five - New Labour’s ‘broken’ neighbourhoods: liveability, disorder, and discipline?

Summary

This chapter investigates the approach to urban renewal adopted by Britain's New Labour government in the early years of the 21st century. We contend that the Labour administration's initial concern to foster an ‘urban renaissance’, articulated most vividly in its 2000 urban White Paper (DETR, 2000), appears to have at least partly been displaced by an explicit endeavour to create ‘sustainable communities’ (ODPM, 2003). At the heart of the sustainable communities agenda is the acknowledgement that places and neighbourhoods need to be economically viable, effectively governed, and, literally, ‘liveable’. In doing so it recognises that any revitalisation of distressed neighbourhoods – whether inner city, suburban or peripheral housing estate – requires them to be clean, safe, and attractive, places where people would actually choose to live rather than places to which people are simply shunted at the whim of some bureaucratically administered diktat (ODPM, 2005a).

In the endeavour to create such ‘sustainable communities’, the government, we contend, is actively targeting visible signs of ‘disorder’ within England's ‘broken’ neighbourhoods, ranging from void housing and a degraded urban environment to forms of anti-social behaviour (ASB) that are likely to unsettle the sensibilities of ‘respectable’ citizens. One notable consequence of this is that such neighbourhoods have become the projected state spaces where strategies for urban renewal intersect with those for criminal justice and labour market regulation (see Peck, 2003), the motivation being to purge these spaces of any perceived signs and symbols of disorder while simultaneously disciplining the purportedly inappropriate habitus of marginalised groups.

This chapter is concerned to critically evaluate three themes. The first relates to a notable modification of the geographical horizons of New Labour's urban renewal agenda. For while the earlier trumpeting of an urban renaissance clearly implied further revitalisation of the commercial and industrial heartlands of Britain's towns and cities, the sustainable communities agenda seems to signal a notable stretching beyond the city centre and a more concerted endeavour to revive distressed inner and outer suburban neighbourhoods. In turn, these spaces have become the testing grounds for new public policy tools and their inhabitants objectivised – and indeed in Foucauldian terms ‘subjectivised’ – as the targets of communitarian discourses of civic responsibility and inclusion (cf Etzioni, 1998; Johnston and Mooney, Chapter Eight, this volume).