ABSTRACT
From the modern neighbourhood still present in official publications in the late 1980s, this chapter follows the fabrication of a new common sense in the form of the stigmatised neighbourhood. Through the 1990s, media produced a stream of stories describing the North West as a broken dream, a social wasteland and as the worst place in the country; a nomination ratified by the Lord Mayor in the City Council. Despite the media stories of juvenile delinquency and ‘immigrant crime’, the political discussion predominantly highlighted the North West as a space of poor, shipwrecked people, ‘a weak population’, a ‘poor tax-base’ that wears down the city as a whole and specifically contaminates the district. Classified as a distressed area, the North West became the object of new political initiatives and categories such as ‘new poverty’ that disregarded structural explanations of poverty for an individualistic-moralistic focus on the ‘inner welfare’ and ‘self-confidence’ of the poor. This symbolism of the distressed neighbourhood and the associated area-based rationality of social ills was institutionalised in the Urban Regeneration Office in the mid-1990s, which aimed to improve the social networks, establish culture, motivate, and ‘break the vicious circle’ of urban and individual degeneration.
