ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how a framework of hegemony is useful for understanding contemporary processes of urban restructuring, particularly the specific way in which gentrification is used to manage deindustrialisation: its effects on working-class people's everyday lives and identities and forms of negotiation and resistance. Regeneration has become the leading government strategy for restructuring places and local populations, extending power to both local agencies and businesses through urban entrepreneurialism and to citizens through participation. These forms of regeneration help manage social relations of neoliberalism whilst effectively blurring the relationship between civil society and the state. Frameworks used to theorise urban restructuring tend to focus on economic processes and are, therefore, often deterministic. Deindustrialisation and the subsequent expansion of the service sector is said to signify the end of the traditional working class. The theoretical thrust towards cultural endeavours was partly a reaction to the claims that the decline of class was part of a progressive process of individualisation.
