Towards Safe City Centres?: Remaking the Spaces of an Old-Industrial City

In recent years, old industrial cities have felt the pressure to 'revitalise' and regenerate their failing economic base, by not only changing the modalities of governance but also changing the focus policy intervention. Examining the rising interest in quality-of-life offences, anti-social behaviour and incivilities in urban public spaces, this study explores the importance of policing, crime control and community safety policies in urban regeneration agendas.At the centre of this book rests an engagement with the practices of policing and social regulation that are part and parcel of the ongoing changes in cities. It does so by grounding some of the more conceptual debates over neoliberal urban restructuring in an extensive empirical study of the making and remaking of urban spaces in the city of Glasgow. Beginning with an overview of the issues of crime control, imagineering and city centre upgrading, it then examines how city spaces are regulated through working practices across the distinctive fields such as community safety policies or policing of homeless people and street prostitutes. Lastly, it focuses in on a warden project - one of the key new policing agencies to have emerged in recent years in urban public spaces.The empirical study is employed to put forward a strong and innovative theoretical argument: enframed in a critical Marxist perspective that draws on debates within German-speaking critical theory and Marxism, this study argues for the centrality of human social praxis in our understanding of social ontology. It thus offers up an engagement with questions over the production of social space, a (fragmented) social totality and human agency, which so far have only received limited notice in Anglo-American discussionsGesa Helms is a Research Fellow in the Department of Urban Studies, University of Glasgow and co-editor of Securing the Urban Renaissance, Policy Press: Bristol, 2007.