IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/envira/v39y2007i3p666-683.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Of Urban Entrepreneurs or 24-Hour Party People? City-Centre Living in Manchester, England

Author

Listed:
  • Chris Allen

    (Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research, Sheffield Hallam University, Unit 10, Science Park, City Campus, Howard Street, Sheffield S1 1WB, England)

Abstract

My purpose in this paper is to provide a fuller account of the origins and nature of city-centre living in Manchester, England, by emphasising its too-often neglected ‘independent’ and ‘countercultural’ underside. Some urban policy researchers have made too much of the ‘entrepreneurial turn’ in Manchester, which is said to have been a key catalyst of its city-centre renaissance and city-centre living. My own empirical work as well as that of some cultural geographers highlights the ‘counter-cultural’ origins of the city-centre renaissance and, later, city-centre living in Manchester. I argue that urban policy research in Britain tends to characterise city-centre dwellers as young, single, professionals as if this was a more-or-less undifferentiated social group. Yet this demonstrates an oversight towards work undertaken by some geographers and urban sociologists who have shown that gentrifiers moving into British and North American city centres and inner-urban areas over the last two decades are a complex and differentiated group of housing consumers. My own empirical work shows that Manchester city-centre dwellers are a similarly complex and differentiated group of housing consumers that occupy a number of distinct positions within the city-centre housing market, and that this can be seen more clearly when the origins and subsequent development of city-centre living in Manchester is more fully understood. Three typologies of Manchester city-centre dwellers are identified; ‘counter-culturalists’ tend to originate from within the ‘new’ middle class; ‘city-centre tourists’ tend to originate from the ‘service class’; and ‘successful agers’ tend to be over the age of fifty.

Suggested Citation

  • Chris Allen, 2007. "Of Urban Entrepreneurs or 24-Hour Party People? City-Centre Living in Manchester, England," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 39(3), pages 666-683, March.
  • Handle: RePEc:sae:envira:v:39:y:2007:i:3:p:666-683
    DOI: 10.1068/a37302
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1068/a37302
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1068/a37302?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ingo Bader & Albert Scharenberg, 2010. "The Sound of Berlin: Subculture and the Global Music Industry," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 34(1), pages 76-91, March.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:envira:v:39:y:2007:i:3:p:666-683. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.