This book offers an inside view of Manchester, England demonstrating the complexity of urban dynamics from a range of ethnographic vantage points, including the city’s football clubs, the airport, housing estates, the Gay Village and the city’s annual civic parade. These perspectives help trace the multiple dynamics of a vibrant and rapidly changing post-industrial city, showing how people’s decisions and actions co-produce the city and give it shape. Using the metaphor of the kaleidoscope, with each turn of the wheel, another aspect of the city is materialised. In doing so, the contributors complicate the dominant narrative of Manchester’s renaissance as driven by the city administration’s entrepreneurial ethos. By taking up civic space and resources with council-led cultural representations focused largely on generating financial income for the city, three decades of command-and-control politics has inhibited grassroots and spontaneous forms of emergent publics.
Table of Content
Foreword by Kevin Ward
Introduction: tackling the urban through ethnography – Camilla Lewis and Jessica Symons
Part I: Realising urban organisations
1 Inclusion without incorporation: re-imagining Manchester through a new politics of environment – Hannah Knox
2 Nurturing an emergent city: parade making as a cultural trope for urban policy – Jessica Symons
3 Lounge Manchester: the new politics of loungification – Damian O’Doherty
Part II: Realising urban spaces
4 Under the surface of the village: public and private negotiations of urban space in Manchester – Michael Atkins
5 Making and enabling the commons: shared urban spaces and civic engagement in North Manchester – Luciana Lang
6 Urban futures and competing trajectories for Manchester city centre – Elisa Pieri
Part III: Realising urban communities
7 Urban transformation in football: from Manchester United as a ‘global leisure brand’ to FC United as a ‘community club’ – George Poulton
8 ‘People want jobs, they want a life!’ Deindustrialisation and loss in East Manchester – Camilla Lewis
9 ‘Don’t call the police on me, I won’t call them on you’: self-policing as ethical development in North Manchester – Katherine Smith
Afterword: the tension in making and realising a city – Jessica Symons
Select bibliography
Index
About the author
Camilla Lewis is a Research Associate in the Sociology Department at the University of Manchester Jessica Symons is an Urban Anthropologist at the University of Manchester
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