A new kind of bleak
Subtitle: journeys through urban Britain
By: Owen Hatherley
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Verso Books; Verso
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Brooklyn, NY
Language: eng
Number of pages: 434
ISBN-13: 9781844678570; 9781844679096
Subjects: Social conditions; Economic policy; Politics and government
Description: "What happens when ruination overtakes regeneration? Following on from A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, Owen Hatherley investigates the fate of British cities in the desolate new world of savage public-sector cuts, when government funds are withdrawn and the Welfare State abdicates. He explores the urban consequences of what Conservatives privately call the progressive nonsense of the Big Society and the localism agenda, the putative replacement of the state with charity and voluntarism; and he casts an eye over the last great Blairite schemes limping to completion, from London's Shard to the site of the 2012 Olympics. Crisscrossing Britain from Aberdeen to Plymouth, from Croydon to Belfast, A New Kind of Bleak finds a landscape left to rot - and discovers strange and potentially radical things growing in the wasteland.'--Publisher's description.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: will there still be building, in the dark times?; title: The Thames gateway : one of the dark places of the earth; title: Teeside : infantilized hercules; title: Preston : nothing great but man; title: Barrow-in-Furness : diving for pearls; title: The metropolitan county of the West Midlands : the patchwork explains, the land is unchanged; title: Bristol : the tyranny of structurelessness; title: Brighton and Hove : on parade; title: Croydon : zone 5 strategy; title: Plymouth : fables of the reconstruction; title: Oxford : Quadrangle and Banlieue; title: Leicester : another middle England; title: Lincoln : between two cathedrals; title: The valleys : I am a pioneer, they cAll me primitive; title: Edinburgh : capital (it fails us now); title: Aberdeen : where the money went; title: From Govan to Cumbernauld: was the solution worse than the problem?; title: Belfast : we are not going away; title: The City of London : the beginning is nigh; title: Acknowledgements; title: Index; title: Index of places.