The Rentier City: Manchester and the Making of the Neoliberal Metropolis
Isaac Rose
Repeater Books, £14.99

YOU could be forgiven for thinking that Manchester, with its glittering towers and feverish urban regeneration powered by foreign investment, is a post-industrial city transformed, a worthy competitor to London. Manchester’s PR machine is shouting it from the city’s lofty rooftops. 

Isaac Rose is well placed to comment on all this. As an organiser for Greater Manchester Tenants Union, for several years he has worked closely with tenants in the area, challenging housing providers and city planners who treat human beings like cattle, to be shunted here or there in order to maximise private profit.

Through examining the history of the city’s expansion, Isaac Rose tells a story of community resistance, political intrigue and broken dreams of municipal socialism; a city with desperate poverty, dispossession and displacement of the people who, for generations, helped build the city.
 
The author was not born in Manchester, but, like me, has lived there for 10 years. He writes: “During this time two things have been impossible to ignore — the rapidity of the changing city skyline and the rising rents,“ and I couldn’t agree more.