Ronan Paddison

City Marketing, Image Reconstruction and Urban Regeneration

Reflecting the new urban entrepreneuralism, city marketing is more than the mere promotion of place, being used in some cities to rebuild and redefine their image, allied to which has been a strategy of targeting specific types of activity which both reflect and bolster the image. Examining the experience of Glasgow, this paper focuses on the implications raised by the use of such marketing techniques, showing that they have social and political implications which practice tends to overlook.

Just Art for a Just City: Public Art and Social Inclusion in Urban Regeneration

In this article, it is shown how cultural policy, and in particular public art, intersects with the processes of urban restructuring and how it is a contributor, but also antidote, to the conflict that typically surrounds the restructuring of urban space. The particular focus of the paper is on investigating how public art can be inclusionary/exclusionary as part of the wider project of urban regeneration. The first part of the paper examines examples in which public art intervention has attempted to generate inclusion. Subsequently, attention focuses more on examples in which the public art has been perceived as an aspect of cultural domination and has thus provoked resistance. Throughout, it is argued that the processes through which artworks become installed into the urban fabric are critical to the successful development of inclusion.

Civic Culture, Community and Citizen Participation in Contrasting Neighbourhoods

This paper uses survey and qualitative evidence from four neighbourhoods in two cities to explore the hypothesis that citizen participation in urban governance is fostered by political structures and public policy as well as by a civic culture supportive of citizen involvement. The analysis shows that although the prospects for citizen participation are likely to be least propitious in poor neighbourhoods demonstrating lower educational attainment levels, for example, such factors may be mitigated by political mobilisation and the approaches to urban governance, including citizen participation, adopted by local institutions. Citizen participation may be fostered as much by the creation of opportunity structures that build confidence in the efficacy of participation as by the intrinsic levels of civic culture. The key policy lesson is that the effort devoted to creating greater institutional thickness and participatory structures is not wasted.

Urban Consumption: An Historiographical Note

After an extended period of academic neglect, consumption has emerged, in recent years, as one of the key concerns of social science in both theoretical and research-based settings (see Miller, 1995). This re ̄ ects a concomitant trend associated with the social sciences more generally, towards the rejection of a productivist vision of modernity, in favour of a more common recognition that people’ s actions and experiences as consumers have an increasingly formative role to play in maintaining social life. The city continues to provide the prime context within which consumer experiences are both constructed and acted out and, as such, a review of current thinking and research on the subject of urban consumption is long overdue. Social scientists no longer appear to regard consumption as a mere afterthought of the productive process and have, in recent years, begun to study consumption for its own sake. This review issue will therefore consider the signi® cance of consumption as a focus for urban theory and research, outlining what such developments may mean for the future of urban studies. Before considering some of the signi® cant ways in which consumption has emerged as a key concern of social science in general and of urban studies more speci® cally, it is necessary to attempt to construct some form of a de® nition of consumption. At its most basic level, consumption can be described as the purchase and use of goods. Going one step further, Campbell (1995, p. 102) de® nes consumption as, a the selection, purchase, use, maintenance, repair and disposal of any product or serviceo . This de® nition, though useful, is far from entirely satisfactory since at its heart, as Campbell himself acknowledges, lies an economic conception of the role of consumption. What is, in fact, of more interest here, is the way in which during the 1980s the object of consumption, the commodity, came to take on some form of magical quality, so much so that consumption took on a dual role as both an economic and a cultural touchstone (see Lee, 1993). Discussions of consumption have been slow to deal with the complex nature of the interrelationships that exist between the economic and the cultural. Indeed, it could be argued that these relationships are often largely constructed in urban settings and that, despite this, the links that bring together questions centring on urban consumption remain largely underexplored. One author that has gone some way towards coming to terms with the complexities inherent in an understanding of the social signi® cance of consumption in general is Grant McCracken (1990) who describes con-

Questioning the end of public space: Reclaiming control of local banal spaces

Abstract There has recently been much said about the end of public space. In contemporary cities, the public sphere is increasingly been seen as comprised of dead public spaces, privatised shopping malls and gated communities, eroding the essence of city life. However, in this paper it is argued that this particular vision of contemporary public space is skewed by the concentration of research in city centres, and in particular in the recapitalised, flagship spaces associated with urban restructuring. The paper questions the extent that the inclusivity and accessibility of local public spaces is under threat and whether democratic practices unfold to threaten such local public spaces, drawing on the recent experience of two inner-city neighbourhoods in Glasgow.

