Designs on the urban: New Labour's urban renaissance and the spaces of citizenship

Adam Holden and Kurt Iveson

City, 2003, vol. 7, issue 1, 57-72

Abstract: The contours of the so-called 'urban renaissance' in British cities have been the subject of increasing amounts of critical attention from urban scholars. In particular, many have noted the exclusionary consequences of the renaissance for urban public spaces in revalorized city centres. In this paper, the authors ask whether New Labour's urban policy might also be opening up new political opportunities for progressive interventions in contests over the meaning of the urban. After considering the influence of New Labour's social liberalism in the recently released Urban White Paper, the authors identify key tensions within British urban policy and show how both the re-scaling of urban governance and the urban design process have emerged as key strategies to overcome these tensions. The emphasis on urban design, it is argued, is opening up a new public sphere through which visions of the 'good city' might be contested. The political possibilities of this emergent public require further empirical investigation. Because it is relatively deterritorialized, it could offer an alternative space of urban citizenship to the over-privileged 'local community'.

Date: 2003
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13604810302221 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:cityxx:v:7:y:2003:i:1:p:57-72

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CCIT20

DOI: 10.1080/13604810302221

Access Statistics for this article

City is currently edited by Bob Catterall

More articles in City from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().