Introduction

Recent government urban policy statements have invoked a discourse of ‘urban renaissance’ that interweaves calls for urban sustainability with a prescription of concepts and ways of living that are closely tied to gentrification practices. The government's Urban Task Force (UTF) report, Towards an urban renaissance (DETR, 1999a), and the recent Urban White Paper (UWP) on urban policy, Our towns and cities – The future: Delivering an urban renaissance (DETR, 2000e), both call for a move ‘back to the city’. Their ‘new vision for urban living’ in England is remarkably similar to visions of gentrification. However, the term ‘gentrification’ itself is never used in these policy documents. Instead, ‘urban renaissance’, ‘urban regeneration’, and ‘urban sustainability’ are used in its place. These neutered terms politely avoid the class constitution of the processes involved. It is difficult to find favour with gentrification, but who would oppose urban renaissance, regeneration and sustainability?

This chapter examines the discursive contexts within which urban policy is being developed in the UK. It devotes considerable time to a critique of the language used in these documents. The discursively invisible process of gentrification is promoted by policy makers as the saviour in troubled English inner cities, and this vision of a continental-style café culture feeds into this language of sustainability, diversity and community (and thus citizenship and rights). My critique of the language used in both the UTF report and the UWP is quite pointed. In their favour, each of these reports takes a long, hard look at the problems of English towns and cities and goes some way towards developing constructive solutions in the face of very complex issues. They should be applauded for moving British urban policy (at least in principle) towards a more long-term and holistic set of prescriptions that balance West European models of urban regeneration with US models of the same. And thanks to the work of the UTF and the UWP, the most disadvantaged groups have been returned to the policy arena, as have long-neglected neighbourhoods and new models of public participation.