Regeneration - which way now?

IN DEPTH

18 | New Start | January 2010

Fans of the cult TV show Dr Who get it. Ever since the 1960s, followers of the charming Time Lord have known the Doctor will be back. He’ll regenerate.

For the destroyer of Daleks, regeneration is second nature. Whatever his opponents throw at him, he’ll be down but not out. He won’t necessarily look the same, sound the same, wear the same outfits or try not to flirt with the same companion – but the stuff that makes him the Doctor will be constant.

Gardeners understand it too. The seed may look very different to the plant, but it contains within it all the genetic material the plant needs. There’s a continuity

and an identity that links it to the past and binds it to the future. It regenerates.

Regeneration that works – the real thing – couples the concepts of continuity and rebirth. A regenerated place is the same, but different: reinvigorated and better equipped for the circumstances that lie ahead, but with a sense of

identity that roots it in the past and in networks of people, and connects it to the future and the people

we will become. It’s a continuous process of survival and strengthening.

But words like regeneration and transformation have been devalued and debased by years of misuse and definitions that tie them to the vagaries of policymakers rather than the life of communities. Every pedestrianised shopping centre is branded a transformation, every set of uPVC windows a regenerated estate. Local identity is diminished: according to the New Economics Foundation, two fifths of our towns are ‘clone towns’. Regeneration risks becoming yesterday’s buzzword, discarded through over-use.

It’s time to reclaim regeneration for the places and communities that need it. Over the coming year, we’ll explain how, where and why that needs to happen, and show examples of real regeneration in action. But the circumstances will be more testing in the next decade than in the last one, so we need an approach that can carry us through those challenges and beyond.

WHERE THE HEART ISThroughout this series we’ll use the idea of home to explain how we think regeneration needs to be grounded in our communities. Governments and local authorities tend to talk not of home but of place, using concepts such as localism, placemaking and place-shaping to describe actions

that have a spatial and local impact. Home is more than all of these: it is what connects place with people.

There is a rich academic literature about home, but regeneration practice tends to pay scant regard to it. Academics talk of place attachment and place identity; as the environmental psychologist Maria Vittoria Giuliani puts it, ‘not only do we acknowledge the existence of an affective bond with places, but also the importance that this can have in qualifying our existence, whether positively or negatively. And not just our individual, private, existence, but also the existence of entire human groups’.

Home is an obviously physical concept. It’s bricks, mortar, furnishings and decoration. It’s our neighbourhood, town or city. When the energy company E-on decided to knock down the Tinsley cooling towers in Sheffield in 2008, one of the strongest protests from local people was that when they saw the twin towers from the motorway or the train, they knew they were nearly home. Home can refer too to familiar or treasured landscapes on a wider scale – London, Yorkshire, Wales, or Africa. It’s difficult to imagine home without a spatial context.

But home is an intensely social idea too. What makes a house home is the fact that we live there, and generally with people we want to live with. What makes locality home is the everyday social exchange of people: we recognise faces, learn names, start to appreciate what’s important or interesting to others. We might even join

Above: the public feeling inspired by Antony Gormley’s installation Another Place has secured the artwork a permanent place on Crosby beach

In future regeneration must offer a convincing account of place and society and connect with what people care about most. In the first of a 12-part series, Julian Dobson argues that we need to bring regeneration home

REGENERATION | ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT | SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES

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in with some of it. You can live alone and still use home socially – but where that interaction is missing or lost individual wellbeing tends to suffer.

Home is an economic construct, too. It’s where we spend much of our money, and sometimes where we earn it. At best, it’s an investment in ourselves and those close to us. It supports local businesses and provides local work. But at worst, it becomes for the well-off an obsession with cash values and a stepping stone to individual advancement that offers nothing to the surrounding community; and for many of the poorest, something that traps them in a place they hate, stymies opportunities and limits life chances.

