ABSTRACT
Strategies, as discussed in the previous chapter, are devices for focusing attention. If they come to shape how interventions in urban areas are designed and materialised, they have real, material impacts on the potentialities afforded by urban areas and the way these are distributed among those with a stake in them. Spatial strategies focus attention on the ‘where’ of activities and values, on the qualities and meanings of places, on the flows that connect one place to another and on the spatial dimensions of the way activities are organised. In the discussions, analyses and disputes that surround the formation and use of spatial strategies for urban areas, this spatial dimension may not be immediately visible. The emphasis may be on general problems – congestion, pollution, lack of affordable housing, conserving historic buildings, the shortage of sites for new companies. Or they may be on appropriate processes – when and how to organise consultation processes, the nature of formal inquiries, how to reconcile different viewpoints. But what gives spatial strategy its distinctive focus and contribution is the recognition that ‘geography matters’ (Massey et al. 1984). It is not just traffic congestion in general that is a problem, but specifically where this occurs, what the impacts are and how and where they are experienced, and, as a result, who is affected by congestion and its impacts. It is not just the inability of the housing market to produce affordable housing that is the problem, but the way housing markets work to distribute living opportunities for different people within an urban area, so that poorer people may end up facing
inequalities not only in access to housing, but to work opportunities, health services, education and leisure opportunities. It is not just the conservation of buildings that is at issue, but the way conservation measures impact on the overall quality of an area, in terms of property values, visits from tourists and traffic flows. Strategies that emphasise the spatiality of activities and relations thus foreground some critical interconnections and qualities arising from the evolving co-existence and juxtaposition of multiple activities and webs of relations in particular areas, locales and territories.
