Restructuring Culture: Identification of Difference and the Regulation of Change in Ex-Mining Communities (Urban and Regional Planning and Development Series) - Hardcover

Pattison, Gary

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1840143304 ISBN 13: 9781840143300

Publisher: Routledge, 1999

Synopsis

This book presents an analysis of community breakdown and the divergency between community and the agencies of economic regeneration in ex-mining districts in East Durham. It confronts issues relating to planning and politics, policy responses, ways of addressing differences between those who hold positions of influence and those who do not, local community and the question of structure/non-structure within agency and community organisation. It shows how authority treated community, how community was represented to authority and how community got by when negated by authority. It applies qualitative methods to community structure in order to draw an understanding of the relations between community and authority and marginalisation and change in local cultural formations and the development of survival tactics. In doing this it contrasts the role of community in ex-mining areas to the position, policies and approaches of formal pressure groups and agencies of economic regeneration. Although this work takes a specific case study area, its findings are of wider relevance to all ex heavy industrial localities and indeed to community structures everywhere, deemed to be excluded, in the face of ongoing economic and community regeneration initiatives.

About this title

Synopsis

This text presents an analysis of community breakdown and its relations to the agencies of economic regeneration in a specific locality of East Durham. Whilst based on a specific case study, the book aims to present more than a text about mining communities. It offers a clear theorization drawing on several major themes extracted from post structural discourse and repackages them as usable tools for empirical research. In this way, the case study materials hold much wider theoretical meaning which could be applied in many areas of social research. Further to this the text offers a counter balance to more conventional research on community structure and public participation in planning and economic regeneration. Firstly, an ethnographic study is persued within the community structure of a specific locality. Secondly, the position, interests and scope of influence of the areas main pressure group is considered. Thirdly, the book turns its attention to agencies of economic regeneration operating in the area.

In this way it is possible to determine the wide ranging and very different perceptions of the same spatial area held by the different groups, and ultimately the images which each held of the other. Finally, this point of difference is explored through the theorization of Jean Baudrillard in terms of a series of conceptualization which dominate much of his work and ultimately ideas of mass society and those outside that mass.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1840143304
• ISBN 13: 9781840143300
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 218