Julie Charlesworth

Managing Local Mixed Economies of Care

It is widely agreed that there has been a move within the United Kingdom away from one welfare state as traditionally understood towards a mixed economy of welfare, in which public, private, voluntary, and not-for-profit sectors are expected to work together. How the new mixed economy is expected to work is less clear. In this paper we focus on two crucial aspects of the change with respect to care services—in emergent local mixed economies of care—with the help of case studies drawn from Buckinghamshire and Birmingham. We stress the need to recognise the role of local differences in the construction and interpretation of mixed economies of care, so that there is not just one, but may be many (locally distinctive) mixed economies. And we emphasise the need to take into account the rise of managerialism as a means of dealing with problems of coordination within local mixed economies, particularly because of the way in which it may undermine alternative forms of coordination and control.

Gentrification and housing improvement: the case of Nürnberg

Abstract A revival of interest among professional people in central and inner city residence appears to have occurred in West Germany since the late 1970s. In recent years, a selective programme of central area rehabilitation has successfully wedded public and private funding in Nurnberg, with consequent displacement of low‐income tenants. The further spread of upgrading and social change appears to have been halted in parts of the inner city designated as Urban Renewal Areas, where the federal and local authorities are apparently intent on stabilising and improving the much‐neglected housing and environmental conditions of the poorest “guestworker” communities.

Corridor or blind alley? The A1M Herts corridor consortium

Local authority intervention in the local economy has proliferated in recent years and is not, as much work suggests, confined to large Labour controlled authorities coping with inner city problems and/or declining heavy industry; a wide variety of economic development initiatives are being executed by councils across the political spectrum. This paper examines the notion of growth coalitions and attempts to shed some light on these aspects of neglected research and reasons for local authority intervention, exemplified by the A1M Herts Corridor Campaign, an economic development initiative to attract inward investment to an affluent county.