But even in the most economically difficult circumstances or for the most mobile people, home has huge cultural significance. Our attachment to unpromising plots of land can be remarkably fierce. Our investment in our homes and localities is not just an investment of cash but of cultural capital and creativity. Planners and developers ignore that at their peril.

That attachment, though, can be strained. The most recent DCLG Place Survey found that although 80% of people in England were satisfied with their area as a place to live, only 59% felt they belonged to their neighbourhood and a paltry 29% felt they could influence decisions in their area. And as the Young Foundation pointed out in its recent study, Sinking & Swimming, people have become significantly less happy. In 1991 seven million prescriptions

Susie Hay: I long for people to take action without waiting for the ‘f’ word (funding) that gets all off the hook. No funding equals freedom.

Yaser Mir: Include high quality design, sustainability , equality and diversity – consider how all communities can live side by side.

Toby Blume: Stop regarding regeneration as something that can be done without tackling underlying causes of poverty and inequality.

Rob Greenland: A smaller State gets out the way and communities take the lead more. State works out ways to support people to do things themselves.

Colin Buchanan (planning consultants): Increase the price of all modes of transport to encourage city centre living, mixed use development and sustainable travel.

Nick Poole: Reconnect to simple everyday values, abandon the centrist state and let people regain their dignity through mutualisation.

Elizabeth Varley: Greatest hope for regeneration is that all business becomes ‘social’ business – that enterprise always means good for community as well.

Neil McInroy: Regeneration becomes proactive rather than reactive in dealing

with economic and environmental change.

Chris Doyle: Ubiquitous broadband for all in digital Britain, bringing the UK into the global digital marketplace.

Kelvin Owers: Tax breaks on saving existing buildings, and repurposing them. Less focus on building new.

Simon Cooke: Confidence, motivation, initiative, enterprise and community, not consultants and architects.

Dan Thompson: Small, locally distinct, community led ‘acupuncture’.

Crispin Moor: People and enterprise focus. Accountable and performance managed. Rural as much as urban. Less obsession with maps and boundaries and buildings.

Gary Kirk, Meden Valley Making Places: Tackle energy efficiency in properties, and a programme to address poor quality housing and open spaces.

James Kennell: More ideological conviction to make up for fewer economic incentives!

Giles Simon, Co-operatives UK: Communities investing in and taking over shops, pubs, local businesses, community buildings, local services and housing.

We asked people on Twitter their hopes for regeneration for the coming decade. Here are a few of their responses...

In pursuit of the real thing

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were issued for anti-depressant drugs; by 2007 that figure had risen to 34 million.

One of the failures of much self-styled regeneration is that it not only neglects to create attachment, but actively undermines it, moving people when they don’t want to be moved, assuming that what’s glossy and sanitised is by definition better than the dog-eared and disorderly. It’s an error of judgement that’s repeated ad nauseam as planners and funders seek quick returns on their investment. And it turns regeneration into a hate-word (see above).

Home, then, with its negative connotations as well as positive, must be at the heart of any understanding of regeneration. What regenerates a place or community – the genetic material that makes it itself and not something else – is also what creates home. Regeneration at every

scale is homecoming and home-making. It is not the delivery of projects or the development of buildings but the creation of meaning.

TEN YEARS FROM NOW, WILL WE NEED REGENERATION?More than a century ago in News from Nowhere, William Morris imagined a utopian Britain run on cooperative, agrarian principles. He was a dreamer. His ideas were ridiculed in favour of pushing forward the economic model that gave us the Great Depression and Beveridge’s Five Giants of squalor, ignorance, want, idleness, and disease.

