ABSTRACT
This book is concerned with intra-urban, rather than inter-urban, variations-with social divisions in the city-and it is true that there is a general form of variation in our post-industrial cities that is best described by reference to Complexity Theory’s concept of the ‘butterfly attractor’ (Byrne 1996). This notion seems absolutely defensible for all the UK’s non-world cities, the large industrial conurbations other than London but including the English shire cities such as Leicester, Hull, etc., which are actually the largest urban form by resident population in the UK. In other words more of us live in places like this than anywhere else. London’s ‘world city’ status (and by London I mean the Greater Metropolitan Area) does complicate its picture somewhat, but even for this massive metropolis the historic significance of
its industrial past is such that the notion of a division of the city into two general sorts of places holds largely true. Nonetheless, and this is an important warning, although this chapter will discuss ‘National Social Policy’ in relation to the general ‘affluent’ and the ‘excluded’ wings of the butterfly, the significance of particular local politics, local history, the local in general, in shaping the actual character of any specific place, is immense.
