Reconstituting troublesome youth in Newcastle upon Tyne : theorising exclusion in the night-time economy

• Main Author: Hesslewood, Aidan
• Other Authors: Gagen, Elizabeth : Atkinson, David : Rose, Mitch
• Published: University of Hull 2009
• Subjects: 910; Geography
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.526331

Following economic stagnation and deindustrialisation in 1970s and 1980s Britain, the shift toward neoliberalism and entrepreneurial urbanism has had profound effects on the ways in which cities are experienced by different socio-cultural groups. As many urban commentators have noted, in the pursuit of maintaining a spatial capital fix, some groups have found themselves increasingly marginalised through various image-related redevelopment processes. The working classes, the homeless and, increasingly, young people continue to be faced with a number of curtailments which restrict access and spatial freedoms. Taking Newcastle upon Tyne and its night-time economy as a case in point, this thesis examines the roles of class identity, delinquency, and exclusion in contemporary nightlife, and how current representations of troublesome youth such as the ‘chav’ are used to articulate exclusionary practices. This thesis, though, also illustrates that exclusion is ultimately driven by commercially-defined imperatives commensurate with extant urbanentrepreneurialism. However, whilst it was initially speculated that the young ‘lower’ classes were excluded from city centre nightlife outright, it was actually found that the night-time economy functions through a number of channelling and redistributive processes. The ‘chav element’, whilst being rejected from many venues, is not wholly excluded from the city centre, but segregated and contained in certain locales. Pointing to a more nuanced idea of exclusion as a spatial restructuring process, this thesis suggests that urban cultural geography should pay closer attention to a temporal, fluid, and fragmentary notion of exclusion that is constantly shifting and transforming alongside other changes in production and consumption.