Narratives of policy: the construction of urban problems and urban policy in the official discourse of British government 1968–1998

Abstract

The central concern of this article is to examine and investigate the assumptions underlying the development of post-war urban policy in Britain. The essential presumption underlying the article is that in order to situate and analyse policy responses, it is first necessary to understand the ‘problems’ to which policy is responding. This involves asking why, and how, a particular issue (i.e. a facet of reality) comes to be defined as a problem. Additionally it is argued that the definition and construction of a ‘problem’ contains within it the ‘solution’ to that problem. Moreover, the construction of a ‘problem’ (and its ‘immanent solution’) involves the development of a particular discursive narrative (a ‘story’) depicting/portraying the evolution and causes of the problem. Drawing upon work in discourse and narrative analysis and recent developments in policy analysis, this article investigates the ways in which urban problems have been constructed over the last 30 years, providing a periodization of urban policy based upon the distinct modes in which urban problems have been constructed and the immanent policy responses to those problems.