David Byrne argues that both the structuralist ‘new geography’ and the poststructuralist ‘new new’ geography ignore or deny the role of class as a creative agency in the formation of urban life. New perspectives on class, which reduces it to an essentially cultural position, reinforce this tendency to allocate all creative capacity under capitalism to capital and capitalists. The consequent pessimism has informed the collaborative politics characteristic of ‘the new urban left’ in the UK. The article concludes with an argument for active strategies of ‘empowerment’ directed towards the working poor as a component of the ‘social proletariat’.
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