Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1971693Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1971693

Empowerment or Abandonment? Prospects for Neighbourhood

Revitalization under the Big Society

Public Money and Management

December 2011

Jonathan S Davies Dr Madeleine Pill Professor of Critical Policy Studies Research Associate Faculty of Business and Law School of City & Regional Planning De Montfort University Cardiff University Leicester Glamorgan Building LE1 9BH King Edward VII Avenue Cardiff CF10 3WA Tel: +44 7764 943706 Tel: 44(0)2920 876014 E-mail: jsdavies@dmu.ac.uk E-mail: pillmc@cardiff.ac.uk

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1971693Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1971693

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Abstract

This paper explores the impact of recent trends towards ‘privatism’ through a study

of neighbourhood governance in Baltimore and Bristol and considers its implications for the

big society’ in the UK. It argues that the self-help ideology of the big society has been

prevalent in Baltimore for many years and that Bristol too has started moving in this

direction. However, the Baltimore experience highlights profound difficulties in substituting

volunteering for government-led revitalization. The major charitable bodies in Baltimore

operate a ‘triage’ approach, investing only in those neighbourhoods deemed ‘viable’. In an

era of austerity, economically ‘unviable’ neighbourhoods face effective abandonment by the

public, profit and non-profit sectors alike. The case of Bristol further highlights the risk to

neighbourhood governance infrastructure posed by the withdrawal of government

programmes. The paper concludes that the Baltimore experience is a warning to British

policy makers, posing a major dilemma. Sustaining neighbourhood revitalization requires

the very public investment now being cut by the Coalition government. The voluntarism of

the 'Big Society' is likely to be a poor substitute.

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Introduction

The UK is in a period of austerity unparalleled since the 1930s. Its full extent and

impact will become clear only in longer term, but we have already seen major cuts in public

services and welfare, as well as real-terms income reductions for millions experiencing the

effects of low growth, wage freezes and high inflation. Moreover, it is far from certain that

the firestorm which engulfed the economy in 2008 is over; the sovereign debt crises in the

USA and Europe suggest not. Alongside austerity, the UK government is confronted by

major crises of public trust and morale, severely aggravated by scandals in every corner of

the establishment including corporations, police, media and the political class. On left and

right alike, there is talk of a ‘social recession’ alongside the economic recession (Devine et al,

2007), described by Phillip Blond (2010: 2) as a ‘wholesale collapse of British culture, virtue

and belief'. It is to ‘civil society’ that the political mainstream has increasingly turned for

answers over the past 20 years. From the Major premiership onwards, successive

administrations have increasingly invested in the potential of civil renewal for reinvigorating

self-help, volunteering and political participation and for taking ownership of public assets

and running public services. Under the present government, New Labour’s preoccupation

with ‘active citizenship’ (Davies, 2011) has been rebranded the ‘big society’. For the

Coalition, halting and reversing the ‘social recession’ in a climate of austerity depends

entirely on the success of the big society agenda.

This paper explores one important element of the challenge in building a big society,

that of neighbourhood revitalization. Given that it is fundamentally about ‘localism’ and

‘self-government’, the fate of neighbourhoods is an important test of big society thinking.

The paper draws on a study of neighbourhood governance in Baltimore and Bristol,

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highlighting several lessons for the UK. First, Baltimore is a stark warning of what can

happen to neighbourhoods when revitalization is led by private and philanthropic investors.

Instead of community need, investment priorities are dictated by ‘asset values’ used as a

proxy for a wide range of other socio-economic indicators. This approach amounts to the

effective abandonment of distressed neighbourhoods. The lesson for the UK, therefore, is

that unless it is backed by substantive public investment, the ‘big society’ risks being little

more than ‘laissez faire’ by another name, with potentially disastrous consequences for

social cohesion.

Turning to Bristol, the paper finds that the city’s response to the roll-back of

neighbourhood programmes in the final years of New Labour has, in some ways, been the

reverse of localism. It began emphasising community entrepreneurialism and market-led

growth over needs-based investment, and at the same time started rolling-back

mechanisms for community participation in neighbourhood governance. Instead of down-

scaling the apparatus of neighbourhood governance in line with localist principles, Bristol

up-scaled it, creating a cluster of remoter, town-size structures with smaller budgets.

