Looking for the South East

A review of the ways in which the South East of England has been constructed as a 'region' in public policy discourse since the late 1990s

Modernisation, managerialism and the culture wars: the reshaping of the local welfare state in England

The story of local government over the last few decades is often summarised in the assertion that there has been a move away from institutional authority embodied in the structures of councils towards more complex networks of local governance, incorporating a range of stakeholders and other agencies, alongside a shift of power from local to central government. But local government has been at the centre of wider processes of restructuring - of attempts to modernise the welfare state, and specifically the local welfare state. Underpinning the changes that have faced local government (and created new forms of governance) has been a series of assumptions about welfare and how it is best delivered. These combine notions of community, neighbourhood, personal responsibility, workfare and partnership with a distrust of 'bureaucracy' and professional power. It is in this context that the 'modernisation' agenda - promising cultural change - has been driven forward, paradoxically combining a rhetoric of decentralisation and empowerment with an increasingly direct involvement by the institutions of central government and a range of other state agencies in the practice of 'local' governance. The emergent arrangements are increasingly characterised by forms of self-regulation as well as more differentiated management from above

Geographies and politics of localism: the localism of the United Kingdom's Coalition Government

There has always been a localist element to British politics. But recently, a particular version of localism has been moved to the foreground by the 2011 Localism Act. This paper identifies various uses and meanings of localism, maps their geographical assumptions and effects, and critiques their politics. It does this using the localism of the United Kingdom’s Coalition Government as a case study of localism in practice. The rationalities, mentalities, programmes, and technologies of this localism are established from Ministerial speeches and press releases, along with Parliamentary Acts, Bills, White Papers, Green Papers, and Statements – all published between May 2010 when the Coalition Government was formed, and November 2011 when the Localism Act became law. We argue that localism may be conceptualised as spatial liberalism, is never straightforwardly local, and can be anti-politica

The role of higher education in social and cultural transformation

This paper forms one of the contributions to CHERI's research report 'Higher education and society'. It reports on one of the centre's ESRC-funded research projects - Higher Education and Regional Transformation

ESRC Tensions and future prospects Briefing Note 4: Thoughts on opposition to new housing development

A summary of views from local communities on perspectives for and against new planned housing development, and a brief commentar

Thinking in and beyond the market: housing, planning, and the state

Everybody seems to accept that there is something wrong with the way housing is delivered in Britain, particularly in England. In some parts of the country house prices are stubbornly high and rising; elsewhere there seems to be housing nobody wants. The planning system is often blamed. But if we are to find a solution, we also need to think more critically about the housing market and the business models operated by house-builders and developers operate, argues Allan Cochrane

In and beyond local government: making up new spaces of governance

In the context of austerity, some of the taken for granted territorial boundaries of local government are being stretched and questioned. Here, these issues are explored with the help of two bodies of evidence: the creation of sets of interlocking arrangements on the edge of the London City region (most recently expressed in proposals for development along what has been identified as the Oxford-Milton Keynes-Cambridge Arc); and the experience of a Mayoral development corporation in the West of London, seeking to take advantage of the possibilities arising from major national and metropolitan investments in transport infrastructure. In both cases, project-based governance coupled with the promise of infrastructural investment, sub-regional visions and plans offer the basis on which new spaces of governance are being put together to fit with shifting economic geographies and changing political priorities. Instead of being institutionally fixed, the spaces of government themselves turn out to be malleable and contested

ESRC “Tensions and Prospects for Sustainable Housing Growth - a case study of Northamptonshire and Milton Keynes" interim report October/November 2012

Formal Interim Report of first year to this ESRC research project into the planning and delivery of 'sustainable housing growth', particularly in the case study part of the MKSM are

The limits of local politics: local socialism and the local economy in the 1980s; a case study of Sheffield's economic policies

The analysis of local politics has too often been partial and one-sided. Dominant approaches to its study have tended to emphasise either the institutions of local government, or the logic of the local state, or (more recently) its relationship to localities. This thesis seeks to bring together a range of different approaches in ways which make it easier to explore the processes of local politics, acknowledging that no single approach is likely to provide all the answers. But it argues that those debates which build links between politics and geography, around the notion of locality , are particularly helpful, as long as they do not lose sight of politics within the state (as expressed, for example, in Rhodes' discussion of policy networks), and (following Duncan, Goodwin, Halford, and Savage) as long as localities are not understood as coherent expressions of underlying relations. Following a critical discussion of the locality debates (associated with the ESRC's Changing Urban and Regional System programme), it is suggested that notions of local growth coalition (as developed by Cox and Mair) and urban corporatism (as developed by Harvey) may be helpful in analysing change at local level. This suggestion is taken further through a case study of the development of 'local socialism' and of local economic policies in Sheffield in the 1980s. The concluding chapter seeks to set out the lessons which can be drawn from the Sheffield experience, relating back to the earlier arguments, as well as suggesting ways of integrating those conclusions with the analyses of the state developed by Jessop at a more abstract level

Building a national capital in an age of globalisation: the case of Berlin

Berlin is being remade as capital of a unified German nation state, just at the time when the role of nation states is being called into question by the claims of globalization, and the associated rise of global cities. The experience of Berlin suggests that it may be unhelpful to accept the world-city agenda as a universal template. Instead, it is necessary to explore the ways in which different agencies, companies and authorities negotiate the world around them, seeking to insert the city into pre-existing ideas and realities, as well as to influence and shape them, in what is best understood as a wider process of 'worlding'