Culture, Class and Urban Policy: Reconsidering Equality

This paper considers the emerging policy agenda for urban–social renewal in relation to academic debates about equality and difference. Signalling problems with prevailing political and geographical approaches to class, the possibilities offered by a poststructuralist engagement with issues of equality are discussed. Policies for social regeneration and inclusion are analysed with regard to their approach to working–class cultures and are argued to be reductive and contradictory in core respects. More progressive and integrated understandings of class–cultural relations, such as those presented in the work of Nancy Fraser and Pierre Bourdieu, are identified as necessary to a meaningful concept of social justice for contemporary urban social policy.