Narratives of Neglect: Community, regeneration and the governance of security

By Jacqui Karn
Cullompton, Devon: Willan Publishing. 2007

Narratives of Neglect is the second title in a series on Crime Ethnography published by Willan Publishing. The book explores the way urban community transformation is understood, conceptualised and, as the title suggests, ‘narrated’ by various groups of residents, professionals, private developers, and workers in an urban neighbourhood (which the author has called ‘Millton’) in Manchester, England. The setting is a publicly owned (council) housing estate near the city centre which had been in a state of decline for a number of years and, at the time of the author’s fieldwork, was the focus of plans to regenerate the locality using public and private investment. Karn’s ethnography recounts the stories of Millton’s decline and the ‘place’ of crime and disorder in these accounts.

The author skilfully demonstrates how residents and professionals frequently ‘talk past each other’ and how community-based issues and concerns are modified and reinterpreted to correspond with agencies’ interests and agendas. This re-configuration serves to both undermine participation on the one hand and plays a significant part in the way punitive and exclusionary discourses and interventions are forged and justified on the other. Karn reveals the tensions and dilemmas associated with community participation in local governance which are so frequently glossed over in official accounts of community consultation exercises. The text makes an important contribution to the existing literature on community change, ‘crime’, and ‘disorder’ and the appeal to ‘community’ in regeneration and renewal discourses. The main arguments are well-situated within existing criminological literature; and readers are likely to find this a useful resource. Moreover, the interdisciplinary nature of the subject matter means that the book is also likely to attract students and academics in the related fields of social policy, urban studies and urban sociology. Some of the themes perhaps could have been more closely tied together and the arguments developed in the concluding chapters. The analysis in Chapter 10 (Towards a governance of just sustainability), for example, could have been extended in the light of some of the theoretical work discussed in the early stages of the book and the empirical insights generated through the substantive chapters. The more policy-oriented proposals possibly deserved more critical exploration too given the wider political-economic drivers of urban change in post-industrial cities such as Manchester, and the changing role of the local state in the governance of crime in this setting, which the author discusses in the introductory chapters. But these are minor points; as mentioned, the book is a very welcome addition to the criminological literature.

The ethnography is detailed and nuanced and, in this way, the book is likely to provide a useful exemplar for teaching qualitative methods generally and ethnography in particular. Monographs such as these are rare, and those that are as painstakingly conducted as Narratives of Neglect are exceptional. There remained some scope to discuss further the methodological issues arising in and from the study in the substantive text of the book; the author makes reference, in the first chapter, to some of the difficulties encountered during the fieldwork because ‘trust’ both within and between groups of residents and their relationships with authorities was fragile, and there is an appendix relating to interviewing. For the reader, lecturer or student, however, a more comprehensive ‘picture’ of the estate, its context and biography would have been welcome. This said, the ethnography is thoroughly engaging; the book is well-organised and well-written. It deserves a wide audience.