Allan Cochrane

• The Open University

Inspired by Jamie Peck’s recent article on conjunctural methodologies, we discuss how geographers might interpret these troubling times. We hope to keep the conversation going by suggesting that a strength of conjunctural analysis lies in trying to get to grips with multiple crises without always knowing precisely where to look. Another strength of...

This article explores the political potential of the local state through an engagement with the case of Sheffield City Council in the 1980s. The new municipalism movement has generated renewed interest in the “local” and “urban” as transformative projects. The local state holds a pivotal if problematic role in these debates, often seen as the decis...

Das Verhältnis zwischen der fast schon nachlässigen umgangssprachlichen wie auch akademischen Verwendung des Begriffs „das Urbane“ – wir alle wissen, wo es liegt – und der Suche nach spezifischeren – oder gar wissenschaftlichen – Definitionen ist ein schwieriges. Auf den ersten Blick scheint es eine recht leichte Aufgabe, das Urbane der urbanen Pol...

In the context of austerity, some of the taken for granted territorial boundaries of local government are being stretched and questioned. Here, these issues are explored with the help of two bodies of evidence: the creation of sets of interlocking arrangements on the edge of the London City region (most recently expressed in proposals for developme...

The question of comparison is one that haunts contemporary urban and regional studies—the need for it is taken for granted, but what it is, how to do it and what it can teach us remain matters of contention. In 2016 Kevin Cox published a book that brought some of these issues to the fore, challenging the ways in which US models have tended to domin...

Universities are necessarily implicated in processes of globalisation and neoliberalisation. But this also finds an expression in the ways that they operate in the cities in which they are located. They are always located in place, but the question remains whether they can be understood to be of the places in which they find themselves, capable of...

In some respects, the impact of globalization on universities is well rehearsed (competition for international students; the drive for status in global rankings; the opening of overseas campuses; the dream of massive open online courses and other forms of digital education), but the relationship between universities as place-based institutions and...

This article contributes to understandings of the conviviality which has dominated recent sociological approaches to urban multiculture. The article argues for conviviality’s conceptual extension by reference to recent rethinking of community as a profound sociality of ‘being with’ and a culture of urban practice. The article draws from a qualitati...

The relationships being explored in this book can only be understood in the context of wider economic and policy shifts at global and European levels, which have dramatically altered the ways in which universities are understood and managed. It seems a long ago, distant mythical age when universities were somehow expected to dedicate themselves to...

There are significant differences in the local and regional roles of universities in the UK. These reflect differences between the individual universities themselves and in the characteristics of their regional contexts. They reflect both differences in intentions and differences in circumstances. But there are also some similarities in the regiona...

A defining feature of a university has always been the ‘universal’ nature of the knowledge that it creates and transmits. Today, within so-called global knowledge societies, some of the claims to universalism arguably become even stronger, in the context of growth in both international labour and student mobility, and as a consequence of new forms...

In the previous chapter, we set out the wider international or global context within which policy developments in the UK have to be understood. This book focuses on the UK case, not as a more or less universal model, but as a case from which it may be possible to draw wider lessons within an increasingly globalised higher education system. In this...

The chapter draws on findings from the project’s four case studies to critically assess the contribution of universities to their regional economic development through three lenses. The first of these relates to the particular economic and development initiatives that universities are involved in and which are explicitly targeted at economic growth...

In this chapter, we consider whether a local higher education presence contributes to redressing social inequalities or whether it perpetuates or even reinforces existing patterns of social disadvantage within its region. We explore how the case study universities identified and addressed social disadvantage in their regional contexts. Areas covere...

This chapter further develops aspects of the discussion introduced in Chap. 4 by shifting the focus from economic development and regeneration to related but distinct questions about image and culture. At its simplest, this is reflected in the relationship between universities and the ‘image’ of the places within which they are located. The greater...

There are many activities of universities which are intended to ‘make a difference’ to the communities that surround them. Some focus on the economic well-being of a region as a whole. Some are directed at particular areas or groups within a region, reflecting perceived special needs or relative disadvantage. Some university activities will be a re...

The prospects of regional partnerships may have been successfully boosted by public policies and economic circumstances of the past two decades, but the notion of public and community ‘engagement’, often understood at local level, has always been a distinctive mission associated with universities. In recent years, discourses of engagement have also...

This book sets out to understand the significance of geographical context – place – for universities in the globalised setting of the twenty-first century. It examines their social impact on the regions in which they are situated, both from the perspectives of the universities themselves and from the perspectives of a range of different local and r...

