ancient cities

emained provisional, as the new urban policies
were grafted onto existing welfare arrangements and
bureaucracies. The initial spread of urban policy
beyond the borders of the United States clearly
picked up on this origin, so that, for example, in
Britain the Urban Programme explicitly drew on the
U.S. experience to the extent that its initial emphasis
and justification involved migrant communities in
Britain’s inner cities.
In this early phase, urban policy was an attempt
to extend the benefits of postwar welfare settlements
to previously excluded populations (albeit
with secondary status) at a moment when those
settlements were already under serious challenge.
Some of the ways in which the rise of urban policy
would help to give shape to those challenges were
already becoming clear.
The promise of urban policy is that it will move
dramatically beyond the limitations of traditional
social welfare and reach those who might otherwise
be excluded. Those engaged in urban policy
are expected to transcend the narrow professional
and bureaucratic boundaries associated with traditional
welfare provision. New professionals drawn
from nontraditional backgrounds, whether rooted
in community activism or other disciplines, it is
claimed, will transform existing (state-based) relations
of welfare. Equally important is the expectation
that urban policy is (of necessity) holistic, in
the sense that its focus is on all the factors that
affect those living in a particular area rather than
on one particular issue. From this perspective,
practitioners need to be able to work with communities,
businesses, and nongovernmental organizations.
Strong community empowerment
rhetoric, less about the delivery of services and
more about enabling people to look after themselves,
has always existed within urban policy.
The rise of urban policy, therefore, incorporated
an implicit (and often explicit) critique of
traditional welfare states. Aspects of this critique
were often quite radical, drawing on traditions of
community action. Urban policy also increasingly
came to be inflected with and, in some ways,
defined by neoliberal approaches to welfare after
the welfare state. This found an expression in the
shift through the 1970s and into the 1980s toward
an economic definition of social well-being. The
problem of the cities, particularly the older industrial
cities and the industrial quarters of cities like
Urban Policy
909
London, was viewed as the result of state regulation
and planning controls that acted as major
obstacles to development. Successful development
often, if not always, property-led, was deemed to
offer both new sources of profitability for business
and a way out of marginalization for local populations.
This was the era of enterprise zones,
waterfront development, urban development
corpora tions, and special employment zones.
Some of the features associated with the “economizing”
of urban policy remain familiar today.
But the economic turn has not simply usurped the
previous emphasis on communities. On the contrary,
although the role of communities may have
been reinvented, visions of community retain a
significant role in contemporary urban policy.
Through a community focus, issues of moral
authority and behavior are brought to the agenda.
Crime, for example, is reframed so that the problem
is the management of daily incivilities or antisocial
behavior. Famously, it was suggested that an
apparently minor failure to fix broken windows in
a timely manner may prevent various forms of
antisocial behavior because those broken windows
imply to the criminally inclined that the area is
not being cared for. In this context, a renewed
emphasis on self-help and self-discipline, in which
neighborhood organizations deliver the necessary
improve ment, has emerged. Through the notion of
social capital, community has also become an economic
issue involving trust and the casting of safe
places as dependent on the right kind of people being
attracted to them, so that economic, social, and individual
prosperity may be delivered through forms of
place marketing and real estate development.
In contrast to the ambitions of postwar planning
projects that appeared to promise the rational reordering
of cities in various ways, urban policy is
rooted in an understanding of the world that stresses
the need for more incremental (or organic) change.
This has also been reflected in a range of settlement
policies, that is, policies concerned with where and
how people live in cities. As well as looking for ways
of fostering or rebuilding existing communities,
urban policy has increasingly looked for ways of
building new communities, particularly associated
with the rise of the new urbanism and what have
been identified as sustainable communities. In some
areas this process has effectively been privatized,
albeit often with state endorsement, through the