Politicians, planners, and academics use terms like ‘sustainability’, ‘security’, and ‘regeneration’ in persuading us that we need to manage the social dislocations and urban decay of late modernity and globalisation. Yet cities have always been a fulcrum of trouble. They grew at points of intersection: crossroads, river fords, and ports where streams of diverse travellers would collide and settle, in pursuit of trade, adventure, excitement, riches, romance, survival, conquest, and intrigue. They were always vulnerable to the ebb and flow of markets, human migration, military competition, and struggles between people divided by clan membership, ‘race’, ethnicity, wealth, religion, and other markers of difference and tribal solidarity. This complexity and danger could be viewed as the sources of the city's creativity and power (Jacobs, 1997). From this perspective, the productive volatility of city life is in tension with competing visions of urban renaissance and of utopian orderliness.

This chapter will explore some of the current tensions in these competing frames of interpretation and strategies of action. It assembles an uneasy mix of ideas from colliding worlds: journalism, high and low; ideological, political networks; policy makers, civil servants and think tanks; the major corporations and their well-financed lobbies; the universities; police, security, criminal justice, and welfare institutions and professions. It also draws on the perspectives of those maintaining the infrastructure of the city from sewage treatment to the transport and emergency services. These frames of interpretation underpin attempts to govern city life from above in the public interest, and in the name of the institutions of law, state, and the big corporations. These constitute the key actors, or, to use current parlance, the ‘stakeholders’, involved in trying to govern city life from above.

For those trying to drive political agendas for change, rational argument and appeals to evidence and science are limited. Leaders resort to simpler messages conveyed through rhetorical (persuasive) arts of emotional manipulation and rich figurative language: the use of metaphor, analogy, and allusion. Democratic politicians’ use of the rhetorical arts, filtered through and shaped by the mass media, involves a recognition that citizens also attempt to govern their domains from below. This is so whether as individuals or in collectivities. These can range from the family, to religious institutions, sports and leisure associations, to organised crime and terrorist conspiracies.