13
Authority of The Common: Formation of Manchester City Council
Despite being a founding globaliser during the 19th century, Manchester has “found itself on the receiving end of new and ostensibly more intense forms of global economic restructuring.” (Peck and Ward, 2002:15) Notable neoliberal urbanisation strategies involved the reimagination of the city through city-centre consolidation, development of sporting economies, and the airport in order to encourage a “consumer” (Peck and Ward, 2002:37) and “high-tech base” (Peck and Ward,
2002:38).
In order to understand post-crisis developments in Manchester, notably the advent of the Manchester Life Development Company, the focus of the case study, it is firstly imperative to trace the consolidation of a central Manchester authority conflating formerly disparate local authorities into a single ‘territory’ for the marketisation of a ‘singular’ Manchester for the attraction of global urban investment following the city’s industrial decline. (Peck and Ward, 2002) These moments of shifting governance in partnership with the explosion of the IRA bomb in 1996 coalesced into a form of formalised financialised urban production detached from democractic processes.
Rescaling Governance: City Pride, MIDAS, and Marketing Manchester
Following the formation of the Manchester City Council in 1972, with the Local Government Act, Manchester’s “seventy-two units at different spatial scales” (Peck and Ward, 2002: 117) were replaced by “one consisting of ten modernised local governments.” (Peck and Ward, 2002: 117) However, during the 1980s, the focus of the conservative government acted in opposition to metropolitan unity. Instead metropolitan deconstruction became the modus operandi, resulting in “a tangled web of task-specific, locally-focused and loosely coordinated agencies” (Peck and Ward, 2002: 118) responsible for managing Manchester’s urbanisation. The centralisation of power in Greater Manchester to a single body (Manchester City Council) was ”a tactical
