Connected Communities

After Urban Regeneration is a comprehensive study of contemporary trends in urban policy and planning. Leading scholars come together to create a key contribution to the literature on gentrification, with a focus on the history and theory of community in urban policy. Engaging with debates as to how urban policy has changed, and continues to change, following the financial crash of 2008, the book provides an essential antidote to those who claim that culture and society can replicate the role of the state. Based on research from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council's Connected Communities programme and with a unique set of case studies drawing on artistic and cultural community work, the book will appeal to scholars and students in geography, urban studies, planning, sociology, law and art as well as policy makers and community workers.

Heritage as Community Research explores the nature of contemporary heritage research involving university and community partners. Putting forward a new view of heritage as a process of research and involvement with the past, undertaken with or by the communities for whom it is relevant, the book uses a diverse range of case studies, with many chapters co-written between academics and community partners. Through this extensive work, the Editors show that the process of research itself can be an empowering force by which communities stake a claim in the places they live.

Based on a four-year research project which highlights the important role of community organizations as intermediaries between community and culture, this book analyses the role played by cultural intermediaries who seek to mitigate the worst effects of social exclusion through engaging communities with different forms of cultural consumption and production. The authors challenge policymakers who see cultural intermediation as an inexpensive fix to social problems and explore the difficulty for intermediaries to rapidly adapt their activity to the changing public-sector landscape and offer alternative frameworks for future practice.

There is an urgent need to rethink the relationships between systems of government and those who are 'governed'. The contemporary transfer of state regulation to the market-based regulation of corporate interests has marginalized many communities in the regulatory systems of everyday life. Exploring a broad range of intersecting areas including immigration, social work, food regulation, space and surveillance, older people, ethnicity and faith, this book takes a 'bottom up' approach that brings to the fore the experiences and expertise of these communities in order to examine ways that we can better design regulatory systems that support the knowledge and creativity of citizens.