We are cautious about reading too much into one comparative study, but argue that

the findings from Baltimore and Bristol highlight significant risks for the big society. Far from

a flourishing of localism and community, we risk moving into a period of neighbourhood

retrenchment alongside hollowed-out ‘big’ government. The paper begins with a short

review of the ‘big society’ concept and its origins. We then discuss the evidence from

Baltimore and Bristol and finally reflect on the implications of the two case studies.

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Localism and the Big Society

The virtues of civil society have been celebrated since the dawn of classical political

philosophy. Aristotle argued that ‘if a tyrant was to be secure’, he should ‘destroy all

intermediary groups, because however unpolitical they were, it was participation in such

social groups that created mutual trust between individuals, without which any opposition

to tyranny … is futile’ (paraphrased by Crick, 2002: 497). Two thousand years later,

Tocqueville (1994: 61) inspired the mid-19th century municipal reform movement, arguing

that freedom rests on the voluntary association of intermediate groups, who ‘constitute the

strength of free nations’. For Edmund Burke (1790: 290), the father of modern

conservatism:

… we begin our public affections in our families …We pass on to our neighborhoods,

and our habitual provincial connection. These are inns and resting places. Such

divisions of our country as have been formed by habit, and not by the sudden jerk of

authority, were so many little images of the great country in which the heart found

something which it could fill.

Burke also believed that social institutions must be built from the bottom-up and

that the ‘little platoon’ was the cornerstone of loyalty to nation and humankind (Burke,

1790: 68-9).

The influence of these ideas on the big society are undisputed (Blond, 2010), and the

terminology appears, among other things, as a neat inversion of ‘little platoon’. They have

long influenced the Labour Party too. Gordon Brown (2000) warmly embraced the

conservative view of civil society. He argued:

There is a strong case for saying that in the age of enlightenment, Britain invented

the modern idea of civic society ... eventually incorporating what Edmund Burke

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defined as little platoons … ideas we would today recognise as being at the heart not

only of the voluntary sector but of a strong society. Call it community, call it civic

patriotism, call it the giving age, or call it the new active citizenship, call it the great

British society - it is Britain becoming Britain again.

Davies (2011: 13) explores how conservative ideas like these influenced many

aspects of New Labour’s social policy agenda, arguing:

Inequalities of opportunity and outcome were axiomatic and empathy,

deliberation and solidarity had little influence in a praxis promoting charity,

individual responsibility and filial duty. Obligation was a cardinal virtue, the

common content of ‘the social’ spanning the Conservative and New Labour

variants of neoliberalism.

The claim that Labour is influenced by social conservatism has been lent additional

credence by the emergence of ‘Blue Labour’ (Glasman, 2011), which openly acclaims the

conservative strand in social democratic thought. Yet, for all that New Labour championed

localism and conservative values the Coalition argues that in reality, it extended ‘big

government’ and the ‘nanny state’, aggravating the so-called dependency culture in civil

society. Nevertheless, there are clear continuities between ideas like ‘new localism’,

‘double devolution’ and ‘big society’, albeit in the distinctive context of austerity and

economic stagnation.

Part of the challenge in grasping the big society is, as Ormerod (2010: 1) argued early

on, that the Tories send out mixed messages (also Kisby, 2010). Moreover, to the extent

that there is a clear agenda, its viability is highly questionable. This paper highlights a

number of significant barriers to achieving it. The big society was inspired, in part, by the re-

reading of modern conservatism developed by Phillip Blond (2010) in his controversial think-

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piece, ‘Red Tory’. Blond, a leading advisor to David Cameron, unsurprisingly distances

himself from post-war welfarism, to which he attributes the ‘dependency culture’. However,

he is equally scathing of Chicago School neoliberalism, the dominant strand in Western

political economy, which he believes caused the concentration of capital in over-mighty

corporations and the loss of an older communitarian capitalist tradition, where private

assets were more widely distributed. Blond argued that neoliberalism delivers not the free

economy, but a 'bastard laissez faire inversion of it, in which power and wealth flow

upwards to the centralisers of capital ' (2010: 34). Thus, Blond appeals to what he sees as

the conservative politics of ‘virtue, tradition and the priority of the good’, in order to deliver

‘a real political economy for the poor’ (2010: 35). Central to Red Tory strategy is the de-

centring of corporate capital and the ‘recapitalization’ of communities.

