The Urbis Building as Looking Glass:

Abstract

This paper uses the glass and steel Urbis building in Manchester as a prism via which we might look at cultural, political and economic change in England over the last twenty years or so. It takes stock of neoliberalism, museum and popular culture in England during that time, and tries to sense different political, cultural and economic turns, at the same time as it acknowledges that ‘uneven development’ on any landscape makes the attempt to describe macro change problematic. To deal with this, the paper introduces a particular figuring of the term ‘degentrification’, in order to think about the ways in which these essentially dialectical movements operate. We are soliciting a cultural dialectic here, which focuses on one site, but then uses the insights made there – in the tradition of Walter Benjamin and the Situationists – to think through wider cultural, economic and political temperatures in England between the early 1990s and the present day.