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Acknowledgements
The ideas developed in this article benefited from the critical feedback of colleagues at several seminars and conferences in 2005 – 2006 at the Centre for Metropolitan Studies, Berlin; the Department of Civic Design, Liverpool University; the Planning Research Conference, University College London and Columbia University, New York. Thanks to all those who provided critical comments on these occasions, and to Claudio de Magalhaes for his comments on the first draft. Thanks to Peter Hall, Michael Edwards and Nicholas Falk for useful hints on the genealogy of the Urban Renaissance agenda. Thanks to two of the anonymous referees for their detailed comments and to Vincent Nadin, editor, for his helpful, constructive guidance.
Notes
1. London was an exception: after experiencing a net decline in population throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the city started gaining population again during the 1980s, largely due to international migrations.
2. The city centres of Manchester and Liverpool had 10,000 residents in 2005, as opposed to a few hundreds a decade before (Guy et al., Citation2005).
3. The concept of ‘urban renaissance’, however, has been taken up by towns and cities across the country, with a host of delivery bodies, such as Bedford or Harlow Renaissance, using the term. I am indebted to Nicholas Falk for pointing this out.
4. The American ‘New Urbanism’ movement emerged as a reaction against the visible failures of modernist urban planning in the US: urban sprawl, social breakdown, car dependency and inner city decay (Ellin, Citation1999). It aims at restoring quality public and residential spaces at a human scale to generate a renewed ‘sense of community’. John Prescott, former UK Secretary of State in charge of urban policy between 2001 and 2006, often referred to New Urbanism in his speeches.