For the City? The Difficult Spaces of Market Restructuring Policy

Abstract

Market restructuring policies have proved controversial and been subject to academic critique on a number of fronts. This paper considers the role that the inherent spatial tensions captured within these initiatives have played, both in terms of their troubled implementation but more specifically in how aspects of the conceptual debates surrounding their nature and intent have been framed. In particular, I focus on assertions that such programmes, in their alignment to housing market geographies, and an analytical discourse that relates the ‘parts’ to the ‘whole’ across subregional, metropolitan spaces, were ‘for the city (or, rather, the urban elites that govern cities)’ (Allen, 2010). While such positions have appropriately reasserted the disjuncture between the ‘space of positions’ of households and those of housing markets, they risk ceding consideration of the competing importance of ‘more-than-local’ spaces in terms of shaping and addressing other equity concerns. They have also firmly aligned the role of urban policy, ‘state’ intervention and practice with elite imperatives. In working through these spatial tensions, I draw upon recent critical perspectives – including Right to the City debates – to reflect upon the challenge of keeping open our engagement and commitment to citywide geographies as part of negotiating the continual and ongoing tensions across different spatial scales.

Key Words:

• Market Restructuring
• scale
• urban policy
• Right to the City

Notes

1. The nine areas initially selected under HMR in 2002 were referred to as pathfinders. Each of the nine pathfinders had defined intervention areas that straddled at least two (and in one case five) local authority areas. In terms of number of households within the area at time of establishment, Urban Living (Birmingham, Sandwell) was the smallest pathfinder with 57,160 households; Transform South Yorkshire (Sheffield, Rotherham, Doncaster, Barnsley) the largest with 125,132 households (Department for Communities and Local Government [DCLG], 2007).

2. Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, University of Birmingham.

3. The texts of interest here were published in French during this time (Lefebvre (1968) La Droit a la Ville and Lefebvre (1974) La Production de l'espace (both originally published in Paris by Anthropos)) and translated into English later (Lefebvre, 1996).

4. Herod (2010) and others have criticized this means of articulating connection between scales because it suggests a set of a priori, hierarchical scales within which such activities are structured and respond.

5. See the Select Committee report for its rather acerbic review of the UK Coalition government's proposed urban renewal strategy Regeneration to Enable Growth (House of Commons, 2011).

6. Even if urban policy and programmes have shown themselves invariably, to be ‘quite simply insufficient to the task’ (Rees & Lambert, 1985, p. 165), doing nothing – particularly when hiding behind Austerity agendas, raises major concerns in spatial justice terms.