Re‐imaging the City Centre for the Middle Classes: Regeneration, Gentrification and Symbolic Policies in ‘Loser Cities’

Max Rousseau

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2009, vol. 33, issue 3, 770-788

Abstract: Abstract This article aims to show how the governments of two industrial cities in France and the UK have now come to the view that middle‐class reinvestment in the city centre offers a solution to urban economic decline, and so have encouraged the middle class to move in by implementing ‘symbolic policies’. Their objective is to transform the image of the post‐industrial city through cultural and urban planning policy, in order to adapt it to the supposed taste of potential gentrifiers. This development in strategy results from both external constraints and internal political changes in these cities. The failure of earlier redevelopment strategies is also a factor in explaining this paradoxical phenomenon, in which a social group that is, in fact, almost absent from the central spaces of these cities has now been accorded the status of ‘systematic winners’. Résumé Cet article a pour objectif de montrer comment les gouvernements de deux villes industrielles, en France et en Grande‐Bretagne, considèrent désormais que le réinvestissement du centre‐ville par les classes moyennes constitue une solution au déclin économique urbain, et en viennent ainsi à favoriser leur arrivée par la mise en oeuvre de «politiques symboliques»: par des actions sur la culture et l'urbanisme, l'objectif est de transformer l'image de la ville postindustrielle pour l'adapter au goût supposé des gentrifieurs potentiels. Cette évolution stratégique est tout à la fois le résultat de contraintes externes et de transformations politiques internes aux villes. L'échec des précédentes stratégies de re‐développement est également un facteur explicatif de ce phénomène paradoxal qui rend «systématiquement gagnant» depuis peu un groupe social pourtant quasiment absent de l'espace central de ces villes.

Date: 2009
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