Introduction Urban Politics and Local Politics

The ‘urban crisis’ is an increasingly central phenomenon in advanced industrial societies. Urban problems are difficult to grasp, however; their origins and development can be only imperfectly analysed using social science approaches. An understanding of state intervention in urban processes is particularly crucial for the analysis of urban problems in a country such as Britain. Yet there is no obviously satisfactory framework within which urban politics can be analysed. Discussions of urban policy are conducted in a disconnected way in a number of disciplines. But these are overwhelmingly descriptive; for the most part they remain uninformed by major themes in social and political theory. The outlines of a coherent body of urban political analysis are at present only faintly manifest in existing work. This book attempts to clarify these outlines, and to show how a reconstruction of current knowledge can advance our understanding of urban politics.