What is a city? How does it come into being? Who are the people involved? How are decisions made and what happens next? Realising the city provides multiple insider perspectives on this northern English city. Drawing on extensive fieldwork into the city's football clubs, annual civic parade and Gay Village, airport and infrastructure, parks and housing estates, these ethnographic accounts trace the multiple dynamics of a vibrant and rapidly changing post-industrial city. This book provides essential reading for researchers interested in contemporary urban dynamics. Its accessible style and material will also interest community activists, city administrators, political analysts and elected officials. The book is suitable for undergraduate reading lists for courses teaching ethnographic methods and on urban studies courses within sociology, anthropology, geography and the built environment.

Foreword by Kevin Ward
Introduction: tackling the urban through ethnography - Camilla Lewis and Jessica Symons

Part I: Realising urban organisations
1 Inclusion without incorporation: re-imagining Manchester through a new politics of environment - Hannah Knox
2 Nurturing an emergent city: parade making as a cultural trope for urban policy - Jessica Symons
3 Lounge Manchester: the new politics of loungification - Damian O'Doherty

Part II: Realising urban spaces
4 Under the surface of the village: public and private negotiations of urban space in Manchester - Michael Atkins
5 Making and enabling the commons: shared urban spaces and civic engagement in North Manchester - Luciana Lang
6 Urban futures and competing trajectories for Manchester city centre - Elisa Pieri

Part III: Realising urban communities
7 Urban transformation in football: from Manchester United as a 'global leisure brand' to FC United as a 'community club' - George Poulton
8 'People want jobs, they want a life!' Deindustrialisation and loss in East Manchester - Camilla Lewis
9 'Don't call the police on me, I won't call them on you': self-policing as ethical development in North Manchester - Katherine Smith

Afterword: the tension in making and realising a city - Jessica Symons
Select bibliography
Index

Editors

Camilla Lewis is a Senior Lecturer in Ageing and Urban Studies; Architecture, Planning and Landscape at Newcastle University

Jessica Symons is an Urban Anthropologist at the University of Manchester