In an increasingly ethnically diverse society, debates about migration, community, cultural difference and social interaction have never been more pressing. Drawing on the findings from a two-year, qualitative Economic and Social Research Council funded study of different locations across England, Lived Experiences of Multiculture uses interdiscipl...

In 2004, Local Government Studies published an article in which I reflected on the implications of new Labour’s modernisation agenda for the remaking of local government and the reshaping of the welfare state. Here I return to some of the issues raised in that paper in the different context of localism, austerity and dreams of urban entrepreneurial...

This paper contributes to research on urban multiculture and debates as to how people routinely live and experience ethnic diversity in their everyday lives. This research takes an ‘unpanicked’ approach to multiculture that sits differently to, although not unaffected by, multiculturalism as policy objective and those debates around multiculturalis...

Traditionally the suburbs have been viewed as secondary products of urbanization, as the necessary consequence of growth emanating from the centre, which has required housing on the outskirts and commuting back in for employment and high-end consumption. But it is increasingly necessary to rethink this approach and to consider the implications of p...

In this paper we reflect on the kind of listening that happens in research whilst taking part in a keep fit group and getting sweaty, that pushes us to ask an interviewee ‘Are you alright?’ and haunts us when the project is over. This is the kind of listening that weaves through, around and beyond what is immediately heard, including the unspoken,...

The global rhetoric surrounding the role of private markets in the provision of new housing masks a more complex reality, highlighted in processes of spatial planning, in which public policy and private developers are deeply enmeshed. This paper discusses some of the tensions with the help of a detailed examination of plans for housing development...

In social research some places and populations are disproportionately targeted by researchers. While relatively little work exists on the concept of over-research those accounts that do exist tend to focus on participant-based research relationships and not place-based research relationships. Using interdisciplinary approaches and fieldwork experie...

This collection of contributions uses the 21nd anniversary of the publication of Allan Cochrane’s Whatever Happened to Local Government? (1993) to reflect on the state of contemporary English local government, and in the process assess the book’s intellectual legacy.

Drawing on the experiences and statements of two universities, this article sets out to relate current trends and discourses of engagement of UK higher education (HE) institutions with their regional environment in the context of major policy shifts in HE and in regional governance. The ‘third mission’ is considered as an aspect of what universitie...

This paper engages with an emergent literature on multiculture and concepts such as conviviality and negotiation to explore how increasingly ethnically diverse population routinely share and mix in urban places and social spaces. As part of a wider ESRC funded, two-year qualitative study of changing social life and everyday multiculture in differen...

Situating itself in encounter and public space debates and borrowing from non-representational theory approaches, this paper uses data from the authors' 2-year Economic and Social Research Council research project to consider how local urban parks can work as sites of routine encounter, mixity, and place belonging. The paper explores how parks as g...

The spatial imaginations of media studies and urban studies are increasingly aligned, illustrated by a growing literature on what can be identified as the media-urban nexus. This nexus has attracted scholarly interest not only as a cultural phenomenon, but also as a site of emergent political dynamics. We suggest that literature on the media-urban...

Global events such as London's 2012 Olympic Games raise questions about the ways in which embedded political arrangements take their shape from relationships that stretch across and beyond urban boundaries. In this article, the urban politics that we wish to capture is not one that is merely located in the city, but rather one that has to constantl...

We outline the rationale for reopening the issue of the spatiality of the ‘urban’ in urban politics. There is a long tradition of arguing about the distinctive political qualities of urban sites, practices and processes. Recent work often relies on spatial concepts or metaphors that anchor various political phenomena to cities while simultaneously...

This article critically reviews the experience of a major sub-regional strategy which sought to bring housing and economic development together, under the aegis of the Sustainable Communities Plan. It draws on evidence from a current ESRC-funded project focused on Milton Keynes and Northamptonshire, the northern part of the growth area of Milton Ke...

In recent years growing expectations have been placed upon universities, particularly in relation to their role as drivers of local and regional economic growth. However, rather than drawing on the economic perspective, the research on which this chapter is based is focused on the socio-cultural impact of universities. It discusses some of the find...

There has always been a localist element to British politics. But recently, a particular version of localism has been moved to the foreground by the 2011 Localism Act. This paper identifies various uses and meanings of localism, maps their geographical assumptions and effects, and critiques their politics. It does this using the localism of the Uni...

Since 2001, as the social and spatial compositions of multiculture and migration have become more complicated and diverse, geography has moved back to the centre of policy, political, and academic arguments about cultural difference and ethnic diversity in England. This spatial turn is most obvious in preoccupations with notions of increasing ethni...

