Cochrane, Allan

Bio Sketch

Allan Cochrane (ORCID 0000-0003-0320-4642) is Emeritus Professor at The Open University, a sociologist-turned-urban-studies scholar whose work spans urban policy, local government, housing, regionalism and multiculture. He was supported as a Leverhulme Emeritus Research Fellow at the time of the 2015 article. His career-long theme is that regions, cities and policy territories are "made up" — actively assembled through governing practices — rather than given; this runs from Re-Thinking the Region (with John Allen, Doreen Massey and others, 1998) through the regional-assemblage papers with Allen (2007, 2010) to Understanding Urban Policy: A Critical Approach (2007). His South-East England and Milton Keynes work (with Julie Charlesworth, and in the ESRC growth-region projects with Bob Colenutt and Martin Field) supplies this wiki's founding account of the suburbs as central to contemporary urbanism (web-verified via Open Research Online, oro.open.ac.uk). His 2015 article ran in the same Built Environment special issue as Roger Keil's "Towers in the Park" and cites Keil's generalized-suburbanization formulation — Cochrane, Colenutt and Field, Keil and Per Gunnar Røe are all researchers in the McMaster/York-led Global Suburbanisms MCRI programme that structures the wiki's suburbanism batch.

Key Works

*Living on the Edge: Building a Sub/Urban Region* (2015) — with Colenutt & Field; the suburbs repositioned as central to urbanism, evidenced on the edge of the London city region (Built Environment 41.4, pp. 567–578)
Understanding Urban Policy: A Critical Approach (Blackwell, 2007) — the critical urban-policy synthesis
Re-Thinking the Region (with John Allen, Doreen Massey et al., Routledge, 1998) — the regions-as-constructed programme
"Beyond the territorial fix: regional assemblages, politics and power" (with John Allen, Regional Studies 41.9, 2007) — regions as assemblages "made and unmade"
"Assemblages of state power: topological shifts in the organization of government and politics" (with John Allen, Antipode 42.5, 2010)
"Making up a region: the rise and fall of the 'South East of England' as a political territory" (Environment and Planning C 30.1, 2012)
"Post-suburbia in the context of urban containment: the case of the South East of England" (in Phelps & Wu eds., International Perspectives on Suburbanization, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) — his own chapter in the post-suburbia literature the 2015 article cites
"Tales of the suburbs: the local politics of growth in the South-East of England" (with Julie Charlesworth, Urban Studies 31.10, 1994) — the 1994 precursor to the 2015 article
"Multiculture and community in new city spaces" (with Kesten, Mohan & Neal, Journal of Intercultural Studies 32.2, 2011) — the Milton Keynes multiculture research the 2015 article draws on

Key Concepts

Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:

suburbanism — suburbanism as an urban way of life; the suburbs as defining aspect of urbanism
post-suburbia — post-suburbia under containment (his 2011 chapter; the 2015 article's frame)
polycentrality — the "polycentric mega-region" read through overlapping, assembled regions rather than scalar sub-regions
home-ownership-democracy — the political settlement linking home ownership to security and suburban identity
nimbyism — the contested growth-politics label and its reversal by community actors

Relevance to the Core Research

Cochrane supplies the wiki's suburbanism cluster with its founding empirical-argumentative text and its regional-theory backbone: the claim that the suburbs are "a defining aspect of urbanism" rather than "a response to urbanization," and the assemblage theory of regions "made and unmade (assembled and disassembled)" that explains how a "(sub)urban region" can exist without its residents identifying with it. His work bridges the wiki's urban-policy and housing registers (the Sustainable Communities Plan, viability, house-builders) with its polycentrality discussion (Hall & Pain's polycentric mega-region), and extends the wiki's political-economy register of the home (home-ownership-democracy) beyond the interior-focused cluster. For the researcher's suburbanism batch, he is the anchor author.

Source Support

Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:

Living on the Edge: Building a Sub/Urban Region (2015) — with Bob Colenutt and Martin Field