In this final section we turn to examine the practice of securing an urban renaissance in its multifaceted forms and effects. Here we gather contributions that throw light on the impacts of these initiatives on the communities they touch, as well as the broader social politics that has emerged around concerns with disorder, policing, anti-social behaviour, and a wider renewal agenda that is so often co-present with these initiatives. The preceding chapters have prepared the ground for this final and most extensive section by exploring the theoretical and conceptual assumptions that lie at the heart of current agendas of safe and sustainable communities and the policy programmes and practices that are instigated to pursue such aims. In this section these underpinnings are elaborated via closer investigations within communities, neighbourhoods, and cities to help bring focus and clarity to the ways in which crime has become interlinked with processes of urban and community renewal.

In this section community, as the focal point for policy, is understood in two key senses. First, it signifies an emphasis on the local and neighbourhood scale that points towards concrete places and geographical locales. As we said in the introductory chapter (see Chapter One), area-based initiatives have been part of urban renewal processes for some decades now, and yet now the links between community and the delivery of renewal have been asserted as inseparable as is evidenced through the strong reliance on engaging with localities in recent programmes that include yet extend way beyond the flagship New Deal for Communities or Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships. Such reliance on this scale, then, can be explained only with reference to the second element of ‘community’ in current policy agendas, namely that concerning the social processes, networks, and their resources within these localities. In this respect many of the contributions here highlight the growing importance assigned by urban and criminal justice policies that have recast the role of community: as agent of change and control, as a means of securing success in processes of regeneration, and as a key output of policy itself – groups of people with responsibility and acting to ensure order in their neighbourhoods.