While the notion that the Conservative Party would ever attack its corporate allies is

fanciful, some of Blond’s ideas are reflected in big society localism and the celebration of

voluntarism over privatism and statism. Again, they echo the New Labour vision for ‘asset-

based welfare’. In David Blunkett’s words (2003: 12), owning assets ‘helps develop self-

reliance and responsibility, while opening up opportunity and rewards’. They have been

further elaborated by Maurice Glasman (2011) and others in developing the ‘Blue Labour’

brand pithily described by Laurie Penny (2011) as celebrating ‘family, faith and flag’. The

concept ‘big society’ was allegedly coined by David Cameron’s Director of Strategy, Steve

Hilton (Kisby, 2010), when the Tories were in opposition. It seeks to provide overarching

coherence and direction to coalition strategy. According to the Office for Civil Society (HM

Government, 2010: 3), it rests on three principles: ‘empowering communities’ by granting

‘local councils and neighbourhoods more power to take decisions and shape their area’;

opening public services to community ownership and management, enabling ‘charities,

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social enterprises, private companies and employee-owned co-operatives to compete to

offer people high quality services’; and ‘promoting social action’ by ‘encouraging and

enabling people from all walks of life to play a more active part in society, and promoting

more volunteering and philanthropy’.

It is important to note that while government distances itself from the extreme

‘underclass’ theories advanced by thinkers such as Charles Murray (1990), it is influenced by

the libertarian ‘crowding out’ thesis (Bartels et al, 2011); the claim that in creating a

dependency culture, the nanny state suppresses civil society vitality and prevents

responsible voluntarism from flourishing. One test of the big society is therefore the

degree to which the roll-back of public services and neighbourhood revitalization

programmes actually leads to greater civil society activism pursuant to the goals described

by the Office for Civil Society.

Methodology

Coalition commitments mean that exploring UK neighbourhood governance and its

international comparators provides an important way of assessing the prospects for the big

society. We here report a study of neighbourhood governance in Baltimore and Bristol,

conducted between October 2007 and September 2008, based on a combination of semi-

structured interviews and review of secondary data. The research in Baltimore focused on

the East Baltimore Development Initiative (EBDI) and Operation ReachOut SouthWest

(OROSW). The Bristol study explored the Community at Heart (CaH) New Deal for

Communities initiative and the Hartcliffe and Withywood Community Partnership (HWCP).

The interviews, a total of 32 in Baltimore and 22 in Bristol, included political leaders, public

officials, foundation staff (in Baltimore), non-profit and third sector representatives, and

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citizen-activists. Interviews were transcribed and, together with the documentary data,

coded in accordance with the framework provided by a topic guide.

Baltimore

Baltimore is governed by what Davies and Pill (2012) call a ‘localist and privatist’

ethos. With little investment or policy direction from federal and state governments,

neighbourhood policy is determined by an informal city network comprising the Mayor, city

council and various private interests, notably philanthropic foundations. The most

significant non-profit actors in city-level neighbourhood policy are Baltimore’s ‘anchor

institutions’; relatively immobile organizations including universities, medical complexes,

and public utilities (Fulbright-Anderson et al, 2001). The Johns Hopkins University and its

Hospital and Health System is the most influential anchor institution in Baltimore and the

largest employer in the state of Maryland (City of Baltimore, 2006: 100).

Baltimore’s approach to neighbourhood investment is based not on ‘need’, but

‘asset-values’. According to a respondent from the Goldseker Foundation, an advocate of

the policy, it involves ‘selecting a small handful of neighbourhoods where there is some

resident leadership, there’s some people we know, who we feel comfortable investing in’.

Encouraged by Goldseker and others, the City Council invokes property values to determine

investment priorities, focusing on so-called ‘middle neighbourhoods’. The strategy is set out

in the city ‘housing typology’ approved by then Mayor Martin O’Malley (City of Baltimore,

2006: 220-24). It has five categories. “Distressed” areas are those suffering disinvestment,

falling populations and abandonment. These areas are designated not for revitalization, but

demolition and clearance. In the three ‘middle’ categories, those at risk of falling into

distress but with some market viability, the strategy is to support home ownership and

housing markets, with additional subsidies for developers and investors. Finally,

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‘competitive areas’ are designated ‘self-sustaining’ (City of Baltimore, 2006: 220-24).

According to a senior housing officer in Baltimore, ‘We went from a needs-based approach

to an asset-based approach. The model really wasn't working. We had unlimited need but

fairly limited resources. So, it basically became an issue, well, how do we target our

resources’?

