ABSTRACT
The maintenance of the provincial city centres as symbolic cores to their regions has been a consistent strand in British urban policy. In cities in declining regions, as is Manchester, play and spectacle are increasingly the crucial elements in reconstituting the city centre. The city controlled a world market in cotton textiles for a century. For decades the city centre of Manchester had dominated commercial labour markets in the conurbation. The designation of defunct tracts in the city centre as public arenas was to be the rationale for regeneration strategies which had to reincorporate a degraded environment into a modern city. Unemployment levels in the inner city neighbourhoods are high, as are welfare dependency rates. In Manchester the consensus is that those who live in stigmatised neighbourhoods do not have equal access to service work and those who are categorised as black, irrespective of skill or qualifications, find barriers.
