A Regeneration Provocation

7 normative primary principles for aspirational urban regeneration

This is a summary of a paper presented at the conference and book launch 6 February 2014, at London South Bank University. This work is ongoing.

What is urban regeneration and how can it be achieved successfully? These two questions have been much on my mind for the least 10 years at least. Recently, I co-edited a book called The Routledge Companion to Urban Regeneration. http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415539043/ When the book came out it was as if somebody had fired a starting pistol and people started running at me from all directions asking two questions: 1) but what is urban regeneration? 2) how can you achieve successful urban regeneration? At first my response was, read the book, but it is 600 pages long. Then I would summarise our definition of regeneration and say that’s what you have to do to achieve successful regeneration. While preparing to give a paper for the book launch event in February this year, the second of the two questions was very much on my mind. Of course there’s lots about this in the book’s conclusions but there again they are 9000 words long. Something a tad snappier was required for a 20 minute presentation, more on that later. A major question faced by politicians, professionals, academics and local communities who seek to address urban problems and evaluate the outcomes of regeneration interventions; is what problems should urban regeneration seek to remedy? In addition regeneration is a mulch-disciplinary policy activity with weak, contested and divergent theoretical underpinning.

There are two broad approaches which provide a rationale for urban regeneration interventions led or funded by the public sector and the multifarious partnerships. Firstly, there is the needs-based rationale. This approach gives priority to the problems that local people and communities face, e.g. poverty, unemployment, poor housing, poor health, poor educational achievement, lack of appropriate employment skills and high crime rates. Secondly, there is the ‘opportunity’-based approach. This approach prioritises opportunities which particular parts of towns and cities seem to offer, particularly opportunities for decent returns on a financial investment and an attractive (even edgy) urban lifestyle. This rationale seems to foreground places rather than people. Exponents of this rationale emphasise the idea that, public (regeneration) subsidy which supports business enterprises, helping them to success, will lead inexorably to a flow of resources to disadvantaged communities and by such means the amelioration of their problems.

What is noticeable is that geographically, places of opportunity and places of urban problems are seldom coterminous, though they do often exist, rather tragically, cheek by jowl and have done for centuries. With great clarity, at the needs-based end of the regeneration spectrum is the response of the London Mayor to the 2011 riot (civil disturbance or uprising) which followed the police (lawful) killing of Mark Duggan in Tottenham, north London. There was an inquiry into the causes of the riot, followed by a multi-million pound regeneration package devised by the Mayor and the Greater London Authority. Across the river at Battersea Power Station the £800 million ‘regeneration’ intervention, partially funded by a Malaysian financial institution presents the archetypal opportunity-based approach to regeneration. The opportunities on offer are for a fantastic return on financial investment and/or the chance of a fabulous urban lifestyle.

Now is not the place to try and resolve the long-standing argument these two approaches generate. What is noticeable however, is that the way urban regeneration is defined more or less determines the shape and direction of strategies, policies and projects on the ground. Hence the definition of urban regeneration and its primary objectives are crucial. It is from the definition that the rationales for intervention cascade. In the book we propose a new definition and therefore a new primary objective for ‘aspirational’ urban regeneration as follows:

urban regeneration is area-based intervention which is public sector initiated, funded, supported, or inspired, aimed at producing significant sustainable improvements in the conditions of local people, communities and places suffering from aspects of deprivation, often multiple in nature.

It should be noted that this definition, or set of paramount objectives, does not preclude opportunity-based approaches, what it does do is focus those approaches primarily on the needs of local people suffering various kinds of hardship and disadvantage. So how is aspirational regeneration to be achieved? Well that is deceptively simple. Regeneration policy makers, professionals and practitioners on the ground need to follow seven principles in order to achieve the primary objectives set out in the aspirational definition, therefore urban regeneration should:

1. base interventions on robust understandings of issues through relevant theoretical frameworks
2. identify problems not symptoms (or only opportunities)
3. provide intervention strategies aimed at local people
4. disburse public funding transparently, achieving value for money
5. include a range of relevant stakeholders in equitable delivery partnerships
6. provide sound exit strategies to ensure long term (sustainable) improvements in people’s lives
7. demonstrate the extent of achievement of aspirational regeneration objectives through appropriate evaluation

The only thing to do now is to try them out at your next dinner party/community activist meeting/research seminar and let me know what happens.