When was regeneration?

By , Sunday, 7 March 2010, 18 Comments

I’ve been thinking about regeneration which is not unexpected in a man who runs a consultancy team with Regeneration and Investment Advisory in its title and who writes for a journal whose raison d’etre is indeed regeneration.My thinking has led me to a hard question:when was regeneration? My own answer is :from the inner city riots of the early 80s to the credit crunch.

That is to say regeneration as a concept and a practice was a moment in time .And that moment has passed. I hear lots about housing from the Homes and Communities Agency but nothing about regeneration. The same goes with my conversations with officials in CLG. It’s become the bad smell in the room – everyone is aware of the embarrassment but no-one knows what to say about it. As to the private sector well they stopped doing regeneration projects – by which the developers meant mixed use inner city projects with lots of social housing – before central government even noticed there was a downturn. The armies have withdrawn from the field of regeneration but we seem to think we can still hear the sounds of battle. Actually there’s just silence about our agenda -and from all political parties.

Part of this debacle for regeneration is our own fault. We all got seduced by the house-builder buck and confused high density flats funded by loose credit as having something to do with the economic turnaround of places and communities which properly deserves the title ‘regeneration’. With little prospect of that buck returning any day soon we have to re-invent ‘regeneration’ at a time when the public coffers look pretty bare too. The bad news ? In this process those public bodies with ‘communities’ in their titles seem to be tad silent on their regeneration strategies for those communities. The good news ? It’s not the bureaucrats’ job to save our communities for us and never was. Indeed, the moment we wake up and realise only we can transform our own communities is the time real regeneration starts.

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  • Martin Hoban

    Tim,
    I dont think the question is: when was regeneration. I think the question is whose regeneration are we talking about: Governments? The private secor? Local authorities? Professionals? or local residents? The dominant model from the 1960′s has largely remained unchanged. External intervention from outsiders. Poor communities just keeping getting regenerated decade after decade with little success and poor value for money. We urgently need some new thinking in this area and to learn from the mistakes of past programmes. Also the people who live in these areas must be central to this discussion.

  • Alan Bruce

    Oh Dear not another missive about geting people in communities to take charge or at least be involved!

    Of course that is part of the mix for succesful regeneration, but most deprived communities also need outside ideas, belief and investment – that is why they are depressed in the first place.

    The biggest problem we have not solved – especiially in the inner cities – is how to make the aspirational working people wnat to stay and participate when it is much easier to buy a house in a better area – especially if you want your kids to benefit from better education and opportunities now and not in the future.

    As to Tim’s partially serious question – I would say after the fall of Thatcher and with the coming of Blair before he got sidetracked into foreign affairs. The we believed that we could actually change communities within a finite period for the better.

  • Regen Officer

    Spot on, Regeneration is too difficult to fully understand and needs money so in the current climate we just leave it.
    In the meantime nothing is happening and all the good things that have been done in the last 30 years will partly go to waste.
    Regeneration is an ongoing process as 30 years lapse you start things again in different angles.
    Regeneartion = RIP

  • Dekonti Mends-Cole

    Tim,

    Hmmm, I can see you are feeling a little bit cynical- “the death stench of regeneration”. It does stink, but that’s because it’s been coated in BS for such a long time. Regeneration has a long, long history and the constant need to revive and reinvest in areas means that it will likely outlive both you and me. Where did it begin? Anne Power would say late 19th century slum clearance was probably the genesis of regeneration in this country. I agree.

    If its death was the property crash, where was regeneration during the property boom? As the long forgotten Regeneration Framework noted, regeneration and economic development have been confused for the last 30 years but they are not one in the same. Regeneration as the improvement of physical, social and economic landscape for poor areas and people has not and will not be fuelled by property demand alone. I would agree that regeneration is going to have to wash itself clean and actually produce results for marginalised areas and people in the future. Listening to the opposing sides, it looks like education-led regeneration is going to be its next big makeover. So in hope of a brighter future here’s some inspiration for you: http://www.hcz.org/.

