow Cabinet team over the future of Regional Development Agencies. However, the Conservatives are starting to produce ‘green papers’ which outline the broad principles underlying their approach. Here I want to briefly talk about one of these principles which appears to be gaining in importance and the budget deficit rises: cost-effectiveness.

Lord Heseltine, who a couple of years back chaired a ‘Cities Taskforce’, has called for the return of the City Challenge scheme to apportion scarce regeneration funds more effectively. City Challenge was created in the last major UK recession of the early 1990s as means of trying to stimulate urban regeneration at a time of limited governmental resources. The scheme, which was replaced after only a couple of rounds by the Single Regeneration Budget (SRB), sought to distribute regeneration funding on the basis of securing value for money out of renewal funding, rather than having money distributed according to the severity of deprivation. Funding was distributed through annual bidding rounds. Local areas wanting to bid were required to form multi-organisational partnership (principally between business and local government, but with a small requirement to consult with local people which was later expanded).  Partnerships were expected to develop bids that were broadly in line with the priorities set out in the bidding guidance documents issued by the then Department of the Environment, and decisions about what to fund were made by the Cabinet.

Lord Heseltine vision of the new City Challenge advocates the extension of elected mayors to major cities in the UK and putting funds currently held by quangos such as the Homes & Communities Agency – which replaced English Partnerships as central government’s housing and regeneration body in 2008 – into a pot from which these mayors could bid for funding.

Briefly looking back at the experience of City Challenge and SRB gives an indication of what problems need to be avoided if key elements of these programmes were resurrected. First, while these programmes had the benefit of getting the most out of funding in terms of ensuring that clear plans for deliverables were developed, they favoured areas that developed a capacity for proposal writing rather than reflecting the actual need of areas for regeneration funding.  Second, as research on the SRB programme by Peter John, Hugh Ward and Keith Dowding (2004 and see also 2005 ) made clear, successive bidding rounds did not lead to a considerable improvement in the quality of the bids submitted and funded, but tended to favour parliamentary seats held by ministers. Therefore there needs to be caution to ensure that the process of allocating funds is not politicised. Third, the intensive output-measuring orientation of both programmes led to increasingly professionalised structures of regeneration (not necessarily a bad thing!) that often had the adverse tendency of further marginalising the contributions of local communities in already alienated areas. There hence needs to be a clear strategy of community engagement underpinning the approach to ensure buy-in to the scheme.

In a period of tight budgetary constraints, the operation of a revived City Challenge or SRB clearly is attractive to a government trying to squeeze more for less out of regeneration funding. However, a possible future Cameron government needs to ensure that it remembers lessons learned from running these funding programmes the first time round to ensure that whatever system it creates is both fair and effective.

Event horizon: the gaze in Manhattan. And at home in Stoke-on-Trent

By Dr Rebecca Leach

Antony Gormley’s sculpture project Event Horizon has moved to Manhattan recently.  The glorious photo in the Guardian last week, and also in the Huffington Post shows some of the contrasting scales of experience of city life.

Gormley says,

“I want to play with the city and people’s perceptions.  The gaze is the principle dynamic of the work; the idea of looking and finding, or looking and seeking, and in the process perhaps re-assessing your own position in the world. So in encountering these peripheral things, perhaps one becomes aware of one’s status of embedment.”

Gormley’s vision has mostly been about looking, with humanoid figures (himself mostly) looking out and above and away, although his famous project Field involves more of the communal horde staring at the viewer, like small creatures waiting to pounce.  Gormley’s figure has been reproduced in projects around the world, but there’s an interesting contrast between his city locations and other sites.  The Angel of the North and Another Place, for example, are resolutely looking away from the city, outside it and taking their position aloof from engagement.

Yet Event Horizon worships the city skyline.  Some of the figures demonstrate human vulnerability: a simple naked body surrounded by unknown chaos.  But overwhelmingly, Event Horizon can only work, surely, in a global city like New York, or London (in its previous incarnation) because Gormley’s work is so monumental, like the buildings it surveys. In Stoke-on-Trent, for example, it would die an instant death.

