twelve - Prostitution, gentrification, and the limits of neighbourhood space

Summary

Conceived as a series of policies intended to bring people back into cities, urban renaissance offers a new vision of environmentally sustainable, socially balanced, and aesthetically inspired urban regeneration. While clearly informed by New Labour's specific concerns about active citizenship, social inclusion, and community participation, urban renaissance has nonetheless been identified as following a well-tested and global model of urban regeneration reliant on the rolling out of the ‘gentrification frontier’ (Lees, 2003b; Atkinson, 2004; Atkinson & Bridge, 2005). In essence, the suggestion here is that the Urban Task Force and subsequent urban White Paper promote a model of regeneration that idealises middle-class lifestyles, and hence encourages the middle classes to move ‘back to the city’. In practical terms, however, the cash-starved state seems unprepared to intervene significantly in central city property markets, meaning this model of middle-class led regeneration is reliant on investment by private developers keen to exploit the gap between current and potential ground rent.

Local authorities lacking the financial means (or imagination) to revitalise areas of urban blight and disinvestment thus aim to serve up the central city as an unmissable investment opportunity for developers, believing an injection of capital is necessary to prevent a net outflow of consumers, businesses, and residents from city centres bedevilled by images of anti-social behaviour, drunken yobbery, second-class shopping, and unemployment (Baeten, 2002). Often, this requires local authorities to take steps to tame urban ‘disorder’, pioneering new techniques and technologies of ‘policing’ designed to promote consumer-led revitalisation. In some instances, this has involved the extension of private property rights to public space, with new agents of social control (for example, city centre guardians) seeking to maintain the civility of the streets through innovative forms of policing (Belina & Helms, 2003; Raco, 2003). Simultaneously, demands for reassurance policing has encouraged many communities to be more active in seeking partnership solutions to crime and disorder issues, with community watch and neighbourhood warden schemes now widespread (Crawford, 1998; Sagar, 2004).

Imposing a particular form of order on the streets is thus often depicted as the precursor of a benign form of civic renaissance. However, critical voices have stressed this is often about the imposition of middle-class consumerist values, and is actually about the displacement of those ‘Others’ who threaten consumer-led regeneration.