  • Martin Hoban

    Alan, I am not arguing against outside support and resources. I am against models that are developed outside these neighbourhoods by planners. In the existing models, local residents have limited roles as volunteers.
    As for local residents being involved. You only have to look at the success of social movements generally. For instance, Black and disabled people only made progress on rights when they were central to social change. Why cant we do the same for poor people? Or do we think they need to be led by professionals and champions as in the existing models?

  • Dave Proudlove

    As Tim has pointed out previously, during the Boom Years, there was too much of an obsession with property-focused interventions, and not enough on people-focused ones.

    Given that the poorest people will suffer the most during Bust Years, perhaps now is the time to think about what a people-focused regeneration model should be? And not just think about it, but also act upon it too.

  • bob Neil

    we are lost for ideas can anyone help,must go to the south of France for help see Jackie.

  • bob Neil

    Foot note problems are structural, more opportunity to see pigs fly. Help me David they are coming

  • http://www.renaisi.com Donna Lightbown

    I dont think its about ‘reinventing’ regeneration – it’s about commuinities themselves ‘reclaiming’ it from the clutches of developers and public bodies – but crucially, not being left to fend for themselves without the necessary state support and intervention. Only then will real regeneration begin! Sadly, I fear it will take another spark of 80s style inner city riots for ministers to sit up and take notice.

  • http://www.newhomesedinburgh.co.uk/ NewHomesUK

    I agree with sentiment that Regeneration has fallen out of favour as a “buzzword” on the political scene. That said regeneration is still taking place, whether under the guise of gentrification of poorer areas or the wave of developments transforming the London East End for the Olympics.

    I holey agree with comments above regarding, a change in focus after Thatcher. Developments such as the proposed high speed rail link from London to the Birmingham and the North should have been on the table decades ago. How can the Government seriously talk about decentralisation of public and private sectors, when the core infrastructure to facilitate such a move isn’t in place.

  • John Moss

    Regeneration is, was and always will be about getting private people to invest where currently they do not. In a “no money” scenario, we just have to be cleverer about how we do that.

    80s was about cleaning land and building roads, sewers, railways.

    90s was about finishing off the 80s and screwing up town centres with too many students/student flats/bars

    00s was about really screwing up town centres, but with added grand plans, partnerships and visions, most came to naught.

    10s will be about nitty gritty, small scale improvements to a rai link, a road, a new town square, rebalancing housing mix. All locally driven, all with limited public sector support because Gordon ate all the cash.

  • http://unlockingthepotential.blogspot.com/ David Ireland

    Regeneration isn’t dead it ‘s just the term has been appropriated by government and developers to make development sound socially acceptable. As you suggest the terms community and sustainable and have been simarly abused. It’s like countries that feel the need to use the word democrartic in their name. If anything that says it’s regeneration, it may well be a good reason to think it is precisely the opposite.

  • Tony Hutchinson

    Regeneration is a name given to a process that seeks to address social and economic exclusion. It is too often confused with redevelopment.

    Redevelopment may be new homes, a new supermarket or even new business space but unless the wealth created in,or by, the process of constructing, occupying and maintaining the property is consciously and explicitly made available to residents of the location then it is not regeneration. Equally if and only if the consequence of the process is transforming a place so that people who have choices choose to either remain in the area or move to it has regeneration taken place.

    Redevelopment driven by easy credit and ballooning property prices was only regenerative if strong political will existed to take a share of profits made for the communities around it. The lack of easy credit and the loss of the super-profits made from the property bubble mean that regeneration is more alive and more necessary than ever, political will drive regeneration more than cheap money.

  • Edward Harkins

    Tim, with respect, I read your piece as too ‘English-focused by default’, too limited in its timescale and too pessimistic.

