ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to explore the relationships between commercial hospitality practices and processes of urban regeneration. It investigates certain versions of hospitality and hospitableness that have come to be woven into the discourses and practices of urban regeneration schemes in UK cities (for the important distinction between hospitality and hospitableness, see Telfer, 2000). The chapter draws on some previous exploratory work on urban foodscapes and regeneration, based on selected areas of the city centre of Manchester, UK (Bell & Binnie, 2005). Places to eat and drink have come to occupy a central role in the production of new forms of city living associated with the revitalization of previously de-industrialized and rundown urban districts (Zukin, 1991). Drawing on insights from work in hospitality studies alongside research by cultural geographers into urban regeneration, exploration takes place as to how commercial hospitality is constructed and performed in regenerating neighbourhoods to encapsulate these new patterns of urban living — patterns often condensed to the short-hand ‘loft living’ (Zukin, 1982). In particular, by looking at two contrasting districts within Manchester city centre, the distinct ways in which urban regeneration, place promotion and civic boosterism all utilize food and drink hospitality spaces as public, social sites for the production and reproduction of ways of living in and visiting city-centre areas are analysed.
