Zoe Thompson, ‘Urban Constellations: Spaces of Cultural Regeneration in Post-industrial Britain’ Ashgate 2015

What is the fate of culture and urban regeneration in the era of austerity? In Urban Constellations: Spaces of Cultural Regeneration in Post-industrial Britain (Ashgate, 2015), Zoe Thompson applies critical cultural theory to help understand this question. The book is based on four case studies, of The Lowry in Salford, The Deep in Hull, The Sage Gateshead and The Public in West Bromwich. These four case studies are read through a variety of methods, including walking and visual methods, along with two key theorists, Jean Baudrillard and Walter Benjamin. Baudrillard and Benjamin are juxtaposed as important thinkers of culture, the symbolic and the urban, in an attempt to show the ambivalences of cultural buildings used for urban regeneration. The buildings are narrated as ‘dreamhouses’ within the symbolic, as well as the political, economy of post-industrial urban spaces. The book shows how all the case studies offer elements of hope and redemption for their locations, whether as sites for individual’s memory, in the case of The Sage, or as collective notions of art and culture, in the example of The Lowry. However the book also shows the risks associated with these spaces, as premature ruins, in the case of the now closed The Public, or sites reminding us of nature’s revenge in the form of climate change, as The Deep does. The book will be of interest to a large range of scholars across cultural and urban studies, through to architecture and critical theory, and it has important lessons for contemporary urban policy too.

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