Traditionally, universities have been understood in terms that assume their special status within the social world somehow divorced from the places within which they find themselves.Yet they are also increasingly expected to make some contribution to regional development. With the help of evidence drawn from an Economic and Social Research Council...

Introduction Questioning the Assumptions Conceptualising Spaces and Places Re-thinking London and the South-East What Is a Region? Conclusion: Relational Thinking and Regional Assemblages Acknowledgement

This critical review debates the issues raised in Mark Whitehead’s 2009 book, “State, Science and the Skies: Governmentalities of the British atmosphere”. After a short introduction that positions the book, four commentators draw on their own work in political geography, the sociology of science, atmospheric science and cultural geography, respecti...

Urban policy is often discussed as if it were a solely a product of national initiatives of one sort or another. Here the focus is on the role of global institutions in setting out frameworks for urban policy development and the circulation of urban policy approaches.

Despite a growing academic scepticism about the significance of territory as a driver of politics, it remains a stubborn presence in the practice of politics. In the context of the wider UK devolution agenda the first decade of this century saw the emergence of an English regionalist project, based around a series of regional institutions and gover...

The notion of ‘sustainability’ is increasingly mobilised in public policy discourse, particularly in the taken-for-granted language of contemporary planning. The promise of sustainability brings together personal and community responsibility with a world in which economic well-being and environmental protection can exist side by side, and may even...

Urban politics is a multidisciplinary field, in other words a number of bits — so to speak — of different disciplines work on it. While those in political science might claim to produce the bulk of the work in this field, others in anthropology, economics, human geography, planning, social policy and sociology can also claim to be making a contribu...

Convention suggests that multicultural areas tend to exhibit high levels of residential and educational segregation, high degrees of poverty and deprivation and low rates of contact between culturally distinct individuals and groups. By contrast, with the help of a case study of a fast growing English new town, this paper reflects on the experience...

Traditional models of urban development have tended to view it as a more or less ‘organic’ (almost biological) process growing out from a central core, around which various rings of settlement and economic activity are organized. These approaches seem stubbornly to retain their power in the language of inner cities, outer estates, suburbs and city-...

: Multi-scalar or multi-site power relations offer two contrasting ways of understanding the shifting geography of state power. In this paper, we argue for a different starting point, one that favours a topological understanding of state spatiality over more conventional topographical accounts. In contrast to a vertical or horizontal imagery of the...

This paper sets to explore and clarify the nature of the politics associated with the institutional shift from government to governance, in the context of the rise of sustainability and sustainable communities as governance discourses. After critically considering the extent to which this represents a move to some sort of post-political settlement,...

This paper forms one of the contributions to CHERI's research report 'Higher education and society'. It reports on one of the centre's ESRC-funded research projects - Higher Education and Regional Transformation.

This report draws on a substantial body of research undertaken by the Open University’s Centre for Higher Education Research and Information (CHERI) on the changing relationships between higher education and society. Higher education currently faces many changes, some externally driven by government policies and changing patterns of social and econ...

This chapter discusses policy approaches to local and regional development which go beyond the new convenional wisdom of economic competitiveness. In this context, it particularly focuses on the experience of the 'new municipal socialism' of the 1980s and on more recent initiatives attempting to build non-capitalist practices within a capitalist ec...

Despite the turn to relational vocabularies in urban theory, most work on urban politics acknowledging the importance of media has tended to reproduce a centred image of ‘the media’ and a functionalist account of mediation. This essay suggests, by contrast, that media might be understood more phenomenologically, as those technologies embedded in th...

Within contemporary social theory and social science, urban and media studies are seen as zones of speciality, with distinctive theoretical traditions and substantive concerns. This introduction situates the four short essays making up this Debates and Developments section in relation to a recent interdisciplinary workshop held in June 2008 at The...

The organisation of this workshop has been prompted by concerns with the way media so often seem to get left out of writing on cities and urban politics (rather than vice-versa). We agree with Iveson’s (2007) argument that urban and media studies have much more in the way of shared concerns when it comes to politics than is conventionally thought t...

An extensive and theoretically informed review of the evolution and meaning(s) of urban policy since the 1960s. Highlighting connections and continuities, the book 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 d...

About the book: This book explores ways of defining and enacting social justice in the context of modern social welfare and crime control policies. It examines how the notion of social justice informs experiences and understandings of the social world, why it appeals to so many people as a mobilising ideal for social change and reform, and how it s...

