The Rise of the Resilient Local Authority?

The term resilience is increasingly being utilised within the study of public policy to depict how individuals, communities and organisations can adapt, cope, and ‘bounce back’ when faced with external shocks such as climate change, economic recession and cuts in public expenditure. In focussing on the local dimensions of the resilience debate, this article argues that the term can provide useful insights into how the challenges facing local authorities in the UK can be reformulated and reinterpreted. The article also distinguishes between resilience as ‘recovery’ and resilience as ‘transformation’, with the latter's focus on ‘bouncing forward’ from external shocks seen as offering a more radical framework within which the opportunities for local innovation and creativity can be assessed and explained. While also acknowledging some of the weaknesses of the resilience debate, the dangers of conceptual ‘stretching’, and the extent of local vulnerabilities, the article highlights a range of examples where local authorities – and crucially, local communities – have enhanced their adaptive capacity, within existing powers and responsibilities. From this viewpoint, some of the barriers to the development of resilient local government are not insurmountable, and can be overcome by ‘digging deep’ to draw upon existing resources and capabilities, promoting a strategic approach to risk, exhibiting greater ambition and imagination, and creating space for local communities to develop their own resilience

Assembling the Healthopolis: Competitive city‐regionalism and policy boosterism pushing Greater Manchester further, faster

Health and care policy is increasingly promoted within visions of the competitive city‐region. This paper examines the importance of policy boosterism within the political construction of city‐regions in the context of English devolution. Based on a two‐year case study of health and social care devolution in Greater Manchester, England, we trace the relational and territorial geographies of policy across and through new “devolved” city‐regional arrangements. Contributing to geographical debates on policy assemblages and city‐regionalism, we advance a conceptual framework linking crisis and opportunity, emulation and exceptionalism, and evidence and experimentation. The paper makes two key contributions. First, we argue health and care policy is increasingly drawn towards the logic of global competitiveness without being wholly defined by neoliberal political agendas. Fostering transnational policy networks helped embed global “best practice” policies while simultaneously hailing Greater Manchester as a place beyond compare. Second, we caution against positioning the city‐region solely at the receiving end of devolutionary austerity. Rather, we illustrate how the urgency of devolution was conditioned by crisis, yet concomitantly framed as a unique opportunity by the local state harnessing policy to negotiate a more fluid politics of scale. In doing so, the paper demonstrates how attempts to resolve the “local problem” of governing health and care under austerity were rearticulated as a “global opportunity” to forge new connections between place, health, and economy. Consequently, we foreground the multiple tensions and contradictions accumulating through turning to health and care to push Greater Manchester further, faster. The paper concludes by asking what the present crisis might mean for city‐regions in good health and turbulent times

Tracing festival imaginaries: Between affective urban idioms and administrative assemblages

This article offers a way of understanding not only Festival Cities, but also the Creative City paradigm and to some extent the practices employed through the convergence of culture and urban planning that has come to dominate the logic of urban space. In its exploration of the 20th century’s nascent administrative imaginary of urban cultural festivals it is in part, a genealogy, but I hope it offers more, that it elaborates a re-reading of the urban predisposition towards a culturalized identity and the curation of affective urban space, which despite the economic downturn, continues to privilege its own legibility. In so doing, this article argues that the city promotes not only its cultural capital, but also its administration

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