The Short Guide to Urban Policy by Claire Edwards & Rob Imrie

Author:Claire Edwards & Rob Imrie [Edwards, Claire & Imrie, Rob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Public Policy, City Planning & Urban Development, Political Science
ISBN: 9781447308003
Google: bEQMCgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 18526796
Publisher: Policy Press
Published: 2014-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Community and the urban problem

The discourse of community has a long history in relation to urbanisation. Reflecting on the moral values associated with community, sociologists such as Ferdinand Tonnies and Emile Durkheim, writing in the late 19th century, viewed urbanisation as the antithesis of community. In the shift from pre-modern, feudal societies to industrialised, urbanised societies, they saw the dissolution of social bonds, such as the family and religious institutions. As outlined in Chapter One, urban commentators in the late 19th and early 20th century, including Patrick Geddes, Ebenezer Howard and Lewis Mumford, saw cities as places that were disorderly, dirty and immoral, associated with criminality, poverty and poor health. This was in contrast to the representation of the rural idyll, in which the environment was safe and unpolluted, and where bonds of ‘neighbourliness’ still existed. Howard (1902 [1898], p 11) quotes from Lord Rosebury, stating:

There is no thought of pride associated in my mind with the idea of London. I am always haunted by the awfulness of London: by the great appalling fact of these millions cast down as it would appear by hazard… working each in their own groove and in their own cell, without regard or knowledge of each other, without heeding each other.

Howard’s (1902 [1898]) analysis of the city as a site of community and societal breakdown, sucking the life out of rural areas, is questionable. Despite politicians referring to the ‘rural’ as an idealised image, or nostalgically linking it to a time or way of being that has been lost, a number of studies conducted in US and UK cities in the late 1950s and 1960s, including Young and Willmott’s (1962) Family and kinship in East London, suggested that community did exist in urban environments but in different forms to those idealised by Howard and others. Studies such as Young and Willmott’s sought to demonstrate that the ‘dualistic split between traditional community and the impersonal ties of modern society is not one that holds up to scrutiny’ (Latham et al, 2009, p 152). Yet, despite the historical discourse surrounding community in relation to urbanism having moved on from the 19th-century thinkers, the remnants remain in terms of how the ‘urban problem’ is conceptualised and how urban policy responses refer to, and target, something called ‘the community’.

Communities, and the characteristics associated with them, have often been problematised as contributing to social and/or economic breakdown, an analysis frequently infused by a racial dimension. For example, the riots in US cities in the 1960s, and those in Britain in the 1980s, were linked by some politicians and commentators to characteristics of the black community and concerns about the threats of ghettoisation based around immigration (Cochrane, 2007). The construction of problematic communities has a strongly moral dimension and associates community breakdown with a decline in family values or ‘fecklessness’. That said, communities have also been seen by urban policymakers as the solution to urban problems, as well as the source of them. Thus, urban policies have sought to identify

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