Stuck in the slow lane: reconceptualising the links between gender, transport and social exclusion

This article draws upon primary research undertaken with over 3,000 women in the North East of England to explore the links between women, transport and the labour market. The research, funded by the ESF, advances the idea of spatiality as a social construction and builds on seminal studies relating to women and poverty to consider the way in which a gender division of transport constrains women's mobility and restricts their employment opportunities. It is likely to contribute to important debates, concerning strategies to tackle worklessness and the most effective spatial level at which to configure public transport networks

A creative industries perspective on creativity and culture

The chapter considers changing definitions of creativity in relation to UK cultural policy and practice in the creative industries. Three perspectives are introduced, beginning with the notion of creativity as a product of individual creativity and talent, popularised by the UK government’s 1998 Creative Industries Mapping Document. This perspective is contrasted with an older model of creativity as a collective expression of shared values, as emphasised in earlier cultural industries policies of the 1970s and 1980s. Finally, the chapter considers contemporary views of creativity in the creative industries as participatory, user-generated, remixed and ‘democratized’. The chapter concludes that there is value in all three perspectives—the challenge for policy makers, managers and practitioners in the creative industries is connecting together individual self-expression with collective cultural values

Policing the Irish: whiteness, 'race' and British cultural studies

The Irish presence in England has been invoked in a range of recent accounts of ‘race’, ethnicity and immigration. However, Irish migrants were largely obscured in cultural studies’ turn to ‘race’ and ethnicity in the late 1970s and early 1980s, despite the fact that England’s Irish were the country’s largest migrant minority and intrinsically relevant to the work of cultural studies. This article explores the absence of an Irish dimension in British cultural studies’ work on ‘race’ and ethnicity, focusing on the landmark texts Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order and The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain. The article illustrates the salience of the Irish to these accounts, and shows how Irish ethnicity (despite being invoked in the formative work of E.P. Thompson) was erased at key moments. Finally, the article maps the emergence of an Irish dimension in cultural studies’ work on ‘race’ and ethnicity since the 1990s

Planning for sustainable transport or for people's needs

This paper reviews and critiques sustainability-driven spatial planning policy from the perspective of ordinary citizens as they seek to travel, live and work, and carry out their daily lives within the environmentally sustainable, green city. The original definition of sustainability contained social, economic and environmental components. This paper argues that there has been an over-emphasis in the UK upon the environmental aspects, at the expense of social considerations, especially gender considerations, creating a dissonance between the sustainability and social equality agendas to the detriment of achieving inclusive urban design. Policy examples from transportation and land-use planning indicate that sustainability-driven planning policy is working against the creation of inclusive, equitable and accessible cities with particular reference to the needs of women. Sustainability policy is set at too high a level to engage with the realities of everyday life. It is concluded that there is a need for a more user-related, social perspective to be integrated into sustainable planning policy