Recovering the Meta-Narrative of the Good City: Manchester as a Post-Industrial City

This book is motivated by a concern that the city is in danger of losing its traditional functions as a place of human interaction and reciprocity, as meeting place and associational space. The quality of individual interaction establishes the content of civic, political and cultural life in the city. The problem is that these precious resources are being suppressed by purely quantitative measures of growth and development. This study seeks to recover the sense of the city as an urban public life, an approach which conceives the city as being something more than a commercial centre and the individual as something more than a consumer. The city is valued as a key site in efforts aiming at civic and cultural renewal. This view defines urban regeneration as involving much more than economics, as pertaining to a public, communal and civic modus vivendi. The aim of this book is therefore to recover the city as an anthropological datum through the conceptual formulation of the urban public sphere. Examining the philosophical, social and ecological conditions for the recovery of the grand narrative of “the good city”, the book challenges postmodernist celebrations of otherness, difference and conflict. The postmodernist view is criticised as a condition of urban diremption