Securing an urban renaissance: crime, community and British urban policy

Rowland Atkinson and Gesa Helms (2007)
The Policy Press
Paperback £22.99 ISBN 9781861348142Hardback £60.00 ISBN 9781861348159

Sometimes it’s good to stand back and, as Craig Raine would have it, see things as a Martian visitor. My postcard home recently would have been about the 83,000 adults currently locked up in UK jails – plus another 2,500 children. Yet another ‘record high’ was announced in May. According to the Howard League for Penal Reform (2008), fifteen years ago the number of adults in prison was 42,000.

Is this what New Labour meant when it said it would be ‘tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime’ (Labour Party, 1997)? Over much the same period of this unwanted aspect of growth, recorded crime has been falling (Jansson, 2006). Yet new punitive measures are always on the agenda for governments keen to show they are taking decisive action on behalf of ‘communities’. For some pointers to how and why we have come to this, ‘Securing an urban renaissance’ gives excellent food for thought. It’s not about prisons, but about the urban settings, ordinary lives and high politics that condition us, and that shape all our futures whether with liberty or its opposite.

This multi-authored book came out of a conference held in 2005. Its claim is to bring together academics from the previously separate disciplines of urban studies, criminology and community studies. In truth, as the contributions show, there are close links across them.

In the early chapters first Kevin Stenson and then Mike Raco outline the ways that urban policy and ideas about urban renaissance have developed. Under New Labour there’s been a new impetus for city renewal, starting first with the city core and then extending to tackling other neighbourhoods. But as Stenson shows, the agenda has become strongly interwoven with government initiatives to reduce crime and disorder. The drive for sanitised, orderly urban places to replace the vivacious, chaotic life of cities has resulted in a situation where, he concludes, ‘the most powerful visions of order come from the corporate world, from the supermarkets and other massive retail chains’.

Governments’ use of urban renewal to pursue a crime and disorder agenda will be a familiar theme to social housing practitioners, who in England at least are obliged to fulfil a range of commitments from signing up to the Respect standard for housing management to helping shut down crack houses. Johnston and Mooney’s chapter in this book concentrates on council estates and the way that term has become synonymous with ‘problem’. In a paper that nicely situates current mores within a longer historical timespan, they outline how the idea of overcoming social exclusion has cloaked the reappearance of a much older moral framework that seeks to clamp down on the sites of disorder and disorganisation – and of course the disreputable poor who live there. They comment: ‘In relation to identifying the “worst” estates or neighbourhoods, definition comes a poor second to the stereotyping language that prevails.’

As several writers in this book point out though, New Labour’s social inclusion agenda relies on those same people, now recast as the backbone of their local community, to become active, ‘engaged’ citizens. The activities they are engaged in ensure order and socially acceptable forms of behaviour, while those who fail to engage remain stigmatised: they stay poor and disadvantaged not simply because their income is low, but ‘because they have not networked enough and have insufficient social capital’.

Other chapters deal with a refreshingly wide range of subjects, including prostitution, community-police relations, begging, and youth disorder. Wood et al’s study of the security for Labour’s 2005 conference in Gateshead, complete with ‘ring of steel’ (a wire fence) uses participant observation to apply the boltcutters with a certain flair.

Perhaps the most challenging piece is Lynn Hancock’s exploration titled ‘Is urban regeneration criminogenic?’. The editors say she is asking the question provocatively but that does not mean this is a polemic. Instead, Hancock builds her evidence carefully, beginning with why people suffering poverty and disadvantage become clustered geographically, and how New Labour promised joined-up government to tackle multiple urban issues. The problem was that the wrong bits got joined up. The new focus on ‘community safety’ became equated with crime reduction; increasingly draconian measures on anti-social behaviour were coupled with inclusion strategies that relied on eradicating undesirable behaviour and lifestyles.

Hancock points to the market-driven, consumption based nature of modern urban regeneration. That in turn leads to gentrification and a tendency to reinforce the values of consumption rather than citizenship. She adds that for some of the most disadvantaged and politically powerless, the right to occupy public space has been effectively suspended. ‘Property-led gentrification is reshaping the social mix of inner city communities in ways that not only undermine rhetorical communitarian ideals, but promote intolerance.’

As always with collections, this book lacks a clear single narrative. Nevertheless it builds a powerful impression in patchwork form of a control agenda seated within government renewal policies. Much of the book offers a gloomy prognosis of what the editors call ‘a new kind of vengeful urbanism’ where those communities that have the chance will withdraw, and then call for ‘the remote control and punishment of those that make them feel afraid’. To spur ourselves into doing better in future, we might perhaps first cast a glance to those crime and prison figures – oddly absent from this book but surely relevant to any discussion of trends in UK society. If the British Crime Survey is right in its assessment that crime has fallen at least in part because of the economic boom of the last decade, then in these harder times we may see yet more urban fracturing. On this book’s evidence of authoritarian control and redemption only for the deserving we should all be worried.


References

Howard League for Penal Reform, Weekly prison watch, web accessed June 2008 at http://www.howardleague.org/
Jansson, K (2006), British Crime Survey, Home Office
Labour Party (1997), New Labour because Britain deserves better, Labour Party


Janis Bright CRESR, Sheffield Hallam University