Part IV: CONCLUSION: Chapter 12: CONTESTED VISIONS OF THE CITY AND DIFFERENT LIFE PROJECTS IN THE DE-INDUSTRIALISED NORTH.

This chapter discusses findings of a sociological study into the English cities of Manchester and Sheffield. An examination of the housing markets of Manchester and Sheffield would reveal that the choice to live in the city is very much a minority one. For the vast majority of the population, the identification of a place to live in the larger city is framed in terms of a Utopian desire and of practical economic possibility. There is no doubting that the presence and distribution of anxieties and fears are quite uneven, and different in expression, in different local areas and in different cities. Manchester has very often been associated in the local and Northern imagination with high levels of crime. By contrast, at least throughout most of the era of mass manufacturing other than the 1920s, Sheffield was associated in the local imagination with very low levels of reported crime by comparison with other cities and regions in the North and also in relation to the national average.