This ‘triage’ system (Stoker, Stone and Worgs, 2009) means that distressed

neighbourhoods have to rely on improving business perceptions of their market viability,

the benevolence of charities and foundations, or both. The East Baltimore Development

Initiative is a good example. The revitalization strategy hinges on the power of Johns

Hopkins as an attractant for thousands of bio-science jobs envisaged in the City’s growth

strategy (City of Baltimore, 2006: 100). According to a City Councilperson:

Basically, any administration - any - needs to put its capital where the people are or

where the sympathies are... Or where Hopkins is [laughs], right? ... Hopkins has a lot

of self-interest going on, and I don't say that in a negative way, I mean, if it weren't

for Hopkins I don't know who'd have a job.

The EBDI strategy sought to tap into the economic vitality of the Hopkins complex.

According to a respondent from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the ‘advantage is that

there's an economic engine to sort of attach yourself to and to feed on the energy of, which

is Johns Hopkins. So part of the reason that we've gone over there is that we're able to

build on and work with an economic engine’. As a leading foundation, Casey’s approach

was very much in tune with the privatist ethos, seeking to anticipate and complement

corporate investment. However, since the onset of economic crisis in 2008, it has become

clear that the bio-science jobs, on which fulfilling the EBDI vision depended, are not going to

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materialize. There have been angry protests by citizens who feel betrayed at the broken

promises of free marketeers (Harvey, 2009: 329-30).

Baltimore also highlighted the limits of voluntarism in the face of declining

investment. The Operation ReachOut SouthWest (OROSW) revitalization programme

obtained most of its resources from a local anchor institution, Bon Secours Hospital and its

charitable counterpart, the Bon Secours of Maryland Foundation. In the OROSW area,

interventions included investment in ‘capacity building’ to enhance big society-style self-

starting among citizens. However, investment in these activities was declining and

volunteering was reported to have stagnated with it. According to a manager from Bon

Secours, ‘Now we’ve got to pick up trash and mow grass, and how interesting is that? You

know, I'd love to come to the table and say make my neighbourhood beautiful, but am I

going to… get behind a lawnmower to keep it that way’?

Other distressed neighbourhoods, lacking perceived economic anchors, were faring

worse still. Even designated interventions, such as land clearance, were not being

undertaken. Davies and Pill (2012) argue that these areas appear as ‘ungoverned spaces’

written-off by government, business and foundations alike, all committed to self-help and

‘revitalization of the fittest’.

Bristol

The context for neighbourhood governance in Bristol was very different. Local

government in the UK is highly dependent on finance from the centre, not least for funding

neighbourhood revitalization programmes. Davies and Pill (2012) describe this as a

‘centralist and managerialist’ governing ethos, where national government is the locus of

political authority and the city council leads locally. Despite the New Labour rhetoric of

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localism, double devolution and place-shaping, the policy framework in Bristol was strongly

determined by the centre.

Under this regime, Bristol enjoyed relatively high levels of neighbourhood funding

until near the end of the New Labour period. Unlike Baltimore, it benefited from ‘needs

based’ investment, allocated broadly in accordance with a neighbourhood’s position in

national indices of deprivation. In 1999, Bristol was allocated one of thirty nine grants from

the national New Deal for Communities (NDC) programme, the Community at Heart (CaH)

partnership. It also received money from the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund (NRF) and

Single Regeneration Budget (SRB). Neighbourhood programmes were notable for their

emphasis on community engagement and NDC became the ‘flagship’ approach, with elected

residents often constituting a majority on governing boards.

By 2008, however, support for neighbourhood governance was diminishing as

government programmes wound down without new ones to replace them. In response to

dwindling funds, Bristol began replacing resource-intensive neighbourhood governance

structures with ‘super-size’ partnerships covering up to 30,000 people and with reduced

budgets. Bristol City Council (2008: 4) wanted these bodies to be far more entrepreneurial

than their predecessors, seeking to influence the way public services are delivered rather

than drawing down resources. It saw the policy change as a pragmatic response to adverse

financial circumstances and flaws in the neighbourhood revitalization model of the

preceding decade. According to a council official:

Regeneration shouldn’t just be happening on a micro level, we need to be aligning

need with opportunity. So rather than just saying there’s a red line around this

deprived area, we’re doing everything in there, we need to be looking at that, but

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more strategically… looking at how those neighbourhoods interact with the rest of

the city and the rest of the sub-region.

