Moral panics and urban renaissance

Abstract

As cities around the world are re-shaped by urban renewal policies underpinned by a concern with enhancing quality of life, tensions inevitably arise about whose quality of life is enhanced, and at whose expense? In this piece, Rogers and Coaffee critically interrogate the effects of quality of life policies which target UK city centres. Their particular concern here is with the exclusion of young people from the spaces of the city and from the policy processes which seek to re-shape those spaces. They explore these issues through an analysis of the ways in which the agencies promoting Newcastle-upon-Tyne's urban renaissance have positioned young people's various uses of the city centre. Their paper highlights the exclusionary consequences of single-minded attempts to enhance quality of life which fail to give recognition to the diversity of lifestyles or urban populations, thereby displacing and dispersing some populations to the margins. Nonetheless, Rogers and Coaffee also find evidence of alternative approaches, which might go some way to fostering a more diverse urban public realm.