Transforming places

Successive waves of regeneration have aimed to address the needs of disadvantaged places and communities, but it is not always clear whether these have transformed the prospects of people and places for the better. Many places remain deprived in spite of years of regeneration initiatives and interventions. This raises hard questions about what can be done to address or manage decline and what the outlook is for deprived communities.

JRF's work in this area seeks to inform approaches to transforming disadvantaged places at national policy level and to improve learning about the interventions needed to regenerate and transform particular localities.

Specific objectives were to:

• develop understanding of the underlying forces operating to transform places (economic, social or environmental) and to explain the different levels on which they operate, from local, regional, and national to transnational;
• explore the interventions designed to transform places that are suffering from decline or disadvantage or to manage that decline, in order to improve the prospects of both places and the people who use them (as residents, workers, etc); and
• find out more about what makes a difference.

Key issues

• Spatial polarisation between the wealthy and the poor has increased in Britain during the period from 1970 to 2005. Urban clustering of poverty has increased.
• Whilst overall unemployment decreased between 2000 and 2005 in areas with higher claimant and poverty rates, high levels of worklessness persist in many areas affected by economic decline and other forms of disadvantage, often concentrated amongst social housing tenants.
• There is no universal model for successful regeneration because of the complexities of different economic relationships within different areas, for example between cities and former industrial and coalfield areas nearby. Geography matters in how far deprived areas are benefiting from economic opportunities in neighbouring cities.
• People's horizons and their willingness to consider opportunities outside their known local areas can be limited by their attachment to a deprived neighbourhood and their strong family and social networks there.
• However, strong social networks can also foster resilience within deprived neighbourhoods. Sustained place management (building on neighbourhood management approaches) within deprived neighbourhoods can help to both stabilise and turn round their prospects but should pay equal attention to issues affecting people and places.
• Fragmented governance arrangements and policy silos (particularly between social inclusion and economic development) remain key barriers to the delivery of more effective interventions. A more powerful role for local government needs to be encouraged, taking an integrated approach to economic strategies (connecting region, cities and neighbourhoods) and enabling more collaboration between agencies.
• Debates about whether to focus on place or people interventions impose a false divide. The principles of sustainable development, with their focus on social equity, require effective and interlinked approaches across social, environmental and economic domains at all levels of governance. The reformed planning system offers opportunities for planning to play more of a central role in connecting regeneration with areas of deprivation.

Overview

Key projects funded under the transforming places programme have focused on:

• the socio-economic forces affecting the fortunes of places;
• assessing the impact of changing regional governance structures and interventions on deprived areas and changing city-region relationships;
• learning from other countries on what is needed to regenerate cities; and
• understanding more about how people's identities and attachment to place affect the futures of disadvantaged communities.

Phoenix cities: New book on city regeneration

Phoenix Cities: the rise and fall of great industrial cities tracks the regeneration and recovery of seven European cities following major industrial decline. The European experience shows progress in many of the cities. The American experience shows slower, more uncertain recovery. The book provides insight both into the main approaches by city leaders to recovery and the ground-level realities of urban change and progress.

Copies can be obtained from The Policy Press.

About the project

Phoenix Cities is the latest in a series of publications from a 3 year work programme funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and led by Anne Power at the London School of Economics. This programme provides:

• Analysis of the decline and recovery of seven European cities: Sheffield, Belfast, Bilbao, Torino, Leipzig, Bremen, St Etienne, exploring similarities and differences in the cities approaches to recovery following industrial decline in diverse contexts
• Indicators denoting the cities' varying success on economic, social and physical environmental changes
• A recovery framework which other cities could adapt to compare and evaluate their own performance
• Analysis of approaches in several US cities that are also seeking to regenerate but in a differing policy context with less federal support for regeneration
• Comparison of European and US approaches to regeneration drawing out key lessons for policy and practice.