Understanding Urban Policy: A Critical Introduction

This extensive and theoretically informed review of the evolution of urban policy since the 1960s explores its complex interaction with changing understandings of urban life and social welfare. Highlighting connections and continuities, it examines a broad range of issues that have helped to define urban policy at different times and in different places, including race, economic regeneration and competitiveness, managing dangerous places, community, and managerialism. The author draws on evidence from the UK to develop his broader argument, but does so with explicit cross reference to developments in the US, because of the way in which the development of urban policy in the two countries has been intertwined. He also considers the emergence of European and globalized forms of (neoliberal) urban policy since the mid 1990s, before reflecting on the hopes and possibilities that might be realized through urban policy in the future.

1. What is Urban Policy?. 2. Exploring the Roots: ‘Race’, Disorder, and Poverty. 3. Managerialism and the City. 4. The Meaning(s) of Community. 5. Managing Disorderly Places. 6. Competitiveness, the Market and Urban Entrepreneurialism. 7. Taking the Cultural Turn. 8. Neo–liberalism and the Globalisation of Urban Policy. 9. Reshaping Welfare, Re–imagining Urban Policy. References. Index

Allan Cochrane is Professor of Public Policy at the The Open University. His previous publications include Comparing Welfare States (editor, second edition, 2000), Rethinking the Region (1998), and A Global World? Reordering Political Space (editor, 1995).

"An immensely enjoyable book, bringing a valuable historical perspective to bear and written in a critical but lucid style... it will challenge and enlighten its readers." Paul Burton, University of Bristol