ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the moral and material positions of 'improvement', the proximities and distances that are invokeand by 'improving' people/ places. The 'responsible individual' has been positioned as an agent of movement and choice, fully inhabiting 'Big Society'. Residing in 'Big Society' involves motivating oneself to move through economic crises and regenerate futures, or be left behind as a result of bad habits and an inability to sort yourself out. Regeneration was both welcomed and criticised in accounts of changing places, at once holding out a promise for a different kind of place, where the past was positioned as residue against change. The mismanagement of resources and uneven effects suggests again the vulnerabilities of particular people and places within the logics of regeneration/degeneration. Consultation efforts require and reproduce the space- both in subjective identifications and in specific places- of the; responsible citizen, where regeneration and responsibilisation are implicated in the 'coming forward' of specific classed subjects.
