ABSTRACT
The essays collected together in City of Quarters represent an intervention into the still-evolving discourses and practices of 'quartering' cities - of designating and branding particular spaces in an attempt to produce new forms of urban living and urban competitiveness, most commonly in a post-industrial context. As such, quartering is part of broader processes of entrepreneurial urban governance tied to the rise of the symbolic economy of cities (Scott, 2000). In this Afterword, we want to reflect on those processes and their outcomes, in an effort to think about urban quarters and what they do and mean for cities and their inhabitants, potential inhabitants and visitors. We want to begin by telling a particular quarter story - a story which, like so many in City of Quarters, visibilizes the forces at work in the production of these new urban spaces. From that starting point, we then want to move our focus out, in an attempt to site quarters and 'quarter-work' in the contested socio-spatial politics of the 'new urban order' - an order which, perhaps paradoxically, turns out to be not wholly new at all (Evans, this volume; Short, 1996).
