Integrating Western and non-Western cultural expressions to further cultural and creative tourism: a case study

The term cultural industries was coined more than half a century ago, but at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the broader concept of creative industries, covering a wide range of cultural, design and digital activity, captured the imagination of public policymakers at national and city levels. Paralleling these developments has been the recognition of the phenomenon of cultural tourism and, more recently, the emergence of the idea of creative tourism, that is, tourism programmes designed to engage tourists actively in cultural activity. This paper presents a case study of a creative tourism event which took place in 2012 in the City of Manchester in the UK. The festival, which celebrated West African culture, utilised existing cultural institutions of the city and drew on the talents of local and visiting members of West African community to engage not only tourists but also indigenous and Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) residents of Manchester in a variety of cultural activities. It thus used the focus of creative tourism to seek to foster community and cultural development as well as tourism

Manchester Irish Festival: events guide

Pamphlet for the programme of events of Manchester Irish Festival, 10-19 March [year not stated, but on the penultimate page it mentions the Manchester Irish Festival 2000]

The politics of partnership: urban regeneration in east Manchester

The prevailing discourse on local governance is that local authorities are subordinate both to central government and to a plethora of local partners. While Manchester City Council (MCC) remains subordinate to central government, its status enables it to exert influence over the urban domain within its boundaries and to act as an intermediate organization between its local partners and the core executive in Whitehall. This reflects the influence that MCC has been able to maintain over the process of urban regeneration within its territory despite the other structures involved, and the creation of the Urban Regeneration Company (URC) of New East Manchester (NEM). MCC may possess singular characteristics but its political style of `community leadership' need not be unique. While the local state has ceded some of its activities to other agencies in this time of multi-level governance it still enjoys a powerful overarching control that can be characterized as metagovernance

Gin and Tonic or Oil and Water: The Entrepreneurial City and Sustainable Managerial Regeneration in Manchester

This paper explores the notion of local urban policy hybridity in Manchester, England. It presents the findings of qualitative research set in the context of the parallel entrepreneurial city and sustainable regeneration debates. The research objective was to examine the extent of Manchester's conversion to the politics of the entrepreneurial city on the assumption that this signals a departure from efforts towards the city's achievement of sustainable regeneration and social equity goals. Manchester was selected because it has been held up as an iconic entrepreneurial city. The continuing entrepreneurial city debate, instigated by David Harvey in the 1980s, runs alongside that of sustainable regeneration in ways that are seen as sometimes complementary but usually contradictory. The software package NVivo 7 was used to assist with data analysis. The methodological approach was based loosely on the grounded theory approach of Strauss and Corbin: the approach of the analysis mainly followed the qualitative interpretive approach of discourse analysis. Key community strategy documents are found to interweave elements of the entrepreneurial and managerial governance discourses and also incorporate conceptual elements that have emerged recently such as a concern with crime, sustainability and community involvement. The paper provides valuable insights into the hybrid nature of Manchester's actually existing local community strategies which feature a robust adherence to the managerial mode of local urban policy.

Governing Ourselves: Citizen Participation and Governance in Barcelona and Manchester

Barcelona and Manchester have become paradigmatic examples of 'governance-beyond-the-state', 'new localism' or 'local state entrepreneurialism'. Whatever the label, citizen participation has become a key feature of governance in each city. This article argues that a useful way of understanding the developing relationship between governance and citizen participation is through the analytical perspective of governmentality. This perspective illuminates two paradoxes that characterize the new governance arrangements in these two European cities. The first paradox is that the power of the state is not necessarily diminished despite the emerging plurality of actors involved in governance. The second paradox lies in the fact that the spread of participatory practices as an integral element of new modes of governance does not necessarily lead to citizen empowerment. Copyright (c) 2010 The Author. Journal Compilation (c) 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.