I was reminded of this again while re-reading a marvellous book by Christopher Reed, ‘Not at Home: the suppression of domesticity in modern art and architecture’.  This collection of essays unravels the intellectual dynamic emergent in the early 20th century (and subsequently) which actively sought to construct the modern in counterpart to the domestic.  Reed quotes Loos (‘ornament as crime’) and Le Corbusier( ‘One can see these same business men… away from their businesses in their own home, where everything seems to contradict their real existence – rooms too small, a conglomeration of useless and disparate objects, and a sickening spirit reigning over so many shams…, and absurd bric-a-brac.  Our industrial friends seem sheepish and shrivelled like tigers in a cage’) as prime movers in the ridiculing of domestic space.  Instead, modernism sought out the large, the heroic, the monumental and the ‘smooth’ (better affording, as Benjamin puts it, the leaving of no ‘stain’ or trace’).

Domestic houses – for which we can also read the feminised spaces of embodied everyday life – couldn’t possibly be the source of creativity in this monumental vision.  Yet Reed’s own paper in his volume focuses on key English versions of modernism, namely in the work of the Bloomsbury group whose attempts to rework domesticity were part of their artistic vision.  And more recent work by feminist artists has revived the radical nature of craft: home-made rather than ready-made?

I don’t even think the domestic has to be artistic to be interesting.  In fact, its very existence as the binary counterpart to the modern – both emerging welded together in discourses of modernity – makes it intrinsically valuable and radical as a concept.  The appeal of homeliness (and the fear of the uncanny/unheimlich), the desire to decorate (however anti-avant-garde) and the desire for small spaces, sequestered and unviewed is as much a part of modernist culture as the open space, the straight line and the monument to masculine authority.

In this context, Gormley’s latest show in Manhattan makes me uncomfortable – perhaps as it should.  I’m more discomfited however by the continuing attachment of architects and urbanists to the wide open space and the grand vision.  Some work is evident on humanising of urban visions, but if you scratch most architects and visionary planners, there’s surely a Le Corbusier under all their skins?  They shifted a bit when Venturi and Rodriguez were momentarily fashionable but still the key motif of the city remains the heroic figure against the Manhattan skyline.

This is very worrying for places like Stoke-on-Trent.  Where its cultural heroism ought to be explored for what it is: small, local, homely (in all the best, English, senses of the word).  Where Manhattan is all we have to live up to, what hope is there?

Post-graduate study while you work? Visit our Twilight Event

Are you interested in studying for a full-time Masters’ degree while you work full-time? The School of Sociology and Criminology at Keele University is offering an innovative way of studying which allows you to keep your earnings coming in while pursuing your intellectual ambitions, and completing your Masters’ within a year…

Come and find out about your post-graduate options at our Twilight Event
Wednesday, 31st March, 2010
Starts 4.30pm until 7.00pm
in the Claus Moser Research Centre, Keele University
Download the programme and the RSVP form

Our new MA in Urban Futures and Sustainable Communities, and our new MA in Criminology and Criminal Justice will offer taught modules within week-long blocks, instead of weekly classes. This means you can use annual leave, or negotiate ‘professional development time’ in order to study. The blocks are spread over the year, typically in early Autumn, Winter, early Spring and early Summer, followed by a Dissertation.

This mode of teaching also means you can visit from wherever you live in the world because you don’t have to be on campus all year round: we support your learning with online resources and reading materials, and your assessments will be completed with in-person or remote supervision following each of the teaching blocks.

Of course, if you wish to come and sample life on the beautiful, green Keele campus all year round, you’re welcome: there is a wealth of cultural and intellectual activities going on – seminars, concerts, cultural events. The Claus Moser Research Centre for the Humanities and Social Sciences hosts a range of post-graduates and provides study and meeting space

There are plenty of other post-graduate options to choose from, including our Masters’ in Research in Sociology

Wow at Google streetview

by Dr Rebecca Leach

Google streetview has just been extended! It now covers 95% of the UK. It is certainly impressive, but the implications are challenging. Such visibility. Anyhow, it now means you can contrast the urban sprawl of Stoke-on-Trent (which we will be thinking about a lot on our new MA in Urban Futures and Sustainable Communities with the leafy bucolic grandeur of Keele where you will be studying it and its picturesque village location.  Yes, we know the ironies are, um, ironic.  But of course the urban has always been discursively constructed in contrast to its rural counterpart: you can’t have one without the other.  And the archetypal English village (pan round to get the full Capability Brown effect from Keele church over the campus and farm) provides a contrasting cultural ideal that shapes our notions of what cities should be (along with the ultra-modernist notion of villages in the sky of course).  Come and have a look round.  Tell us what you think.

