ABSTRACT
Few would deny that the nature of urban politics in Britain has changed substantively during recent decades. Postmodernists, elevating the politics of difference, are able to point to the declining significance of traditional classbased cleavages and to the emergent new identities, coalescing around gender, the marginalized, environmental activism and other issues leading to the generation of new social movements and local oppositional politics. Those seeking to understand the changing nature of local governance and local democracy are able to point to the radical changes to the institutional structure through which urban politics is conducted, to the shift in policy emphasis within urban arenas towards ensuring the production of proactive local economic development strategies and to the creation of quasi-public agencies alongside the formal machinery of local power. Not unexpectedly, such changes have engendered conflict and resistance reflected in the volatile relationships between the central state and city governments, particularly in the 1980s, and within the attempt by the (central) state to redefine the relationships between itself and civil society. Clearly, such representations of the nature of urban politics emphasize different aspects of it, reflecting the contrasting theoretical understandings of how to conceptualize the key bases of urban politics, power and the purposes to which it is (and should be) directed. As disparate as are these alternative perspectives, they share a common perception of the increasing salience, and often conflictual nature, of urban politics.
