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Urban Politics
Accommodation or Resistance

By Teresa Hayter
November 1997
Spokesman
ISBN: 0-85124- 606-0
186 pages, 5 3/4 x 8 1/4"
$29.50 paper original

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This book is an account of urban politics since the 1960s. It covers a wide range of urban problems and policies from a socialist perspective. It refuses to accept the growing de-politicization of urban politics in academic and other circles and the retreat into vague notions of "localness", cultural difference and (undefined) community. The author believes that unemployment is a central cause of poverty, racism, crime and other problems in inner cities. The lessons learned in the 1960s and 1970s remain completely relevant to present day community activists. It is as true now as it was then that communities cannot "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" and that the elimination of poverty requires fundamental change at a national and indeed international level. Governments' "special programs for inner cities" are marginal in their effects and represent a giving back, with fanfares, of a small part of what has been taken away. Urban Politics is based partly on the author's personal experience as one of the left activists recruited to the Greater London Council under Ken Livingstone and her subsequent research for the London Strategic Policy Unit, followed by campaigning and research against the closure of car plants at Cowely in Oxford and a period of research on urban policies and City Challenge at South Bank University in the 1990s.

Politics
Socialist Renewal