A decade ago Tony Blair imagined a Britain where nobody would be seriously disadvantaged by where they lived (see New Start, December 2009). Despite being a more achievable ambition, we’re no nearer it than we are to

RegenerationThe golden sun glistened above the dilapidated ruins that were once humans’ homes Shadows grow as the fiery planet slowly climbs To the top of the worldRadiating a spot Where Mr Rolls livedCries of children’s laughter Echo around the building site Entrancing the wolf that whistles bares its bum But rarely bites

A white cooker stands high and aloneOn a drumlin of sand soil and societal sediment Once the fabric of people’s lives

Green curtains are half drawn in the glassless window of a second floor flat And above The chaos of twisted steel Jagged slabs

Concrete boulders A yellow workman’s hatDiggers dig and cranes roar In an attempt to bring the community to the floorBrick by brick and stone by stone Pull old buildings down Build new homes

This is how regeneration begins People lose Contractors win The chaotic destruction of whole communities All in line with Government policy Architecturally brainwashing Generation after generation

Barbed wire fences and floating dust Large cranes and plant covered in rust Builders and joiners from out of town Tear our houses shops and boozers down But order must be carried out to the letter Please the bosses and make things better

In some places regeneration is a dirty word. This poem by Manchester performance poet


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Morris’s idyll. As the Young Foundation has demonstrated, even what progress we have seen has been offset by greater unhappiness as well as material inequality.

What’s clear from all the evidence is that the problems facing our communities and society are more intractable than most politicians and policymakers imagined.

Even when we have continuity of government, there’s a discontinuity of policy. The Conservative governments of the 1980s and 1990s gave us urban development corporations, City Challenge, and eventually the single regeneration budget. New Labour accelerated the policy merry-go-round with the new deal for communities, neighbourhood renewal fund, sustainable communities plan, sub-national review of economic development and regeneration, and much, much more.

Seen from the ground, these policies attract an abiding critique: they are not given time to work, they are riddled with arcane funding rules, and they turn the idea of building skills and capacity from a process of nurturing into yet more paperwork. And however benevolent the ministers and civil servants, the perceived need to demonstrate that government action is getting results makes it harder to learn lessons, while in their eagerness to tick all the required boxes local officials stifle initiative and invention.

A report for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation by Oxford University researchers published in 2008 had the telling subtitle, ‘Not knowing what works’. As the introduction pointed out:

‘Since 1997, the government has implemented a raft of person- and place-based policies to tackle disadvantage.

These people who redesign our lives Live a million miles away with their wives And kids who play on vast green lawns Surrounded by blooming flower beds But would swap it all for a Sunday with DadThey are far away from floating dust speeding cars that maim and kill A different kind of hurt A different kind of pollutionville

And when they have finished their rebuilding Ex-homeless people begin to move in They’re impressed for a month or two Then realise that the plastic glue hardboard and Formica That holds this fragile box togetherIs just like Princess who scissored the ribbon On the outside pristineAnd on the inside a midden

First they find large black cockroaches Second big black rats These house are built on flats That were built on top of housesThat were built on a bog Soon the houses begin to bend and bob from side to side Cracks appear and whole streets slideThen a rat like councillor decides This crime ridden area of dilapidation is in serious need of regeneration‘Let’s build things up and make things fine With a grant from sexy Heseltine’£500 million already spent And £44.90 collected in rent Rebuilding doesn’t make problems go away It just creates new dumping groundsFor the poor the black the Irish and the gay.

Mike Garry can be contacted at [email protected]. To hear Mike reading this and other poems, visit his website at www.cheersta.co.uk

Ciara Leeming’s pictures of housing regeneration projects in northern England can be viewed at http://www.socialdocumentary.net/exhibit/ciara_leeming/691 or at www.ciaraleeming.co.uk

In some places regeneration is a dirty word. This poem by Manchester performance poet Mike Garry and pictures by Ciara Leeming help to explain why

Photos: Ciara Leeming

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RegenerationTHE DEFINITION: ‘The government’s view is that regeneration is a set of activities that reverse economic, social and physical decline in areas where market forces will not do this without support from government.’Transforming places, changing lives(DCLG, 2008)PROS: Recognises regeneration as a complex concept – it covers a range of activities and interlocking problems.CONS: Assumes regeneration is needed because of ‘market failure’, which is a late stage for effective intervention. Responsibility is placed firmly with government. A top-down, economically biased interpretation.

