Simon Parker

• PhD
• Professor at University of York

Enoch Powell's legacy continues to haunt British politics, and especially the Conservative Party, which while seeking to distance itself from the more extreme language and warnings of his so-called "Rivers of Blood" speech has nevertheless embraced Powell's belief that mass migration has mostly had a negative impact on British society and that mult...

This article develops a framework for understanding policy-making responses to the crisis of the post-industrial urban economy in Britain through an exploration of the policy event of the 1981 English riots and the policy-making field that surrounded it in which the rival positions of ‘managed decline’ and concerted urban regeneration became reconc...

In this paper we examine elite formation in relation to money power within the city of London. Our primary aim is to consider the impact of the massive concentration of such power upon the city’s political life, municipal and shared resources and social equity. We argue that objectives of city success have come to be identified and aligned with the...

ABSTRACTNon-state space: the strategic ejection of dangerous and high maintenance urban space. Territory, Politics, Governance. Some commentators have characterized so-called ?no-go? areas as sites in which the exercise of authority is prevented. Here we suggest that many such spaces are produced by state, policing and citizen repertoires that aim...

We need to rethink regional growth strategy in favour of redistributive fiscal devolution and a democratic renewal that puts service users and citizens at the heart of local government. The ‘Northern Powerhouse’ model as it currently is risks leaving most of its socially and economically disadvantaged residents locked outside.

In our introduction to this Debates & Developments forum, ‘What place for the Region?’, we discuss why the founders of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR) regarded the regional question as having the same importance as the urban question, and how the region has remained a significant focus during the journal's subsequen...

Urban Theory and the Urban Experience brings together classic and contemporary approaches to urban research in order to reveal the intellectual origins of urban studies and the often unacknowledged debt that empirical and theoretical perspectives on the city owe one another. From the foundations of modern urban theory in the work of Weber, Simmel,...

Critical urban theory and critical urban studies form the subject of two recent edited collections on approaches to the analysis and transformation of the contemporary capitalist city. In an exchange of commentaries by the respective editors and contributors, the introduction explains the genesis of each book and previews some of the key observatio...

This essay seeks to challenge the idea that those who consider themselves to be empirical urban researchers are necessarily concerned with a quite separate quest for knowledge than those involved in the interpretation of representations and narratives of the urban experience. Two essential claims are advanced. First, the attempt to make an epistemo...

Traditionally, the study of ‘power in the city’ was confined to the institutions of urban government and the actors involved in contesting and making political decisions in and for metropolitan societies. Increasingly, however, attention has turned to the function of the city not only as a centre of urban governance but as a major economic, social,...

Traditionally, the study of 'power in the city' was confined to the institutions of urban government and the actors involved in contesting and making political decisions in and for metropolitan societies. Increasingly, however, attention has turned to the function of the city not only as a centre of urban governance but as a major economic, social,...

In terms of its ability to hold the attention of the viewer and to require an engagement with hundreds of characters and numerous complex institutions and organisations in over 60 hours of real‐time television, David Simon and Ed Burns’ television drama, The Wire, offers the prospect of a new ‘socio‐spatial imagination’. Drawing on the work of C. W...

There is a growing body of research relating to the ways in which digital code contributes to the production of space. In much of this work this issue is approached by first examining particular spaces and then considering the code and its effects on those spaces. In contrast, we explore the production of space from another angle, examining the way...

This paper argues that the 'spatial turn' in the sociology of class - the clustering of people with a similar habitus into what we might think of as 'class places' - is connected in a number of important ways with the ongoing informatization of place, particularly as manifest in the urban informatics technology of geodemographics. This is a technol...

The idea for this special issue of Modern Italy emerged from the Association for the Study of Modern Italy's annual conference ‘The Second Italian Republic Ten Years On: Prospect and Retrospect’, which was held at the Italian Cultural Institute, London, in November 2004. The conference afforded an opportunity for scholars and observers of contempor...

In political discourse, ‘society’ has been out of fashion for some time, having become eclipsed by the more fashionable ‘community’ as a collective noun for the interaction of individuals and groups above the level of the family and household but below that of the state. Why this should be so requires an understanding of how in Britain (but not onl...

Article Outline 1. Background 2. Electoral coalitions 3. The poll 4. Vote transfers 5. The new parliament and government

East London, the "red belt" of communes north of Paris, and Bologna are the subject of close analysis as localities which have had local governments of the left for many decades, representing "communities of resistance". Simon Parker explores the interplay of "community" and "identity" - using a methodology developed in the previous issue of City (...

This is the first of two articles by Simon Parker in which he outlines a theory of urban structuration and applies it to three urban settings – Paris, Bologna and London. Parker's starting point is to fuse an understanding of "community" with "identity" – the former he discusses with reference to writings such as those of Marx and Ebenezer Howard s...

Our understanding of cities must depend to a significant extent on an awareness of the language, including its figurative resources, that we use. In an exploratory reading of some stages-Antique, Renaissance, Industrial, Post-Modern-and related figurative devices used to characterize the development of cities, Simon Parker presents a cyclical rathe...

Using the example of the Woodberry Down estate in Stoke Newington, this article explores the often contradictory housing policy of the Labour-controlled London County Council (LCC) from the 1930s to the 1960s. The LCC's previous involvement is social housing is evaluated and the controversy surrounding the adoption of the flatted estate as the prin...

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Thesis (doctoral)--University of Cambridge, 1992.