ABSTRACT

This book has explored what is involved in focusing governance attention on the place qualities of urban areas and the space-time dynamics of the relations and interactions that take place in such areas. In particular, it has examined what it means to intervene in shaping place qualities through conscious attention, through some kind of strategy, which embodies and expresses a conception of the place of an urban area, whether this is what may be commonly called a city, a city with its surrounding landscapes or a collection of urban and rural settlements. I have been especially interested in how far such strategically focused governance attention has the capacity to contribute to a double transformation: in the material trajectories of urban dynamics and the potentialities they afford to the multiple social and environmental relations that inhabit and pass through urban areas; and in the forms of governance directed at shaping the qualities of places experienced as urban. I have also emphasised the complex interplay between explicit attention to place qualities and connectivities, and the wider context in which such attention is situated, both in terms of evolving governance processes and wider social, environmental and economic dynamics and governance cultures. To understand the interplay of proximities and connectivities in urban areas, and the interactions that form governance processes, I have used the intellectual lens of an interpretive policy analysis and a relational geography. These focus attention not just on individual agents or on structural driving forces but on interactions, on how meanings are made, on how

relations are understood, and how action is shaped in social contexts. I have focused this lens on the politically charged processes through which collective action is imagined, mobilised, organised and practised to ‘make a difference’ to urban conditions.