Responsible Participation and Housing: Restoring Democratic Theory to the Scene

Tensions between individual liberty and collective social justice characterise many advanced liberal societies. These tensions are reflected in the challenges posed for representative democracy both by participatory democratic practices and by the current emphasis on (so-called) responsible participation. Based on the example of ‘community’ housing associations in Scotland, this paper explores these tensions. It is argued that the critique of responsibility may have been over-stated, that, in particular, ‘community’ housing associations offer the basis for relatively more inclusive and effective processes of decision making than council housing, which relies on the traditional processes and institutions of representative local government for its legitimacy.

On place-making, participation and public art: the Gorbals, Glasgow

Public art has become part of the rhetoric of regeneration and within this participation has come to play an increasingly significant role. Public art, through its aesthetic and process, is perceived as integral to place-making within regeneration practice, affording cohesion to otherwise disaffected and disillusioned communities and distinctiveness to reformed places. Based on the example of a regenerated inner-city neighbourhood in Glasgow, the Gorbals, this paper questions the role of public participation in the installation of public art. How the regeneration of the neighbourhood unfolded was heavily influenced by new urbanist ideals in which place-making techniques were instrumental in repositioning the perception of the neighbourhood for its residents as well as externally. We argue that within a complex process of regeneration there are limits to how public participation can be built into the process of installing public art, reflecting in turn the different routes through which places become meaningful.

Spatial Effects of the Poll Tax: A Preliminary Analysis

The introduction of the Community Charge has probably gathered more widespread opposition than any of the legislation aimed at reforming the basis by which British local government is financed (Newton and Karran, 1985). Earlier reforms of the system of local government finance, introduced in the first and second Thatcher administrations, had sought by a variety of methods to control what the centre argued was excessive local spending, and had generated considerable opposition amongst local authorities. Local politicians, and the opposition national parties both saw the changes as an assault on local autonomy, a view increasingly shared by professional bodies representing accountants and valuation officers. Opinion polls in the early 1980’s had indicated that ’most people would be willing to pay at least a limited amount of additional taxation, rather than see major services deteriorate’ (Game, 1984, p.10). Yet in spite of this, and the concerted attempts by the centre to control the local fisc, it was not until the poll tax legislation that such reform was to confront widespread popular opposition from the general mass of the population. In Scotland opposition to the principles of reform has been consistent. At the outset the earlier introduction of the change to Scotland than to England and Wales was resented, not only (and more obviously) by Nationalist and Labour Parties, but also, according to some polls, by a proportion of Conservative politicians and voters. To some the ’imposition’ of the community charge became symptomatic of the gulf separating the Thatcher ’English’ administration and Scotland, as a clear example as any of the dominance of the periphery by the

Some problems in planning the office economy in a third world city: the example of Tunis

Abstract While the office economy has been studied extensively in the advanced industrial nation, it has been overlooked in the context of the developing country. Based on a case-study of Tunis it is shown how the growth of office activities in the central area has exacerbated the planning problems of the citys core. Planning policies designed to control the rate of office growth in the central area and encourage its suburban decentralization have been introduced. However, achievements to date on either of these two aims have been limited, reflecting political, administrative and fiscal problems which limit the effectiveness of planning in the city as a whole.

Urban Studies: Overview

This article is a revision of the previous edition article by R. LeGates, volume 24, pp. 16092–16099,