Business Improvement Areas and the Justification of Urban Revitalization: Using the Pragmatic Sociology of Critique to Understand Neoliberal Urban Governance

This chapter examines an approach to crime reduction which differs from many others in that it focuses, not on the offender or their reasoning for committing an offence, but upon the environment in which an offence takes place. This approach also differs in its consideration of who should hold responsibility for the reduction of crime, with a focus, not solely upon the traditional criminal justice system agencies, but also upon planners, architects, developers and managers of public space. The approach is based on the presumption that offenders will maximise crime opportunities, and therefore, those opportunities must be avoided (in the first place) or removed (following the emergence of a crime problem). In the 2001 publication ‘Cracking Crime through Design’, Pease introduces the concept of design as a means of reducing crime, but more importantly, the premise that it is the moral responsibility of many different actors and agencies to improve the lives of those who may fall victim to crime, those who live in fear of crime, and (less obviously) those who will, through the presentation of unproblematic opportunities, be tempted into offending. In the case of crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED), it is the planners, designers, developers and architects who risk acting (as Pease paraphrases the poet John Donne) as the gateway to another man’s sin.

Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design

Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster

This paper critically explores the ‘politics of becoming’ in a ‘wannabe’ creative city in the United States. It shows how, in Baltimore’s policy sphere, Richard Florida’s theory has served as an ‘intellectual technology’ aiming at the invention of a new macro-actor (the creative class), while related urban regeneration outcomes and prospects appear to be more problematic. In particular, at the city-wide level, the creative class policy has favoured the interests of local politicians and their closer institutional partners; while, in the described context of a socially deprived neighbourhood, the embraced culture-led policy, albeit successful in redesigning a more attractive urban realm and thus in attaining its stated goals, has proved to be concerned more with real estate revitalisation than with issues of social inclusion and life-chance provision. It is concluded that the prevailing institutional imperative of networking and collaboration, as observed in Baltimore’s creative class initiative, overempha...

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Becoming a Creative City: The Entrepreneurial Mayor, Network Politics and the Promise of an Urban Renaissance

Newcomers to older neighborhoods are usually perceived as destructive, tearing down everything that made the place special and attractive. But as "A Neighborhood That Never Changes" demonstrates, many gentrifiers seek to preserve the authentic local flavor of their new homes, rather than ruthlessly remake them. Drawing on ethnographic research in four distinct communities - the Chicago neighborhoods of Andersonville and Argyle and the New England towns of Provincetown and Dresden - Japonica Brown-Saracino paints a colorful portrait of how residents new and old, from wealthy gay homeowners to Portuguese fishermen, think about gentrification. The new breed of gentrifiers, Brown-Saracino finds, exhibits an acute self-consciousness about their role in the process and works to minimize gentrification's risks for certain longtime residents. In an era of rapid change, they cherish the unique and fragile, whether a dilapidated house, a two-hundred-year-old landscape, or the presence of people deeply rooted in the place they live. Contesting many long-standing assumptions about gentrification, Brown-Saracino's absorbing study reveals the unexpected ways beliefs about authenticity, place, and change play out in the social, political, and economic lives of very different neighborhoods.

A Neighborhood That Never Changes: Gentrification, Social Preservation, and the Search for Authenticity

In this short response I would like to address some of the criticisms made by Neil Brenner, David Madden and David Wachsmuth (2011) to the programme of urban studies presented in the volume Urban Assemblages: How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies (Farias and Bender, 2009). I will do this by addressing some crucial differences between this approach and the project of critical urban studies, which, as Brenner et al. noted, is not thoroughly discussed in the aforementioned volume. I think there are four fundamental matters to be discussed: the style of cognitive engagement (inquiries or critique), the definitions of the object of study (cities or capitalism), the underlying conceptions of the social (assemblages or structures) and the envisaged political projects (democratization or revolution). Obviously these pairs of concepts don't represent clear-cut distinctions. They do, however, signalize differences of emphasis making up the politics of urban assemblages.

Business Improvement Areas and the Justification of Urban Revitalization: Using the Pragmatic Sociology of Critique to Understand Neoliberal Urban Governance

References

Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design

Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster

Becoming a Creative City: The Entrepreneurial Mayor, Network Politics and the Promise of an Urban Renaissance

A Neighborhood That Never Changes: Gentrification, Social Preservation, and the Search for Authenticity

The politics of urban assemblages

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