What is a City?

by Dr Mark Featherstone

What is a city? In his classic book, The City in History, Lewis Mumford tells us that the city is primarily a space of culture, society, and civilization. Before the invention of the original cities humanity was a nomadic species that lived to survive and survived to live. It was only upon the invention of the first cities that humans settled down, formed cities, became domesticated or civilized beings, and invented culture, where culture means the ability to represent what matters in life in order to better understand human existence. If this was everything, and the city was simply a space of sociability and civilization, there would be nothing more to say because we would, of course, be living in utopia. As we know, this is not the case.

By the late 19^th century and early 20^th century what the classical thinkers of the city, from Plato onwards, had always known, had become completely transparent: that the urban project, and the drive to design well ordered human living spaces, was continually plagued by the problem of human nature, what the classical thinkers called passion. In the works of the modern German thinkers of technology, Marx, Weber, Simmel, and Tonnies, the city is a labyrinthine place, an anomic space, where the ancient ideal of civilized living has more or less collapsed into the capitalist desire for accumulation and luxury. It is this theme, the theme of the fragmented city, that carried over into the Chicago School theory of the atomisation of urban space and the rise of the notion of sub-culture. In the works of these American writers, the notion of a unified city was not even idealised, since it was no longer possible to conceive of urban community, in anything but the loosest sense.

Where the Americans were interested in thinking through the politics of the fragmented city, a desire that was translated into the British cultural studies’ concern for sub-culture, the French writers of situationism, and later post-structuralism and post-modernism, wanted to take advantage of the splintered state of late modern urban space and oppose the technologies of state power through various strategies, such as Debord’s theory of derive or drift. Against the regimes of power Lefebvre conceptualised through the idea of abstract space, the post-modern theorists of space turned to strategies of everyday life forms of resistance. In these theories, expressed in works such as Michel De Certeau’s work on everyday life, the alienated, de-industrialised, landscape of the post-modern city became a battleground between humanity, imagination, and desire, and the post-human forces of technology, administration, and capitalism.

Torn by the forces of high speed capitalism, the contemporary post-modern city barely resembles the space of social interaction, cultural exchange, and civilization imagined by Mumford’s early urban dwellers. Instead the post-modern city is a space of suspicion, paranoia, and violence, conditioned by deep divisions between the rich who seek to buy a protected civilized world at the expense of the poor who are left to fight it out in the state of second nature that closely resembles the violent pre-historic world that pre-dated the emergence of the first cities. The sociologist Loic Wacquant imagines this urban future through the concepts of the hyper-ghetto and advanced marginality. Where the term hyper-ghetto conceives of the city in terms of totally enclosed spaces of civilization and violence, the notion of advanced marginality explains that urban violence is not some kind of atavistic throw back that will be eradicated through processes of modernisation, but rather a product of modernisation itself that we can expect to increase in intensity until the future city is realised under the sign of the barely civilized neo-Darwinian principles of contemporary capitalism, such as competitive advantage. We can already trace the outline of Wacquant’s concepts if we consider the social condition of our most futuristic cities, Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, Sao Paulo, Lagos, and it may not be entirely hyperbolic to suggest that the best exemplars of the ideas of the hyper-ghetto and advanced marginality in the contemporary world are Baghdad and Kabul, with their sprawling slums, safe green zones, and ultra-violent hinterlands.

What I think we can see, then, in the contemporary world is a strange situation, where the urban form is simultaneously everywhere, since now, more than ever before in human history, we are an urban species, and nowhere, because none of our contemporary cities would measure up to the ancient ideal, in respect of the way they fall well short of the Platonic principle of the urban as well ordered, socially secure, civilized space. Given that my sense is that we are today caught somewhere between the complete realisation of the urban form and the total collapse of the idea of the city into some new form, my interest in the notion of urban futures resides in the way this basic tension will be played out. In this respect I am concerned with the predictive capacity of culture, and academia, even though this faculty is also under attack from the forces of capitalism that seek to quantify all cultural production, turning it into a commodity to be sold on the free market.

Against this situation, where it is no longer possible to ask ‘what is means?’, and the only relevant question is ‘how much?’, the role of what critical culture we have left is to think through our potential urban futures in order to oppose the virus of anomie, which is characteristic of the contemporary city, and is, if we believe Simmel and the other classical urbanists, a condition of the way the free market commodifies human existence. This is precisely how we must conceive the task of constructing sustainable communities. What is a sustainable community if it is not a creative response to reasonable projections about our potential urban futures coloured by decay, decline, inequality, and violence?

