Restructuring Culture: Identification of Difference and the Regulation of Change in Ex-Mining Communities (Urban and Regional Planning and Development Series)

This text presents an analysis of community breakdown and its relations to the agencies of economic regeneration in a specific locality of East Durham. Whilst based on a specific case study, the book aims to present more than a text about mining communities. It offers a clear theorization drawing on several major themes extracted from post structural discourse and repackages them as usable tools for empirical research. In this way, the case study materials hold much wider theoretical meaning which could be applied in many areas of social research. Further to this the text offers a counter balance to more conventional research on community structure and public participation in planning and economic regeneration. Firstly, an ethnographic study is persued within the community structure of a specific locality. Secondly, the position, interests and scope of influence of the areas main pressure group is considered. Thirdly, the book turns its attention to agencies of economic regeneration operating in the area. In this way it is possible to determine the wide ranging and very different perceptions of the same spatial area held by the different groups, and ultimately the images which each held of the other. Finally, this point of difference is explored through the theorization of Jean Baudrillard in terms of a series of conceptualization which dominate much of his work and ultimately ideas of mass society and those outside that mass.