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. They show how people’s decisions and actions co-produce the city and give it shape. In doing so, the contributors complicate the dominant narrative of Manchester’s renaissance as solely driven by the city administration’s entrepreneurial ethos. 

Instead, these ethnographies of Manchester reveal a city of paradoxes; economic recession, public sector cuts, pockets of deprivation and political disengagement coexist alongside strong leadership, aspiration, vision, cultural growth, and a proud local identity. They show the impossibility of representing the city as a unified object and how people act as if it was.

Realising the city 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.