Introduction

If there is a core understanding that underpins the practice of urban policy in England it is, unfortunately, a rather banal one. As the foreword to the White Paper, Our towns and cities, puts it: “How we live our lives is shaped by where we live our lives” (DETR, 2000e, para 3) – and most of us now live in urban areas. Urban policy, in other words, can be understood as the attempt to shape the places in which our lives are lived. The vision identified in the White Paper is “of towns, cities and suburbs which offer a high quality of life and opportunity for all, not just the few” (DETR, 2000e, para 3). Unlike other forms of social policy that are defined through the identification of problems faced by particular groups, urban policy is defined through the places in which those problems find their expression.

As this implies, there is no straightforward definition of urban policy as an explicitly specified and delimited area of social policy. Even the definition of the places to which the ‘urban’ label has been applied has varied over time – from community to neighbourhood, inner city to metropolitan area. Even the inner city has been a remarkably elastic concept, sometimes incorporating large areas of cities, sometimes being defined through small area initiatives. The object of urban policy is a “chaotic conception” (Atkinson and Moon, 1994, p 20), in the sense that there has been no widely shared conception of an urban problem around which policy might be defined and, since Castells (1977), there has been little serious attempt to find one. In principle, it appears at times as if almost any aspect of public policy could become part of urban policy.

Nevertheless, it is impossible to ignore the extent to which a (changing) cluster of initiatives has been brought together under the heading of urban policy. In practice, the existence of urban policy is taken for granted and there has been a significant growth of academic and policy literature as well as government statements concerned with it. The search for a coherent policy object may be frustrating, but there is rather more agreement around the need to tackle specific urban problems.