Overview

This book explores the making, unmaking and remaking of social infrastructure in ‘left-behind places’. Such places, typically once flourishing industrial communities that have been excluded from recent economic growth, now attract academic and policy attention as sites of a political backlash against globalisation and liberal democracy. The book focuses on the role of social infrastructure as a key component of this story. Seeking to move beyond a narrowly economistic of reading ‘left behind places’, the book addresses the understudied affective dimensions of ‘left-behindness’. It develops an analytical framework that emphasises the importance of place attachments and the consequences of their disruption; considers ‘left behind places’ as ‘moral communities’ and the making of social infrastructure as an expression of this; views the unmaking of social infrastructure through the lens of ‘root shock’; and explains efforts at remaking it in terms of the articulation of ‘radical hope’. The analysis builds upon a case study of a former mining community in County Durham, North East England. Using mixed methods, it offers a ‘deep place study’ of a single village to understand more fully the making, unmaking and remaking of social infrastructure. It shows how a place once richly endowed with social infrastructure, saw this endowment wither and the effects this had on the community. However, it also records efforts of the local people to rebuild social infrastructure, typically drawing the lessons of the past. Although the story of one village, the methods, results and policy recommendation have much wider applicability. The book will be of interest to researchers, policy makers and others concerned with the fate of ‘left behind places’.

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9781032710044

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John Tomaney is Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at University College London. His research interests are focused on the political economy of local and regional development. A Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences and a Fellow of the Regional Studies Association, he is also a trustee of Redhills: the Durham Miners’ Hall and Sacriston Youth Project. Maeve Blackman worked as researcher with the Durham Miners’ Association and is currently a senior research officer at Durham University and an associate lecturer at the Open University. She has worked extensively in the field of public engagement at the arts. She holds a PhD from Durham University. Lucy Natarajan is Associate Professor in the Bartlett School of Planning at University College London. Her research centres on knowledge in community engagement and spatial planning. She is the co-editor of Engaged Urban Pedagogy. Participatory Practices in Planning and Placemaking (UCL Press, 2023). Dimitrios Panayotopoulos-Tsiros is a Research Associate and Lecturer at the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London, with a background in architecture and urban planning. His research centres on social and policy aspects of urban design. He has published in Built Environment, Regional Studies and Urban Planning. Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite is Associate Professor in Twentieth-Century British History at University College London. Her research focuses particularly on class, gender and politics. She is co-author of Women and the Miners’ Strike, 1984–1985 (Oxford University Press, 2023). Myfanwy Taylor is Leverhulme Research Fellow in the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London. Her research focuses on urban economic development, planning and politics, especially collaborative research with grassroots group, and she has published in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Area and Antipode. She is a Trustee of West Green Road/Seven Sisters Development Trust in North London.

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