Of Urban Entrepreneurs or 24-Hour Party People? City-Centre Living in Manchester, England

Abstract

My purpose in this paper is to provide a fuller account of the origins and nature of city-centre living in Manchester, England, by emphasising its too-often neglected ‘independent’ and ‘countercultural’ underside. Some urban policy researchers have made too much of the ‘entrepreneurial turn’ in Manchester, which is said to have been a key catalyst of its city-centre renaissance and city-centre living. My own empirical work as well as that of some cultural geographers highlights the ‘counter-cultural’ origins of the city-centre renaissance and, later, city-centre living in Manchester. I argue that urban policy research in Britain tends to characterise city-centre dwellers as young, single, professionals as if this was a more-or-less undifferentiated social group. Yet this demonstrates an oversight towards work undertaken by some geographers and urban sociologists who have shown that gentrifiers moving into British and North American city centres and inner-urban areas over the last two decades are a complex and differentiated group of housing consumers. My own empirical work shows that Manchester city-centre dwellers are a similarly complex and differentiated group of housing consumers that occupy a number of distinct positions within the city-centre housing market, and that this can be seen more clearly when the origins and subsequent development of city-centre living in Manchester is more fully understood. Three typologies of Manchester city-centre dwellers are identified; ‘counter-culturalists’ tend to originate from within the ‘new’ middle class; ‘city-centre tourists’ tend to originate from the ‘service class’; and ‘successful agers’ tend to be over the age of fifty.