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Through a focus on "consumer-citizenship" this paper foregrounds the class practices inherent in urban regeneration. Using Glasgow's 2014 Commonwealth Games (CWGs) as an illustrative example of regeneration, it seeks to highlight the market-led processes that underpin state interventions. The paper demonstrates how these processes are implemented to transform "problem people, and problem places" (Damer 1989, From Moorepark to "Wine Alley") into sites of "active" consumption and "responsible" citizenship. Yet, access to this "consumer citizenship" is stratified. In doing so, we synthesise conceptual insights from the Marxist-influenced gentrification literature and the Foucauldian-inspired housing renewal literature. We forward this to initiate further academic debate and empirical enquiry on the specific issue of mega sporting events.

This paper reappraises the meaning of space and place in contemporary class analysis. We explore how class is reshaped and mediated by neoliberal urban restructuring, of which the processes of gentrification and territorial stigmatization form critical parts. We focus on the contemporary interrelation of class and urban restructuring in the post-crash city by looking at the local lived experiences of the 2014 Commonwealth Games (CWG) in Glasgow’s East End. This high-profile regeneration effort in a deprived working-class neighbourhood reveals much about the functions of neoliberal financial capitalism, austerity and contemporary class formation. We show that gentrification and territorial stigmatization work in tandem within urban regeneration policy interventions as a punitive strategy for managing poor populations. This involves land value and (de)valuing of people and creates new localized class inequalities and insecurities. Our research highlights that in the face of national level cuts and commodification, residents’ local relations and support become essential social, economic and political resources. Yet, paradoxically, at the very same time, their local attachment to place is devalued, stigmatized and is at its most precarious. This exposes the coercive elements of the neoliberal class project; a distinct urban class inequality of our time and therefore, we suggest, a critical direction in class analysis.

This article explores how stigmatisation is intimately linked with neoliberal governance and capital accumulation in specific ways through processes around the Glasgow Commonwealth Games. It advances the author’s previous research exploring the effects of stigma on the East End community hosting the Games, by looking at some of the processes of power and profit which motivate stigmatising processes by ‘gazing up’, rather than ‘gazing down’. That is, looking at the role of the stigmatisers in this project and not the stigmatised. It draws loosely on Goffman’s concept of ‘backstage’ to shed light on those who produce and profit from these stigmatisation processes, including government bodies and actors and private business interests. Looking at some of the processes through which stigmatisation is profited from reveals not only forms of power vital to this process but that it is a key form of exploitation integral to capital accumulation. Under austerity, the political economy of the Games constitutes state support of private finance and a simultaneous withdrawal of social welfare support, which transfers the burden of debt from the state to the individual and wealth from public funds to private funds.

In this paper we show how the form and effects of gentrification have advanced in the post crash, recessionary context. As such, we argue that state-led gentrification contributes to state-led evictions. The cumulative impacts of government cuts and the paradigmatic shift of housing from a social to financialised entity not only increases eviction risk amongst low income households but, through various legal repossession frameworks that prioritise ownership, the state actively endorses it. Given the nature and extent of these changes in housing, we argue that the state-led gentrification has advanced further. Evictions, we argue, are the new urban frontier and this is orchestrated by the state in fundamental ways.

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This paper critiques the use of gentrification within urban policy by examining gentrifiers' neighbourhood practices. Strategies of gentrification are increasingly used to attract people and capital to places of 'decline' in order to combat the effects of uneven development. Policy experts and governments believe middle-class settlement creates 'cohesive', socially mixed communities. However, such a strategy may have serious unintended and paradoxical consequences. Despite widespread application we know little about the outcomes of gentrification within urban policy. This paper seeks to rectify this by critically examining the hegemony of gentrification. This is explored empirically by examining the practices of gentrifiers. Hegemony normalises governance, which essentialises middle-class settlement and legitimates their residential practices, over those of working-class communities. Analysis of changes in the Park area in Glasgow reveals that incoming residents' choices and practices centre around the consumption of segregation. The paper argues that bringing middle-class groups into the debate and foregrounding their autonomy not only helps in aiding the evaluation of these policies; it elucidates how their practices actually impact upon working-class communities, the supposed beneficiaries of their arrival.

Large scale sporting events are a major part of urban policy and regeneration strategies in the UK and globally. These events court as much controversy and criticism from academics and community groups