Aidan While

The New Urban Politics as a Politics of Carbon Control

The new urban politics (NUP) literature has helped to draw attention to a new generation of entrepreneurial urban regimes involved in the competition to attract investment to cities. Interurban competition often had negative environmental consequences for the urban living place. Yet knowledge of the environment was not very central to understanding the NUP. Entrepreneurial urban regimes today are struggling to deal with climate change and reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon reduction strategies could have profound implications for interurban competition and the politics of urban development. This paper explores the rise of a distinctive low-carbon urban polity—carbon control—and examines its potential ramifications for a new environmental politics of urban development (NEPUD). The NEPUD signals the growing centrality of carbon control in discourses, strategies and struggles around urban development. Using examples from cities in the US and Europe, the paper examines how these new environmental policy considerations are being mainstreamed in urban development politics. Alongside competitiveness, the management of carbon emissions represents a new yet at the same time contestable mode of calculation in urban governance.

Changing governance structures and the environment: economy–environment relations at the local and regional scales

Two substantive bodies of research have developed in recent years, both of which have a focus upon local and regional scales. First, there has been the development of work on changing forms of local and regional governance. This has drawn on a range of theoretical perspectives, including notions of institutional capacity, urban regime theory and neo-regulationalist accounts. Second, a body of research has developed into environmental policy and sustainable development, but this has largely been normative and undertheorized. While these two bodies of literature have developed separately, we believe there is merit in bringing the insights from each together. A focus on local environmental policy helps to broaden our understanding of local governance and problems of after-Fordist regulation. Such a project also helps to illuminate problems in implementing policy on the environment and sustainability. The examination of changing local and regional forms of governance allows us to identify new state spaces, which may provide opportunities for the strategic insertion of environmental objectives into economic development policies. This paper seeks to theorize such environment–economy relations and emerging multi-scalar forms of environmental governance, drawing upon case study research work in six UK local authority areas. Copyright

Unblocking the city? Growth pressures, collective provision, and the search for new spaces of governance in Greater Cambridge, England

A somewhat overlooked aspect of the geography of ‘after-Fordist’ regulation concerns the precise role of different branches of the state in managing tensions between local economic development and the collective provision of social and physical infrastructure. In the United Kingdom, the states reluctance to manage or spatially redistribute growth in the South East has resulted in localised pressures on housing markets, the land-use planning system, infrastructure, and the environment, intensifying struggles between progrowth and antigrowth factions in certain places. In this paper the authors examine conflicts arising from the rapid growth of new economic spaces in and around the Cambridge subregion and explore various attempts by different branches of the state and locally dependent factions of capital to overcome barriers to further growth within existing and proposed frameworks for territorial management. A key arena of conflict in this instance centres upon land-use planning and provision of infrastructure. The Cambridge ‘growth crisis’ raises a series of issues about the ability of interests claiming to represent nationally important city-regions to detach such places from their formative local and national modes of regulation.

Locating art worlds: London and the making of Young British art

The international prominence of Young British art (YBa) in the 1990s gave London a contemporary art movement to match its role as one of the worlds key centres of art exchange. Examining the rise of YBa in retrospect, this paper is concerned with the difference place makes in helping to shape the (hi)story of art. It is argued that Londons established role as an international art centre was crucial in providing the density of networks, associations and facilities necessary to sustain an international art movement. At the same time, YBas success can be linked to Londons changing status as a cultural capital, as well as profound changes in the business of contemporary art. Attention is drawn to the ways in which the international art world is dominated by networks formed within and across a limited number of world art cities.

Governing Nature Conservation: The European Union Habitats Directive and Conflict around Estuary Management

Demands for increased levels of protection for species and ecosystems are being translated into new modes of spatial governance at national, regional, and local scales. As part of this, new ways of analysing and representing ecological systems are leading to qualitatively different treatment of the (time) spaces of nature conservation. In this paper we explore what happens when the land-use demands of new paradigms of nature conservation collide with preestablished modes of spatial regulation, taking as our focus the implementation of the European Union Habitats Directive in estuary spaces in the United Kingdom. We provide evidence of the ways in which ecological regulation is reshaping political–economic landscapes and offer insights into the direction of ‘postmodern’ nature conservation practice, including the extent to which theoretical notions of hybrid and nonequilibrium systems have become absorbed into conflicts around ecological regulation.

