Abstract
Urban Crisis, Urban Hope: A Policy Agenda for UK Cities dwells on the premise that criticality needs to harbour hope, despite all the precarity in people’s access to food, housing, education, health, communal support, safety, and environment in the existing UK context. The editors argue against ‘a dead criticality’ (2020: 2) that is confined to criticism without pointing to possibilities for exit from the precarious living conditions. The book’s support for ‘a critical hope’ that is predominantly an urban hope reflects from the chapters’ structure. All chapters start with a diagnosis of the existing problematic situation and continue with applicable policy suggestions within their fields. The shortness of each chapter allows one to understand the overall situation of the contemporary UK cities without getting lost in details.
First, we learn about the food insecurity in the UK after 2010 due to the austerity cuts, such as in the working-age social security. Growing socio-economic inequalities lie behind widening food insecurity which is also related to the eroding community and stigma. The paradox regarding the food banks that assume the state responsibility also applies to the topics of other chapters. Most chapters blame the neoliberal state’s austerity cuts for the urban crisis. Yet, most contributors also call the same state into action, for example, to end hunger in the UK cities. The Unhomed City chapters deal with the housing crisis as a crisis of affordability due to commodification, privatization, financialization of housing by the market, and the restricted welfare subsidy more than a matter of supply and demand. The UK housing crisis is exacerbated by the threats to council estates and gentrification in the neoliberal city.
The emphasis on the city for economic growth versus sociability puts children, youth, and adults at risk physically and psychologically. People’s reduced ‘sense of mattering’ appears as chronic anxiety, ‘the Urbanicity Effect’ or ‘an “epidemic” of urban violence’. The underlying structural causes, such as privatizations, academization, and regeneration or environmental pollution create uneven effects for different city areas. We read that London’s economically deprived areas with a higher ratio of Black residents are exposed to higher air pollution. Hence, structural inequalities lead to environmental injustices.
People’s access to good nature is dwindled in a context of ‘landscape decline’. Against the loss of biodiversity and bioabundance due to wrong farming practices and the climate change, examples of good and bad practices from Sheffield, Ghent, and French cities are provided. The policy of ‘tidying up’ nature that is ‘complex, messy, (and) untidy’ is criticized. The neoliberal urban policy is about ‘tidying up’ council estates as much as the nature through regeneration or mixed communities policies. The book’s solution to the dispossessed city is reclamation of public land as ‘a common good’ by protecting councils, building community land trusts, and improving legal rights, including the community right to buy. Public services taken for granted until recently and urban politics based on the democracy ideal also take their shares from the neoliberal urban crisis. One of the book’s suggestions is refinancing and rebuilding a purpose for public services. Another suggestion is seeing democracy as an unfinished business rather than adopting localism that lives easily side by side with centralization. Finally, the book warns against the ‘agency gap’ in addition to the rent gap that leaves the floor empty for destructive urban governments.
Although this edited volume refrains from pure criticality, criticism might have a value in itself in urban contexts that are predicated on all types of post-truth and conformity. The individual policy suggestions are regrouped under themes of actions, concerning certain groups of actors as ‘A Manifesto for Urban Policy’. Therefore, urban policy-makers beside researchers are most likely to benefit from reading the book.