    Your take, which you do describe as ‘My own answer’, is that regeneration ‘began with the inner city riots of the early 1980s’. Perhaps that is so from a purely English perspective, but for the rest of us living elsewhere in the UK it all began, at the very latest, in the 1970s with a certain little thing called the Glasgow East Area Renewal (GEAR). Well – it wasn’t really little – it was at the time the largest urban regeneration project in the UK, possibly in Western Europe.

    GEAR was perhaps also one of the very first genuine regeneration approaches in-that it was based on inter-agency partnership and – most crucially – genuine community engagement. That engagement stretched all the way to genuine community empowerment in the form of slowly evolving community based housing associations. Many of those housing associations still exist in expanded form today in the GEAR area, and are still under local community control.

    I’d not be as pessimistic as you about the death of regeneration. The context is that the ‘whole picture’ is in some sort of stasis – house building, the private sector and public expenditure. It is not regeneration that, as such, is singularly dying (although that may depend on what sort of regeneration, as another poster said)

    In going around Scotland anyway just now, I’m finding that there is an almost animated debate and interest around regeneration – recession is the cause of this animation, rather than being some fatal intervention. We have learned many lessons (GEAR’s shortcomings taught us about the need to attend to the economic and health, as well as the physical) and we must go on learning and adapting.

    I’m finding that many practitioners, activists and policy-makers have suddenly been brought face-to-face with the reality that we cannot going to go on with the piecemeal, silo, approach – with a bit of housing or retail here, a bit of training there and some token community consultation there. In the face of recession, and the aftermath, we have to work even harder at getting all the ducks lined up in a row and pressing all the appropriate levers at the appropriate time if we are to design, initiate and deliver sustainable regeneration.

    I think you are maybe acknowledging all this when you write about the need “to re-invent ‘regeneration’ at a time when the public coffers look pretty bare too”, and when you write about regenerating our own communities – and that is why I think that the SURF annual conference in Scotland next week is very appropriately entitled ‘Sustaining and Reinventing Community Regeneration’

    Incidentally, an awful lot of awfully alive people have signed up for that conference :-)

    • http://regenwilliams.wordpress.com Tim

      As a Welshman I could hardly disagree that my focus was too English. I’ms till reeling from the shock though in my defence I say :I do not consider the interventions to bring new jobs to South Wales in the 30s to be ‘regeneration’. or indeed the results of regeional policy and assistance in the 50s and 60s.They were far too successful and significant as economic interventions to be tarred with the regeneration brush…..!

      tim

  • Will Napier

    Couldn’t agree more with what Tony and Edward have said above, and would add my own tuppence worth -

    Regeneration has ALWAYS been generally ‘polluted’ by the push and pull of individual specialism and skill sets placed in leadership roles, and more often than not failed to capture the complexity of connections between social, physical and economic themes. I would say that I am tired of hearing about the tensions between external players and internal communities – we KNOW that property led gentrification is not regeneration already people! But we also know that the existing pockets of poverty will likely not benefit individually from interventions (no matter HOW much we consult), because of the time periods involved – so reactive public service improvements (still valid in their own right) shouldn’t be labelled as regeneration either. That is precisely WHY we need to create the conditions by which more people are given the ‘choice’ (through education and training for young people) and to exercise that choice by staying / moving to the community in question. This is what breaks the cycle of poverty creation, and helps maintain place utility.

    The Economic Development types get a hard press, but again, it’s the case that we need them to ‘create’ opportunity – which allows for making the connection (usually missed) between that opportunity and the ‘need’ that has been identified by communities and local agencies.

    Regeneration is alive – it’s just not kicking.

  • http://www.bura.com Paul Evans

    Interesting discussion Tim has started and useful points in the comments. Sometime we can argue about the history thing. But the key now is get “it”, whatever we call it, back centre stage. BURA (British Urban Regeneration Association) has set out a framework to get started. You can find it on http://www.bura.com and we are now gearing up discussion here and on all the other related blogs.

    So in answer to Will – Let’s get kicking.

  • Paul Evans

    Second attempt to correct the link: it should be http://www.bura.org.uk

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