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practitioners and institutions. The reaffirmation by Britpop and the Young British Artists of London’s long-lost credentials as a capital of culture in the aftermath of eighteen years of Conservative rule lends itself to comparison with the unleashing of creative energies in the Spanish capital some fifteen years previously. The discrediting of the Movida combined with Madrid’s unimaginative approach to urban redevelopment, as well as a sentimental post-Orwell attachment, ensured that the Catalan capital was the chief and generally sole Spanish reference point. It is no
estate firms and construction companies that controlled the urban redevelopment. 57 An editorial from a special issue of Cuadernos para el diálogo speaks of how and why the ‘right to the city is a basic social demand, a genuine national priority in our case’. 58 Vallecas was the first major stranglehold of local activism. Annexed to Madrid in 1950, this once autonomous municipality had seen its population quadruple over the course of the decade, from 56,530 to 222,602 in 1960. 59 Many
that the existence of slums like the Gorbals often led outsiders to view Glasgow in a negative light (Damer 1990 ). But the city has reinvented itself as a post-industrial city and cultural destination with some success (Tucker 2008 ), becoming a venue for the National Garden Festival and European Capital of Culture in 1990 (Garcia 2004 ; Mooney 2004 ). And, while it was possible for researchers such as Patrick ( 1973 ) to seek to analyse Glasgow’s gang culture in the 1970s, urban redevelopment and population dispersal and overspill have broken up many of the
where growing youth unemployment, ill-conceived urban redevelopment and notable levels of immigration combined with the wider economic problems facing Britain in the 1970s and early 1980s, as in London’s East End, parts of the West Midlands and Yorkshire, so the NF and BM made inroads.55 Significantly, too, the politicisation of youth culture led to some cultural identities being bound up with an affinity to the NF or BM. In particular, an element within the revived skinhead Class, locality and British punk -43- movement aligned itself to the far right, sometimes
other political creeds. 99 From a similar perspective, some of the leading Liberal community politicians had already underlined what they considered to be the major shortcomings of British social democracy. In their eyes these lay in its pursuit of economic growth regardless of the environmental consequences, in its bureaucratic and technocratic approach and ethos, and, specifically, in the housing and urban redevelopment policies and programmes implemented by Labour-controlled councils. In the light, therefore, of the emergence of the new
local communities. That insensitivity was probably most apparent during this period in decision-making in the fields of housing and urban redevelopment. Community politics was also a critical response to developments in British society, such as the growth of large-scale institutions and organisations, and the steadily increasing bureaucratisation of society, with its centralising and dehumanising effects. In the face of those developments, community politics was therefore, as another of its Liberal practitioners later wrote, ‘an attempt to regenerate democracy and
or less than themselves. From such awareness often came the realisation that ‘their lives were controlled by more powerful people’ who acted seemingly without care for those below them.15 Sue Bruley grew up in a newly built Surrey council estate close to Epsom Downs race course. The working-class estate was part of the extensive post-war urban redevelopment that included council housing programmes financed from government subsidies paid to local authorities. Sue’s parents took part in the working-class migration from inner cities to suburbs situated in the New
selfdetermination, support and trust they had envisaged for the group and Camden Town at a point of transition in traditional working-class London communities. In 1969 –71 CMPP members were amongst an array of metropolitan grass-roots activists protesting against the urban redevelopment schemes displacing old communities and exacerbating the homeless crisis.44 For Sue Crockford, Queen’s Crescent market was an emblem of the mythic community CMPP envisaged. She understood it as one of the few ‘egalitarian places’ allowing for ‘normal human transactions regardless of class’, and
thing’; living it out was ‘quite another’. The new collective life Beyond the Tufnell Park milieu, however, other ‘non-aligned’ men and women more readily embraced collective living as part of the ‘avalanche of new ideas’ guiding social and subjective transformation.55 By the early 1970s the rapid growth of the WLM saw loose assortments of left libertarians mushrooming across relatively poor, working-class provincial and metropolitan areas; in north, east and south London the post-war urban redevelopment schemes made run-down Victorian terrace housing empty and