Competitive urbanism and the limits to smart city innovation: The UK Future Cities initiative

The technological vision of smart urbanism has been promoted as a silver bullet for urban problems and a major market opportunity. The search is on for firms and governments to find effective and transferable demonstrations of advanced urban technology. This paper examines initiatives by the UK national government to facilitate urban technological innovation through a range of strategies, particularly the TSB Future Cities Demonstrator Competition. This case study is used to explore opportunities and tensions in the practical realisation of the smart city imaginary. Tensions are shown to be partly about the conjectural nature of the smart city debate. Attention is also drawn to weakened capacity of urban governments to control their infrastructural destiny and also constraints on the ability of the public and private sectors to innovate. The paper contributes to smart city debates by providing further evidence of the difficulties in substantiating the smart city imaginary.

From Corporate City to Citizens City?: Urban Leadership After Local Entrepreneurialism in the United Kingdom

The authors reassess the recent history of U.K. urban politics. Following the local entrepreneurialism promoted by the Thatcher governments in the 1980s, they trace the gradual emergence of a more inclusive approach to urban policy. This shift, which began with the Major government in the early 1990s, marks a move toward a more community-orientated vision of social regeneration. Through a survey of the evolution of partnership styles and economic development in Leeds and informed by recent cross-national work on regime theory, the authors provide insights into the structural factors that have shaped the formation, composition, and actions of local coalitions in U.K. governance.

Ontology and the Conservation of Built Heritage

The ontological status of historic buildings has until recently been little explored, particularly in relation to their conservation. This is curious, for the assumed status and existence of buildings have critical impacts upon our attempts to conserve them. Conventional conservation thought has conceived buildings as solid objects constructed under the gaze of a single architect and retaining exemplar properties worth preserving. This paper offers an alternative and novel conceptualisation of buildings in time and space, drawing on the naturalistic ontology of Jubien and combining this with actor-network theory to explore how buildings might be conceived as multiple things with variant but persisting properties (some of which may be worthy of conservation). Using the moment of post-1945 reconstruction, we explore conservation of the architecture and spaces of Exeter (UK) to consider three objects, their nature, persistence, properties, and formation. Doing so reveals the multiplicity of material and social objects that may become entwined in attempts to conserve these buildings. Things such as ‘views’ become reconsidered as multiply constructed, with variant nonessential parts. The paper concludes that conservation practice requires a more heterogeneous understanding of these objects, how they are formed, and the potential for their social and material hybridity.

The competition state, city-regions, and the territorial politics of growth facilitation

As urban centres of agglomeration expand and compete for investment, new demands may arise for additional housing, infrastructure, and services. Failure to meet these demands imposes costs on firms and workers, stifles expansion, and potentially compromises the long-run economic competitiveness of the growth area. Drawing on evidence from Germany (Munich), Sweden (Stockholm), and the UK (Cambridge) this paper examines the organisational and political challenges of growth facilitation in the context of post-Keynesian political and economic restructuring. Particular emphasis is placed on tensions arising from changes in the form and function of European state social regulation. These tensions are not simply a matter of neoliberal regulatory deficit but reflect broader societal cleavages in relation to the uneven spatial impact of local economic growth. Deploying the concept of territorial structures of growth facilitation provides a conceptual framework for taking forward research on the relationship between state spatial regulation, state restructuring, and the competitiveness of city-regions.

The State and the Controversial Demands of Cultural Built Heritage: Modernism, Dirty Concrete, and Postwar Listing in England:

Whilst it is generally accepted that architecturally or historically significant buildings should be protected in the common interest, conservation policy often raises a series of dilemmas for governments in terms of balancing demands for preservation and change. In 1987 statutory protection for historic buildings in England was extended to the post-Second World War (ie post-1945) era, taking conservation planning into new and sometimes controversial territory. This paper examines the origins and evolution of Englands postwar listing programme, exploring the factors that prompted the state to extend protection into such a politically contentious area of conservation policy. Attention is drawn to the lobbying role of influential postwar conservation lobbyists located within and outside state structures in making the case for 1950s and 1960s architecture. However, the politics and practices of postwar listing are ultimately shown to be rooted in the underlying logic of built heritage regulation in England. The paper offers original insights into the states role as conservation champion and its implications for what gets protected and why from the physical legacy of 1950s and 1960s design.