Introduction

In this chapter, one of the authors tells the story of when she was chief executive officer (CEO) of the Single Parent Action Network (SPAN) and became involved in an ambitious urban regeneration project in the early 2000s, a venture that then fell apart under the pressures of ‘austerity’. SPAN is now a partner in ‘Productive Margins: Regulating for Engagement’, a collaboration between two universities and nine community organisations that aims to co-produce a series of research projects, and is one of the largest single research programmes to be funded through ‘Connected Communities’.

This story illustrates the two different strands enmeshed in this book. In the urban policy context, it can be viewed as a ‘post-regeneration’ story, showing the ways in which changes in urban policy shape and interact with the lived reality of the organisations, people and social structures that the policy is focused upon. For the ‘Connected Communities’ programme, it illustrates why community organisations and academics must be concerned with the regulatory mechanisms that enmesh the everyday activities of communities at the margins if the programme is to engage with issues of social justice.

The experiences in the SPAN story are the experiences of many, and have led to the research question that guides the ‘Productive Margins’ programme: how can we explore ways in which the ‘creativity, passions and skills’ of communities at the margins are able to produce new ways of thinking and ‘new experiments in living’? The ‘Productive Margins’ partnership intends to explore new imaginings of social space, ways of ‘mobilising neighbourhoods’ and ways in which digital spaces can and have been harnessed to shift power relations. Perhaps most critically, we aim to both explore and produce ‘spaces of dissent’ in which to challenge dominant discourses of ‘austerity’ and ‘we’re all in it together’, discourses that are all too frequently used to regulate and control social space, negating dreams of equality, the celebration of difference and of living differently.

The authors of this chapter were both involved in the design of the ‘Productive Margins’ programme from the outset. One, an academic with research projects on social housing and third sector advice organisations, became the principal investigator responsible for bringing together the bid to the Economic and Social Research Council.