title: Saving the City? Negotiating Stigma, the State and 'Socialism' in Liverpool
Creators: name: O'Connor, Abigail
Publisher: name: University of Liverpool Repository
Year: 2027

description: This thesis is a sociological study of Liverpool. It explores how the long-term stigmatisation of
the city has influenced the creation of a particular kind of space: one which is ripe for processes
of devaluation and revaluation, offering private interests the opportunity and ability to extract
financial capital from it. Alongside acute experiences of socio-economic deprivation following
deindustrialisation and the onset of neoliberalism in the 1980s, Liverpool has been subject to
intense forms of denigration at key moments in its recent history. These moments have
contributed to and justified the need to fundamentally restructure the city. However, processes
of urban restructuring in Liverpool are complicated by the particular kinds of representations
and histories perpetuated about the city. Whilst its external representation is one of denigration,
Liverpool is simultaneously considered to be a space of ‘socialist’ politics with a history of
resisting injustices and has come to be personified by its politics and people being antithetical
to the Conservative party. This thesis considers how these narrations play out empirically, and
argues that uncovering this is central to understanding the city’s urban political economy today.
Through critical methodological inquiry this thesis demonstrates how Liverpool’s experience
of devaluation has been realised most acutely through housing in the city, leaving it vulnerable
to narratives of the need to revive, revitalise and regenerate – by-words for capital extraction.
By focusing a key urban policy agenda, ‘housing market renewal’, the research seeks to
understand the justification for and negotiation of housing financialisation in Liverpool. Two
areas subject to renewal are studied: the ‘Welsh Streets’ in Toxteth and the ‘Webster Triangle’
in Picton, which at the turn of the current century were occupied working-class communities
in inner-city Liverpool. Despite this renewal policy being in operation between 2002-2011, the
legacies of it remain as scars on the city’s communities. This research questions who is
(re)making place, why and how they are doing so, and what the consequences are for class
politics, power and social relations in the city. Empirically speaking this research looks up at
power relations and back over time, allows this work to identify how Liverpool’s history of
socio-economic urban decline and experiences of city-wide stigmatisation have continued to
impact decision making of political actors and lives of residents on the ground.
In particular, this research makes visible how extractive urban policies have been experienced,
negotiated and consented to by the local state. Taking an emergent context reinvigorates a truly
sociological approach to critical studies of the urban scale, offering conceptual, epistemological
and methodological interventions. It allows the centralisation of the local state as a key agent
in the financialisation of housing in the city against the backdrop of austerity measures. This is
a timely intervention as whilst the privatisation of housing has historically been enacted by
private interests (landlords and developers), recent shifts in urban governance owing to
austerity have seen the role of the local state in the financialisation of the city move into an
active, not passive actor. These shifts represent a new landscape which critical urban
scholarship must attend to through empirical engagement. Liverpool offers this opportunity,
and this thesis offers a much needed sociological and empirical insight, on the ground, at a
local state scale.