Ash Amin

Ethnicity and the Multicultural City: Living with Diversity

In the wake of the race disturbances in Oldham, Burnley, and Bradford in Summer 2001, the author explores the possibilities for intercultural understanding and dialogue. He argues that, although the national frame of racial and ethnic relations remains important, much of the negotiation of difference occurs at the very local level, through everyday experiences and encounters. Against current policy emphasis on community cohesion and mixed housing, which also tends to assume fixed minority ethnic identities, the author focuses on prosaic sites of cultural exchange and transformation, plural and contested senses of place, an agonistic politics of ethnicity and identity, and the limitations of the White legacy of national belonging in Britain.

An Institutionalist Perspective on Regional Economic Development

Until recently, regional policy has been firm-centred, standardized, incentive-based and state-driven. This is certainly true in the case of the Keynesian legacy that dominated regional policy in the majority of advanced economies after the 1960s. It relied on income redistribution and welfare policies to stimulate demand in the less favoured regions (LFRs) and the offer of state incentives (from state aid to infrastructural improvements) to individual firms to locate in such regions. Paradoxically, the same principles apply also to pro-market neoliberal experiments which have come to the fore over the last fifteen years. The neoliberal approach, placing its faith in the market mechanism, has sought to deregulate markets, notably the cost of labour and capital, and to underpin entrepreneurship in the LFRs through incentives and investment in training, transport and communication infrastructure, and technology. The common assumption in both approaches, despite their fundamental differences over the necessity for state intervention and over the equilibrating powers of the market, has been that top-down policies can be applied universally to all types of region. This agreement seems to draw on the belief that at the heart of economic success lies a set of common factors (e.g. the rational individual, the maximizing entrepreneur, the firm as the basic economic unit and so on). The achievements of both strands of such an ‘imperative’ approach (Hausner, 1995) have been modest in terms of stimulating sustained improvements in the economic competitiveness and developmental potential of the LFRs. Keynesian regional policies, without doubt, helped to increase employment and income in the LFRs, but they failed to secure increases in productivity comparable to those in the more prosperous regions and, more importantly, they did not succeed in encouraging self-sustaining growth based on the mobilization of local resources and interdependencies (by privileging non-indigenous sectors and externally-owned firms). The ‘market therapy’ has threatened a far worse outcome, by reducing financial transfers which have proven to be a vital source of income and welfare in the LFRs, by exposing the weak economic base of the LFRs to the chill wind of ever enlarging free market zones or corporate competition and by failing singularly to reverse the flow of all factor inputs away from the LFRs. In short, the choice has been that between dependent development or no development.

Regions unbound : towards a new politics of place.

Abstract This paper proposes a non‐territorial reading of a politics of place. Focusing on the politics of contemporary regionalism, it argues that globalisation and the general rise of a society of transnational flows and networks no longer allow a conceptualisation of place politics in terms of spatially bound processes and institutions. The second part of the paper outlines an alternative politics of place that works with the varied distanciated geographies that cut across a given region.

Spatialities of Globalisation

The focus of this paper is on the theorisation of the spatialities of globalisation. I seek to shift the emphasis away from the currently dominant discourse of scalar and territorial relativisation, towards relational processes and network forms of organisation that defy a linear distinction between place and space. I stress the importance of actor networks of varying length and duration as well as the world of practices as the central components of a topographical understanding of globalisation. What this might mean in terms of a theorisation of place is illustrated through a discussion of the geography of the urban economy and a discussion of the politics of place.

Institutional issues for the European regions: from markets and plans to socioeconomics and powers of association

This article, focusing on regional development issues, discusses thepolicy alternatives that might be mobilized to reverse the centralizing forces unleashed by the pursuit of neo-liberal policies in the European Union. It highlights the limitations of contemporary versions of the managed economy model, and explores the significance of anemerging model of development rooted in socioeconomics, and stressing the powers of ‘associationism’. While broadly sympathizing with this third way-in between market and hierarchy - as a basis for generating economic success, the article goes on to argue that questions of social equity and political democracy remain unresolved by the associationist agenda.

