Introduction

This chapter focuses on the tensions around the media representation of a city suburb that has undergone a major urban renewal process. The Castle Vale estate at the edge of North East Birmingham, referred to locally as ‘The Vale’, has been through significant physical and social changes since the 1960s: from high-rise council estate to low-rise social housing, and from being an area seen as having significant social problems to one where the potential of community-led localism might be enacted with a degree of success. Throughout these changes, community media have played a role in both representing the process of change and being a vehicle through which such change is made palatable to residents. Yet, assumptions about the democratising, empowering function of community media inevitably come up against the tensions over representation that exist between readers and producers of media texts. Given the historic reputational issues of the estate, what stories do citizens now expect to be told about the area? What role could citizen journalists play in the digital age in countering what David Parker and Christian Karner (2011: 309) have described as externally imposed ‘negative reputational geographies’?

As part of a strand in a major ‘Connected Communities’ project focused on the notion of ‘Creative Citizenship’, the research presented here has looked closely at the role that community media play in Castle Vale, drawing upon a range of primary research: workshops with residents; interviews with the estate's community media organisation; and reflections on the undertaking of a participatory journalism project.

Urban policy and the role of the citizen in ‘The Vale’

Following major post-war inner-city slum clearances in Birmingham, Castle Vale was one of a series of edge-of-city estates that became home to families whose previous inner-city dwellings had been declared unfit to live in. Although the new estate had a large proportion of low-rise maisonettes, it was the 34 high-rise flats that dominated the landscape when built throughout the 1960s. When the nearby M6 was later completed, it was these tower blocks that greeted visitors to the city, a symbol perhaps of Birmingham's famously brutal approach to city regeneration that brought radical change to its city centre as much as to its edges.