Urban Design and City Regeneration: Social Representations of Entrepreneurial Landscapes

Recent accounts of urban political change have been seemingly preoccupied with demonstrating the existence of a transition from managerial to entrepreneurial forms of governance, typified by the speculative deployment of resources to attract investment. Within such processes, the construction of spectacular urban landscapes has become a requisite strategy for making the city attractive as a site for investment, yet, with a few notable exceptions, the meanings projected by these landscapes have been given little attention. This paper sets out to rectify this omission by developing ideas from European social psychology, particularly that of the social representation, to explore the process by which the meaning and symbolism of these new urban landscapes is imposed by dominant interests in such a way as to make them appear legitimate. Using Birmingham as a case study, interviews with local residents are drawn on to demonstrate that even when opposition to the city's entrepreneurial policies was articulated, it relied on the existence of a shared representation of its entrepreneurial landscapes, one which acknowledged their spectacular and post-modern appearance. The paper thus concludes by suggesting that such urban landscapes can potentially play a crucial role in forging a new cultural politics of place conducive to the legitimation of entrepreneurial policies.