Caring for clean streets

Policies as world-making practices

Bibliographic Data

ID3159999
AuthorsNatalie Gill (Lancaster University, corresponding author)
Year2017
Volume65
Issue2_suppl
Pages71-88
Publication date2017-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Sociological Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0038-0261 • E-ISSN: 1467-954X
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0081176917710422
OpenAlexW2731033883
LanguageEN
Citations received7
References cited43

At a local authority domestic waste and recycling department in the North West of England, a local authority surveyor assesses the streets of the district for cleanliness. The surveying practice is also a way of assessing the work of the local authority for efficiency. This drive to improve services is a mode of care as governance and is actively entangling local streets with government practices that are generative of social relations that then shape future care practices. But these care practices are at odds with broader policy aims to strengthen relations between local residents and their environments. This article outlines the role that street survey practices play in articulating the social contours of place, how these contours are shaped by histories that are carried in policy technologies of calculation and mapping. The author argues that policy practices are performative of realities that shape possibilities for engagement as citizens and add to some common worlds and not others

Aesthetics · Best practice · Civil engineering · Corporate governance · Economics · Government (linguistics) · Local authority · Local government · Management · Odds · Performative utterance · Political science · Public relations · Sociology · Urban planning · Urban policy · Work (physics) · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Engineering · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Public Administration · Urban Planning and Governance

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