Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.
Jane Jacobs, The Life and Death of Great American Cities”
If we seek to move “beyond the body count” as Cowie and Heathcott (2003) encourage deindustrialization scholars, then we must also be compelled to identify ways to make working-class lives count not only in the present, but also as active contributors shaping the future. Alternatives to gentrification are needed that are capable of addressing the class divisions, power discrepancies and structural inequalities that lie at the heart of neoliberal urban policy making and that have made cities increasingly exclusive.
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Post-industrial landscapes offer unparalleled terrain — materially, symbolically and at scale that transcends from the body to the site, from the neighbourhood to the city and from the city to the global city — in which to explore the nature and impact of social displacement and who ultimately, as Henri Lefebvre (1968) articulated, has a “right to the city.”
The large question is not whether abandonment can be avoided, gentrification controlled, displacement eliminated, or even how these things can be done, but rather whether there is the desire to do them. That is a question that can only be answered in the political arena.