fourteen - Conclusion: British urbanism at a crossroads

Summary

We started this volume with the observation that urban policy, like social policy before it, has become criminalised in the processes of viewing regeneration as closely linked to a broader and populist ‘disorder’ agenda. Such specific views on regeneration have been promoted not only by a punitive central government but also at a local level where the neoliberalisation of urban governance, in particular through new models of management and working practices, has been established. As the various chapters have shown, a reading of the criminal justice, anti-social behaviour, and urban agendas and attempts to revitalise neighbourhoods and central cities are now deeply entwined areas of public policy intervention. What we see now is the buttressing of policy in both fields by reference to each other as the disorder agenda seeks out places and communities damaged by or deficient in their control of crime and as explicit urban regeneration policies construe policing, disorder, and citizen engagement as the central hallmarks of effective control. In short, it no longer makes sense to treat these concerns as separable fields of policy, just as citizens see those linkages operating in local arenas on a daily basis.

In the first part of this collection we saw how policies dealing with crime control and urban regeneration are increasingly intertwined from a conceptual perspective. In particular the emphasis by New Labour on joined-up policy, while conferring new legitimacy on such policies, also had the effect of imbuing urban regeneration programmes with a strong criminal justice agenda, thus effectively criminalising urban policy. Here the chapters from Stenson, Raco, and Hancock (Chapters Two and Four respectively) moved beyond an initial analysis of policy initiatives and opened up the ways in which state–society relations are being reconfigured in the interlinking of urban, social, and criminal justice policies. In all of these contributions we see a strongly critical interpretation of the value of such a turn in policy making as an emphasis on ‘active communities’ and citizens has been undermined by an emphasis on strategies of policing and empowerment that have operated in punitive ways – actively excluding those very constituencies most in need of help and social inclusion.