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The purpose of this paper is to advance the understanding of the choices and difficulties at a city level that faced public leaders who were trying to pursue economic regeneration while at the same time coping with austerity policies introduced by national government.

We are using a case study approach to assess both the type of strategic leadership being offered and the public governance issues faced by Liverpool City.

In terms of leadership, the mayor fitted what we describe in the paper as the pragmatic type of strategic leader (long-term perspective providing foresight, and inclusiveness in formulating strategy and plans). The directly elected mayoral system seemed to have a number of advantages, perhaps the key one being that the mayor, acted for the entire city, rather than being the leader of the city council as he was before. New channels of social dialogue had been opened up, especially with the business community. The major difficulties in governance were the overstretched entrepreneurial and strategic capacity of the centre of the council and a lack of coherence in terms of multi-level governance.

The approach to public leadership in Liverpool represents a major break from the past; it was a widening of political inclusiveness to embrace people with a range of political perspectives. It was also a major break from the past in terms of building good relations between public leaders and business leaders. The prize was economic regeneration to create a better platform for social and economic inclusiveness.

This chapter explores the importance of place in the creation of new enterprise and wealth.

The chapter deploys a case study of the Liverpool city-region and provides a critical review of the conditions for small enterprise in the locality, with attention paid to enterprise in low income communities.

The argument here suggests that place and public investment are important contributory factors to help understand how enterprise can contribute to wealth creation.

Further work is required to comprehend the wider aspects of enterprise in the context of place and particularly its relevance to low income communities.

Policy makers may acknowledge how enterprise as a tool of wealth creation can reinforce local dynamics of social and economic exclusion and that the nuance of place needs to be taken into account.

Small enterprises have a wider potential beyond their economic role to impact local communities.

There are some studies in entrepreneurship that consider the propinquity between enterprise, place and wealth creation although placing this in the context of local economic decline and low income communities is a relatively under researched and misunderstood domain.

Post-pandemic renewal has to be much more radical. In this chapter we develop a considered response to reimagining the public sector with a focus on Liverpool City Region, its local economy and local government. By drawing on wider ideas of new municipalism, new narratives of how to make local economies more social through public investment, accountability and democratic governance can be made. The local scale offers the frame through which this can be examined as we make the case for new municipalism in the Liverpool City Region.

As scholar-activists we have been involved in responding to the continuous austerity imposed on local government. We research and debate the social and economic problems faced in the Liverpool City Region and present some of our findings here. In our work, through an organisation known as ‘Beacon’ – a grass roots movement agitating for new municipalism – we make the case for new policy initiatives and seek to demonstrate a need for a different type of public sector reform through local government.

In the context of the ‘levelling up’ agenda of the UK government, there remains concern across the city region about how local government can function given the ongoing austerity imposed from the centre. We have a public sector that has faced disinvestment in communities for over a decade and because of this, we reimagine public sector renewal by advocating for a new municipalism based on strategies of economic and political innovation that can lead to greater levels of democracy, accountability, wealth creation and distribution. We show examples outside of the UK, such as in the US and Spain, where embryonic forms of new municipalism are evident.

Our work sets out a roadmap to achieve a new municipalist agenda in the Liverpool City Region through an activist movement, Beacon. We bring together ideas and practices that are often underway elsewhere that have real political and economic impacts. In articulating the need for renewal, not only must we critically reflect on underpinning problems but seek to campaign for the change we advocate. The challenge we face is one of coordination and scale.

This empirical chapter explores the case of Baltic Creative Community Interest Company (BC CIC), a creative hub that enabled and demonstrated intrapersonal entrepreneurial capitals (Pret et al., 2016) to adapt quickly and develop novel offers for their tenants during an unprecedented period of crisis and change in the wider ecosystem. BCCIC is a community-owned property development company established to regenerate an underused post-industrial area in Liverpool and support the Creative and Digital community. Over the past decade, they have become a creative hub where small, unique micro-businesses thrive alongside more established enterprises.

Using an organisational ethnographic approach, the authors highlight the complexity in the conversion of entrepreneurial capitals and how this has demonstrated resilience and adaptability in the CIC during the global coronavirus pandemic in the 2020s. During the first coronavirus lockdown in 2020, The CIC responded swiftly to tenants by providing a wide variety of business support initiatives. Regular communications on sector-specific COVID-19 operational guidance and a support programme to help tenants apply for Liverpool City Council Small Business Support grants.

The establishment of this hub for creative entrepreneurs prior to the recent disruption proved invaluable. Although they were severely tested, emerging behaviours, such as agility, adaptability, and resilience during periods of crisis, were identified. This chapter offers key insights for scholars and those leading on creative hubs and cluster policy development and economic initiatives for creative sector support regionally, nationally, and internationally.

Although the concept of social capital is rightly associated with Putnam (2000), arguably its roots lie further back in the nineteenth century, but were first articulated in a “contemporary sense” in 1916 (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 2001, p. 41). The authors begin their analysis by summarizing the main types of capital: economic, social, political, human, cultural and symbolic, before exploring the different types of social capital, including bonding, bridging and linking. These are then linked to a variety of related concepts, including: social enterprise, social networks, social value, community development, community resilience and sociability (Cook, Halsall, & Wankhade, 2015). It is argued that social capital is central to these, and is of increasing importance across the globe within the context of the threats and opportunities posed by globalization on the one hand (including the spread of COVID-19) and of potential deglobalization on the other, in part as a reaction to COVID-19 and pre-existing nationalist trends toward limitation of global interactions. The discussion is supported by examination of a range of case studies drawn from societies of contrasting types, including the UK, USA, China, Bangladesh and South Africa. The authors conclude their analysis via consideration of how social capital can be expanded further in order to help meet contemporary and future challenges from whichever direction it arises.