This comment arguably reflected a ‘revisionist’ critique of the policy agenda in the

preceding decade, which had been premised on the need to intervene intensively at the

postcode level in multiply deprived areas. The critique signalled a turn towards the politics

of self-help. The objective, according to the Bristol Partnership (2008), was ‘to ensure that

the city’s prosperity strengthens and grows. As an essential part of achieving this, we will

unlock the potential of our disadvantaged communities to contribute to long term

sustainable economic growth and shared prosperity’.

The mix of upscaling, self-help ideology, and top-down control freakery weakened

the institutional basis for community participation in neighbourhood governance. According

to a resident board member of the CaH partnership, community governance was ‘a real

experiment; unfortunately the scientist has interfered so much with the experiment that

they’re not going to learn very much from it because they didn’t let it run’. For a resident

member of the HWCP Board, ‘... throughout this last process of neighbourhood renewal,

neighbourhood management, I’m sure that we’ve lost local residents through that, because

they saw the power and the control that they could actually have with the SRB, and then

had it taken away’. By 2010, funding from the SRB, NRF and NDC had all dried up. The

reform of neighbourhood institutions, the decline of community engagement and the

renewed emphasis on market-led revitalization suggested that in Bristol, neighbourhood

governance was being ‘hollowed out’, indicating some convergence with Baltimore.

Discussion

The study of Baltimore and Bristol lends support to critical voices in emerging

academic and media commentaries on the big society (e.g. Kisby, 2010) and draws attention

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to additional challenges. First, community ‘voice’ in neighbourhood governance appeared

to be diminishing in Bristol. Upscaling to supra-neighbourhood governance structures and

cuts in funding were undermining both revitalization and citizen engagement. While ‘voice’

and ‘volunteering’ are distinctive forms of participation, the relationship can be mutually

reinforcing (Hays, 2007) and the risk is that the erosion of citizen involvement in

neighbourhood governance also undermines the networks required for cultivating the big

society.

Critical commentators, including Blond (2010), recognize that even in the best case

scenario, delivering the big society will require culture change over a generation. As he

commented, ‘the drive for cuts and deficit reduction is perhaps running too fast to give

people the chance to take over the state and create the conditions for a civic economy’

(http://www.respublica.org.uk/item/The-Big-Society-will-only-get-bigger-qtin). Cuts in

public and voluntary sector budgets are happening now, with the big society still a cultural

pipe-dream. As Dame Elisabeth Hoodless, former Executive Director of Community Service

Volunteers put it, cuts are ‘destroying’ volunteering and ‘undermining the big society’

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12378974). As OROSW in Baltimore shows, these

concerns suggest that the likelihood of the ‘big society’ compensating for retrenchment and

anomie in the short and medium terms is poor.

Yet, there are grounds for doubt in the longer term too. Baltimore’s deprived

communities, have been exposed to the full blast of market forces and self-help ideologies

for decades and the situation there resembles what Shelden (2007) called the ‘New

American Apartheid’. Rolling back the state seems not to unleash a culture of volunteering,

and charitable investment seeks to anticipate corporate investment rather than need.

Baltimore therefore challenges the so-called ‘crowding out’ thesis and adds weight to the

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finding by Bartels et al (2011) that the withdrawal of funding correlates directly with a

decline in volunteering. It is therefore a real possibility that the retreat of the state from

Britain’s deprived neighbourhoods will result in Baltimore-style abandonment and

ghettoization.

Another argument for the big society is that in addition to volunteering flourishing,

cutting back the state will unleash a private sector-led recovery. Again, the failure of bio-

science jobs to materialise in East Baltimore highlights that even in a low tax, low wage

economy this is at best a risky strategy. The failure of the EBDI highlights that the prospects

for business-led revitalization are otherwise poor in the current climate. The private sector

is not taking up the slack.

Bristol highlights an additional problem for the big society: localism is very difficult to

implement, and centralism comes naturally in the UK. The up-scaling of ‘neighbourhood’

and the apparent decline in community influence both highlight that austerity does not

necessarily diminish the pressures to centralize. Centralization and economies of scale are

certainly one plausible response to austerity, with the possibility that we are entering not

the era of the ‘big society’, but rather a period of hollowed out ‘big government’. The

ambiguity is evident in government thinking. For example, the Office for Civil Society states

that the ‘Big Society agenda is not a Government programme; it is a call to action’ (HM

Government, 2010: 12). Yet, David Cameron argued in paternalistic vein that ‘We must use

the state to remake society’ (Cameron, 2009). The current Localism Bill is meant, among

other things, to be an enabling mechanism for the big society but has also been denounced

as the ‘centralism bill’ (Jones and Stewart, 2011) because of the myriad additional powers

reserved to the Secretary of State. The Spectator (Blackburn, 2011) acknowledged and

embraced the contradiction, arguing:

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Cameron denies central government a leading role, arguing that the big society is a

revolt against the top-down' guidance and interference … but how else can errant if

not yet militant local councils be bent to the cause? Eric Pickles and his department

will have to become more active, and ignore the irony that to decentralise you must

centralise first?