Regenerating Medium-sized cities? Keele ESRC Seminar series

Members of the new Keele Urban Research Network (KURN), Dr Philip Catney (Law, Politics and Justice), Professor Graham Allan (Life Course Studies), Dr Mark Featherstone (Law, Politics and Justice), and Professor Chris Phillipson (Life Course Studies) have been awarded a grant for a series of seminars entitled ‘Regenerating English Medium-Sized Post Industrial Cities’.

The seminar series is examining the problems facing medium-sized cities. In particular, it explores the barriers inhibiting successful regeneration and the policy levers available for overcoming these.

It is intended that the series will help to establish a network of academic researchers and regeneration practitioners to examine the interdisciplinary aspects of the issue of urban renewal and community change in medium-sized post-industrial English cities.

The first seminar, which was held in Autumn 2009, focused on comparisons between Stoke-on-Trent and Hull and included academics, policy makers and regeneration/urban policy professionals.  Speakers included (you can download pdfs of the presentations via the Keele website):

Paul Hildreth (SURF, Salford University)
‘The Role and Potential of English Medium-Sized Cities’

Alan Harding (IPEG, Manchester University) and Brendan Nevin (Nevin Leather Associates)
‘ The Political Economy of Disconnected England: Hull, Stoke and Dystopia’

John Henneberry (Sheffield University)
‘Barriers to Property Investment and Development in Medium-Sized Cities’

Mark Featherstone (Keele University)
‘Living on the Edge in the ‘Forgotten City’: Utopia, Dystopia, and Public Housing in Northern England’

For more information on forthcoming seminars, have a look at our Keele webpage and please contact Dr Phil Catney or Dr Mark Featherstone

It’s grim up North? How public sector cuts will hit cities like Stoke-on-Trent harder…

By Dr Phil Catney

Keele Urban Research Network

On March 1st I participated in a BBC Radio Stoke debate on the results of a survey that the BBC has undertaken on the likely funding cuts and job losses that will arise from broader cuts in local government funding. Of the local authorities in this area, Stoke-on-Trent City Council will be hardest hit with projections of more than 1,000 job losses over the next five year, almost a quarter of its total workforce. Spending will be reduced by between 20-25%. These are among some of the deepest cuts expected in the country. In a city that is already suffering from severe deprivation, the social consequences of such a cut will be profound both in terms of the services that people access and for people working in those services.

Managing through these severe cuts will be challenging. In the debate this morning I set out a number of options which any council might consider in the downturn (though I didn’t get a chance to discuss the various strengths and weaknesses of each):

1.    Further shifting services to the private sector and the voluntary sectors. This is an option which has a long heritage in local government, but which has a patchy record. Contracting out to the private sector has often been criticised for failing to realise true value for money, and where there have been genuine cost savings, it has often been at the expense of creating low-paid employment. Utilising the voluntary sector is possibly more promising, but too far an extension of core welfare tasks to the voluntary sector risks diluting their dynamism.
2.    Service reduction. This is a strategy which is already taking place for ‘non-statutory’ functions (such as libraries, leisure services, arts and so on). However, cuts that are too deep run the risk of creating social problems which are even more costly to tackle (for example, cutting fitness programmes may create further health burdens that will need to be addressed by statutory functions within the council).
3.    Limit expenditure. Again, this is a method that central and local governments are already utilising. Hiring freezes, early retirement schemes, reductions in capital project spending, and so on, have been used across the public sector in order to avoid mandatory redundancies, though it now appears that previous rounds of these schemes seem to have picked the low hanging fruit, making compulsory redundancies a clearer prospect.
4.    Increase revenues. Outside substantial increases in Council Tax (which can be ‘capped’ by central government if they are considered to be too high), another tool that councils could use to address funding shortfalls is to increase charges for services they offer that are not statutorily required to be offered free-of-charge. For example, substantial increases in car-parking charges could generate more income for the local authority, though this could also drive customers away from the centre of cities, further threatening local economies.

Each of these strategies have severe limitations, though each are being used by local authorities to manage the funding shortfalls they expect over the next few years. Whatever the result of the 2010 general election (expect on May 6), the future for local government in its current form is bleak.

The prospects for cities such as Stoke where public sector employment is a significant part of the local economy, appears even worse. Deep cuts in public funding across the board will have even more severe social, economic and political consequences than in many other cities in England.