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

Abstract

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.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to John Allinson, John McCarthy, and Trudy Harpham for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper and to the anonymous referees for their suggestions. Thanks also to the Department of Urban Environmental and Leisure Studies and the Faculty of Arts and Human Sciences, London South Bank University, for partially funding the research, during 2006 and 2007 on which this paper is based.