ABSTRACT
This chapter treats the novels not as cultural monuments but as geocritical resources that speak usefully to one other, to more direct critiques of regeneration, and to specific examples of regeneration's excesses. These processes involve multiple characters, and readers, interpreting particularised places, from crowded streets to intimate rooms, neglected edgelands to grand new developments. Thus, while individual procedurals can foreground plots of land, or crimes revolving around real estate, many works in the genre support geocritical analysis. Both Jonathan Meades and Malcolm Miles explore cases where 'regeneration' projects consume resources of land and labour but create urban environments that are indifferent or inimical to most people. The procedural details navigation and interpretation of built environments by police and other detectives, and also by criminals, victims and potential victims, and witnesses. Bryden observes that Writers can exploit "streetness" to highlight the narrative potential of urban space, whilst simultaneously emphasising the link between identity and place, between the individual and the social.