The Re-Emergence of Regional Economies? The Mythical Geography of Flexible Accumulation

A critique of the potential of industrial districts for local and regional development in the present period is developed. It focuses particularly on the influential arguments being put forward by Piore and Sabel and by Scott and Storper. The authors argue against a simple and totalising theory of localised agglomerations, and suggest that contemporary processes of structural change are in fact more complex and contradictory. The new industrial spaces of economic development are in reality quite heterogeneous and are of limited significance in the face of powerful tendencies towards accelerating economic concentration and integration at a global, rather than local, level.

Local community on trial.

Abstract While plenty has been written about the reinvention of the social by the Third Way as a new governmentality of control, consensus, and social integration, less has been said about its subtle elision of social and the local, and the implications of this elision for urban and regional regeneration. This is the theme taken up by this paper, beginning with a critical appraisal of the recent turn by New Labour to community cohesion and social capital as a means of overcoming local poverty and disadvantage. It shows how the social has come to be redefined as community, localized, and thrown back at hard-pressed areas as both cause and solution in the area of social, political, and economic regeneration. The second half of the paper develops an alternative designation of the local-social that is less instrumentalist, decidedly a-moral (though equally ethical), agonistically political, and geographically unconstrained. It argues for a return to ideas of agonistic democracy and the society of commitments and connections so thoroughly repudiated by new versions of market social democracy.

Learning and Adaptation in Decentralised Business Networks

In this paper we address two problems related to what can be claimed about the powers of decentralised business networks. The first concerns the role of tacit knowledge and proximity in securing competitive advantage. Recently, in a strand of the literature concerned with the differences between tacit and codified knowledge, it has begun to be claimed that the superiority of relational and geographic proximity (for example, intense face-to-face contact, local industrial clusters, and districts) over formally constituted and distantiated networks of knowledge and learning. In the first part of the paper we dissent from this interpretation by questioning the separability of the two forms of knowledge and by suggesting that business networks largely dependent on local tacit knowledge and incremental learning may prove to be inadaptable in the face of radical shifts in markets and technologies. The second problem regards the relationship between knowledge and the organisational structure of firms and business networks. In the second half of the paper we focus on the challenge facing competence-based large firms which draw on localised sources of knowledge to argue that competitive advantage is crucially influenced by the ability of firms to mobilise and integrate diversified forms of knowledge (tacit and codified), rather than to specialise in one form. We also argue that the imperative to sustain continuous learning is adding a new architecture of organisation and governance to that traditionally associated with the reduction of transaction costs, rather than replacing it, as is implied in the new literature which privileges the firm as a nexus of competencies. Thus, a dual structure seems to be emerging, which is composed of a decentralised network of reflexive and interactive centres to advance core competencies and learning and overlaid upon a more traditional hierarchical structure for the regulation of noncore activities.

Collective culture and urban public space

This paper develops a post‐humanist account of urban public space. It breaks with a long tradition that has located the culture and politics of public spaces such as streets and parks or libraries and town halls in the quality of inter‐personal relations in such spaces. Instead, it argues that human dynamics in public space are centrally influenced by the entanglement and circulation of human and non‐human bodies and matter in general, productive of a material culture that forms a kind of pre‐cognitive template for civic and political behaviour. The paper explores the idea of ‘situated surplus’, manifest in varying dimensions of compliance, as the force that produces a distinctive sense of urban collective culture and civic affirmation in urban life.

Cultural-economy and cities

This article seeks to re-imagine the urban economy from a cultural-economy perspective. The first part summarizes a perspective arguing that economic life is so shot through with cultural inputs and practices at all levels that ‘culture’ and ‘economy’ cannot be seen as separate entities. Focusing on the power of such influences as passion, moral values, soft knowledge, trust and cultural metaphor, the article illustrates different ways in which the economy can be imagined only as a hybrid entanglement. The second part uses the insight gained to illustrate how the urban is implicated in narrating new economic mantras as well as supporting and defining the everyday cultural-economy. The purpose of this illustration is to reveal new ways in which the urban economy might be grasped.