Eric Pickles and his department seem to have taken heed of this lesson and at the

very least, continuing control freakery gives good grounds for scepticism that the coalition is

ushering in a new era of localism. Moreover, authentic ‘localism’ might be unattainable. As

Polanyi put it (1957: 140): ‘Thus even those who wished most ardently to free the state

from all unnecessary duties, and whose whole philosophy demanded the restriction of state

activities, could not but entrust the self-same state with the new powers, organs, and

instruments required for the establishment of laissez-faire’.

Why should ‘localism’ be prone to failure and recuperation by centralism? There are

numerous possible explanations, such as the centralizing British Political Tradition (Marsh et

al, 2003), the dependency of local government on central government funding, and the

‘elite contempt’ of civil servants for their local counterparts (Stewart, 2000: 95-6). Perhaps

most powerful of all is Harvey’s (2005) claim that ‘free market’ societies are compelled to

deny the freedoms they promise because they cause social polarization, are prone to

instability and unleash profound inequalities. A strongly interventionist state of some kind

is essential, whether this means redistributive social policy, coercion and ghettoization

and/or moral authoritarianism, as a pre-condition for the cohesion and sustainability of

society. If so, the big society is a non-starter, because in the absence of generous

revitalization programmes the ‘nanny state’ is less likely to step back than it is to morph into

a US-style carceral state.

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Conclusion

Despite cultural, economic and political differences, there are signs of convergence

between Baltimore and Bristol, as Bristol retreats from needs-based neighbourhood funding

towards a more overtly market-focused growth strategy. However, Baltimore is arguably a

grim portent of what may follow in Bristol and other parts of the UK if convergence

continues. Where the big society anticipates that volunteers and charities will step into the

chasm left by the rollback of public services and programmes, Baltimore suggests that this is

highly unlikely. Where it anticipates market-led revitalization, Baltimore highlights the limits

of private sector-led growth in the face of continuing economic stagnation and the threat of

renewed crisis.

The big society could therefore be based on a series of false premises. Not least

among these is that localism necessarily thrives amidst austerity. The centralizing measures

in the Localism Bill represent one tacit concession to this possibility. The upscaling and de

facto retreat from neighbourhood governance in Bristol might be another. Centralization

and local economies of scale are highly plausible responses to the continuing crisis, and to

the extent that they occur in the rest of the UK, would pose a direct challenge to the big

society. The chorus of criticism in 2011, forcing David Cameron into repeated re-launches of

his big idea, is another sign that the future of the big society is very uncertain.

If the big society is untenable because the state is cutting services, but not retreating,

the market is encroaching on the public sphere, but not reviving, and civil society is being

summoned to action, but not stepping into the breach, then what are the alternatives? One

is simply a laissez-faire posture. As Charles Murray (1990: 51) argued:

The alternative I advocate is to have the central government stop trying to be clever

and instead get out of the way, giving poor communities (and affluent communities,

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too) a massive dose of self government … When meaningful reforms finally do occur,

they will happen not because stingy people have won, but because generous people

have stopped kidding themselves.

As in the USA, the carceral neighbourhood is a real possibility. Crouch (2011)

highlights the bizarre juxtaposition of the still hegemonic ideology of neoliberalism

extending a seemingly bankrupt market-led growth strategy and further encroaching on the

public sphere. One alternative, for those who remain committed to social solidarity and the

public realm is to revive the vision, which never materialized under New Labour, for publicly

funded, citizen-led revitalization, alongside an exacting critique of disastrous market

fundamentalism. It is too early to announce the death of a poorly articulated policy

framework, whose implementation has barely begun. However, developments in

neighbourhood governance in Baltimore and Bristol suggest that there is precious little

reason for thinking the big society offers a credible way forward.

__________________________

Acknowledgements

Many thanks are due to all those in Baltimore and Bristol who gave their valuable time to

participate in the research.

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