Framing regeneration: Embracing the inhabitants

Cities are central to neoliberalism and therefore, there is a need to understand the tools used by policy makers to present and garner support from inhabitants to this ideology. By understanding how policy makers encourage inhabitants to support the attraction of private investment, it will be possible to recognise how power is manifested at a local level. This article proposes to demonstrate how the Local Authority and other public and private (and public–private partnership) organisations in Liverpool intend to embrace the inhabitants in urban neoliberal policies. Such recognition gives insight on how the process of urban neoliberalism has evolved and is advocated at a local level. By means of frame analysis (Goffman E (1986) Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press) of strategic documents, it is proposed that the inhabitants are stereotyped according to specific characterisations and hence, included within the narratives of urban regeneration as a ‘product’. It is argued that this commodification and one-dimensional image of the inhabitants becomes a means of giving a global representation through the reappropriation of historical stereotypes. The paper demonstrates how future success is constructed, with neoliberalism legitimated through imposition and control of the inhabitants’ identity.