The past ten years have seen local government in the UK facing two major challenges: to survive in the face of Thatcher government hostility, and to adapt to enormously powerful forces of economic restructuring which have also been encouraged by government policies. The key aspects of these changing fortunes of British towns explored in this important new book is the ability of individual localities to exercise any control over their own growth and decline. Place, Policy and Politics examines local political initiatives seeking to influence economic and social development in seven sharply contrasting localities, ranging from the outer council estates of Merseyside to the boom towns of Cheltenham and Swindon. Throughout their analysis, the contributors, drawn from a wide range of social science disciplines, address the vital questions in the debate over local policy initiatives, including: * To what extent are localities able to harness trends in the national and international economy to provide jobs and a better standard of living for their inhabitants? * Why do local authorities vary in their capacity to initiate economic policy? * To what extent do national urban and other policies inhibit or encourage their efforts? * How might central government modify its policies to facilitate the prospering of localities?

This book explores the political significance of tourism. It discusses the implications of different political theories on how we perceive the politics of tourism and examines the relationships between the political aspects of tourism at different levels of analysis.

This volume places the welfare debates of the 1980s in the context of past patterns of U.S. policy, such as the Social Security Act of 1935, the failure of efforts in the 1940s to extend national social benefits and economic planning, and the backlashes against "big government" that followed reforms of the 1960s and early 1970s. Historical analysis reveals that certain social policies have flourished in the United States: those that have appealed simultaneously to middle-class and lower-income people, while not involving direct bureaucratic interventions into local communities. The editors suggest how new family and employment policies, devised along these lines, might revitalize broad political coalitions and further basic national values. The contributors are Edwin Amenta, Robert Aponte, Mary Jo Bane, Kenneth Finegold, John Myles, Kathryn Neckerman, Gary Orfield, Ann Shola Orloff, Jill Quadagno, Theda Skocpol, Helene Slessarev, Beth Stevens, Margaret Weir, and William Julius Wilson.

The first part of the book is concerned with developing the place perspective. Three dimensions of place are put forward: locale and sense of place describe the objective and subjective dimensions of local social arrangements within which political behaviour is realized; location refers to the impact of the ‘macro-order’, to the fact that a single place is one among many and that the social life of a place is embedded in theworkings of the state and the world economy. The second part of the book provides detailed examinations of American and Scottish politics, using the place perspective. Contrary to the view that place or locality is important only in ‘traditional societies’, this book argues that place is of continuing significance in even the most ‘advanced’ societies.

Thomas Jefferson envisioned a nation of citizens deeply involved in public life. Today Americans are lamenting the erosion of his ideal. What happened in the intervening centuries? Daniel Kemmis argues that our loss of capacity for public life (which impedes our ability to resolve crucial issues) parallels our loss of a sense of place. A renewed sense of inhabitation, he maintains —of community rooted in place and of people dwelling in that place in a practiced way—can shape politics into a more cooperative and more humanly satisfying enterprise, producing better people, better communities, and better places. The author emphasizes the importance of place by analyzing problems and possibilities of public life in a particular place— those northern states whose settlement marked the end of the old frontier. National efforts to “keep citizens apart” by encouraging them to develop open country and rely upon impersonal, procedural methods for public problems have bred stalemate, frustration, and alienation. As alternatives he suggests how western patterns of inhabitation might engender a more cooperative, face-to-face practice of public life. Community and the Politics of Place also examines our ambivalence about the relationship between cities and rural areas and about the role of corporations in public life. The book offers new insight into the relationship between politics and economics and addresses the question of whether the nation-state is an appropriate entity for the practice of either discipline. The author draws upon the growing literature of civic republicanism for both a language and a vantage point from which to address problems in American public life, but he criticizes that literature for its failure to consider place. Though its focus on a single region lends concreteness to its discussions, Community and the Politics of Place promotes a better understanding of the quality of public life today in all regions of the United States.

An Introduction to Political Geography provides a broad-based introduction to how power interacts with space; how place influences political identities; and how policy creates and remoulds territory. By pushing back the boundaries of what we conventionally understand as political geography, the book emphasizes the interactions between power, politics and policy, space, place and territory in different geographical contexts. This is both an essential text for political geographers and also a valuable resource for students of related fields with an interest in politics and geography.

What might an analysis of politics which focuses on the operation of power through space and place, and on the spatial structuring of inequality, tell us about the world we make for ourselves and others? From the national border to the wire fence; from the privatisation of land to the exclusion and expulsion of persecuted peoples; questions of space and place, of who can be where and what they can do there, are at the very heart of the most important political debates of our time. Bringing together an interdisciplinary collection of authors deploying diverse perspectives and methodological approaches, this book responds to the pressing demand to reflect on and engage with some of the key questions raised by a political analysis of space and place. Its chapters chart the ways in which inequality and exclusion are played out in spatial terms, exploring the operations of power and resistance at the micro-level of the individual home and small community, analysing modes of securitisation and fortification utilised in the interests of wealth and power, and documenting the ways in which space and place are being transformed by changing socio-economic and cultural demands. As well as analysing the ways in which forms of exclusion and persecution are manifest spatially, the chapters in this book also attend to the forms of resistance and contestation which emerge in response to them. Resistance is found in the persistence of those who build and rebuild their homes and communities in a world which seems bent on their exclusion. At the same time life on the peripheries can give rise to new conceptions of citizenship and public space as well as to new political demands which seek to (re)claim space and contest the dominant order. Bringing together scholars working in fields as diverse as political science, geography, international studies, cultural anthropology, architecture, political philosophy and the visual arts, this book offers readers access to a range of contemporary case studies and theoretical perspectives. Relevant, timely and thoroughly accessible, this text offers an integrated approach to what can be a dauntingly diverse area of study and will be of interest not only to those working in fields such as architecture, political theory and geography but also to non-specialists and students.