Regenerating London explores latest thinking on urban regeneration in one of the fastest changing world cities. Engaging with social, economic, and political structures of cities, it highlights paradoxes and contradictions in urban policy and offers an evaluation of the contemporary forms of urban redevelopment.

The dissolution of the old mechanisms of state welfare has not yet led to the generation of a new welfare settlement, although the rise of neoliberalism and of what Jessop has called the Schumpeterian Competition State have highlighted some key directions of change. The importance of geographical inequality and unevenness to the process of reshapin...

The idea of regions as territorially fixed in some vital political sense is a stubborn conception, one that is both mobilized to pursue selective interests and to establish regional identities. To assert that regions are political constructs, however, is not to say that such bounded, territorial entities enclose all the political relations that pro...

In the recent past, local government has largely been analysed as if its very existence were in danger from centrally inspired legislative reforms and financial controls. Such a starting point may make it more difficult to assess the changes which are taking place and which are likely to dominate in the 1990s. Three other possibilities are consider...

Local enterprise boards were first developed as radical initiatives For economic intervention in the early 1980s. Despite the closeness of their dates of birth, however, and the apparent similarity of the organizational forms (and titles) which they adopted, the differences between the boards were as significant as their shared features. The ambiti...

Urban policy actively shapes the ways in which people live in cities. As well as reflecting contemporary understandings of the role of cities in economic and social development, it also helps to create those understandings.

Alan Latham criticizes recent Anglophone writing on Berlin for reflecting a consensus position, which explains urban development with the help of a template defined by globalizing neo-liberalism. In some respects the points he makes are helpful. Berlin has been actively repositioned and re-imagined through an ambivalent process of 'normalization',...

Devolution appears to challenge the traditional regional and national hierarchies of the UK, but in practice the dominance of the South East of England has been maintained through active state intervention. As social welfare has increasingly been redefined through economic success and access to the labour market, the focus of social policy has shif...

Much contemporary writing on cities focuses on their position within wider global networks, so there is a risk of underplaying the significance of other aspects of the urban experience.This paper explores the particular role of Berlin as capital city in the making of the (new) Berliner Republic and the ways in which it is defined (and defines itsel...

This article first identifies citizenship as an ambiguous con-cept with changing and contested meanings. Next it discusses the methodological commitment of a study conducted in 2001 exploring the conceptions of citizenship permeating learning disability services. The third section identifies four themes linked to the citizenship of disabled people:...

The story of local government over the last few decades is often summarised in the assertion that there has been a move away from institutional authority embodied in the structures of councils towards more complex networks of local governance, incorporating a range of stakeholders and other agencies, alongside a shift of power from local to central...

This study focuses upon the effect of social policy upon a particular area of service provision. It is influenced by the Foucauldian concept of governmentality and the proposition by Lewis et al. that social policy needs to be understood in local contexts. Only through understanding the partial and fragmented impact of policy can we gain a clear in...

Discussion of the Manchester Olympic bid, highlighting the extent to which bidding for mega projects is also part of a process of bidding for grants from national government. Exploration of the urban politics of global sports events.

Review of shifts in urban policy towards more neighbourhood/community approaches.

Discussion of the role of the English regions in the context of devolved planning.

Berlin is being remade as capital of a unified German nation state, just at the time when the role of nation states is being called into question by the claims of globalization, and the associated rise of global cities. The experience of Berlin suggests that it may be unhelpful to accept the world-city agenda as a universal template. Instead, it is...

John Wiseman, Global Nation? Australia and the politics of globalisation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, viii + 202 pp., £40.00, £14.95 pbk. - - Volume 29 Issue 1 - ALLAN COCHRANE

A discussion of the ways in which British urban policy has been imagined and reimagined since the 1970s.

A review of urban policy in Brtain in the early years of new Labour.

Globalization has had a dramatic effect on the way in which we understand the operation of urban systems. Cities - or their elites - have increasingly sought to redefine and reimagine themselves through place marketing in ways which allow them to compete in the global marketplace. The ‘exceptional’ case of Berlin is explored in the context of regio...

About the book: Harvey Molotch's "city as a growth machine" thesis is one of the most influential approaches to the analysis of urban politics and local economic development in the United States. However, the nature and context of urban politics have changed considerably since the growth machine thesis was first proposed more than twenty years ago,...

A review of the urbdna development corporations initiative, reflecting on their role within the broader history of urban policy and urban governance in Britain.

It has always been difficult to explore local power structures, and local politics (or local political economies) have often been reinterpreted in ways in which they are simply seen as the working out of wider national or global processes. The recognition that this is not enough has encouraged a growth in more locally focused research, frequently i...