RenaissanceTHE DEFINITION: ‘Achieving an urban renaissance is… about creating the quality of life and vitality that makes urban living desirable… We must bring about a change in urban attitudes so that towns and cities once again become attractive places in which to live, work and socialise.’Towards an Urban Renaissance, introduction by Lord Rogers, 1999PROS: Links place and people – it focuses on creating places where people enjoy living. Encompasses culture and quality of life.CONS: A view of urban renaissance that ignores poverty and inequality risks being reduced to café culture for the middle classes.

For the most part, these policies (person and place) have developed separately within their specific domains... However, this separation does not reflect a reality in which poverty and disadvantage are mediated by place, and places are affected by the poverty or otherwise of their inhabitants.’

Even if we could get the policy mix and implementation right, there are compelling reasons why regeneration will be a continuing need. Think for a moment about the definition drawn up by civil servants in the regeneration framework document, Transforming places, changing lives (see panel, below): ‘The government’s view is that regeneration is a set of activities that reverse economic, social and physical decline in areas where market forces will not do this without support from government.’

The history of the last half century shows us that economic, social and physical decline have gone hand in hand with rising affluence. The economist Joseph Schumpeter expressed this as ‘creative destruction’: to make way for the new, the old must be demolished. But what in economic and market terms is considered a good – innovation and new products – brings social ills in terms of skills becoming redundant, places losing their economic raison d’etre and the personal costs of stress and unemployment.

One of the greatest policy failures of the last decade, arguably, has been the unwillingness to recognise that the market forces that create prosperity and opportunity are the very same forces that bring decline and deprivation. They create losers as well as winners, as surely as Strictly Come Dancing or X Factor. A 40-year analysis for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in 2007 found that spatial inequality had worsened, with cities becoming more polarised between rich and poor. The losers tend to be the same kind of people in the same places.

Figures for business start-ups help to illustrate the problem. Even in the prosperous years between 1995 and 2004, more than one third of firms failed to survive the first three years, and survival rates were lower in poorer areas. Only 57% of new businesses registered in Wolverhampton

lasted three years. We applaud the winners, but who counts the cost to the losers?

The problem is that poverty of place becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: the places with the worst conditions are poorest, and because of their conditions, the ambitious leave and those with resources to invest stay away. As the 2009 government strategy document, World class places, puts it:

Here are some of the key terms used to describe regeneration and related activities in the last decade, along with some of the definitions offered and a quick critique of their pros and cons...

It’s the way you tell ’em...

‘One of the greatest policy failures of the last decade,

arguably, has been the unwillingness to recognise that the

market forces that create prosperity and opportunity are

the very same forces that bring decline and deprivation.’


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Poverty isn’t just about a lack of jobs, education or wealth, it’s about unsafe and bad housing design and low quality neighbourhoods

Sustainable communitiesTHE DEFINITION: ‘Places where people want to live and work, now and in the future; that meet the diverse needs of existing and future residents, are sensitive to their environment and contribute to a high quality of life. They are safe and inclusive, well planned, built and run, and offer equality of opportunity and good services for all.’Homes and Communities AgencyPROS: Condenses the comprehensive eight-point approach to sustainable communities set out in the Egan Review of 2004. Recognises the need for a holistic approach that benefits everyone.CONS: Risks being confused with the specific agenda of environmental sustainability, which is one part of the matrix.

PlaceshapingTHE DEFINITION: ‘The creative use of [local authorities’] powers and influence to promote the general wellbeing of a community and its citizens.’Lyons Inquiry, 2007PROS: Recognises the importance of local government as a champion for places and citizens. Strong emphasis on creating local identity and community cohesion and representation.CONS: Inward-focused and sets community and citizen activity firmly in the context of local authorities’ role – the approach is somewhat paternalistic. It is also easily confused with placemaking, a concept much closer to the Egan vision.

LocalismTHE DEFINITION: ‘We need to devolve down decision-making to the lowest sensible level… clear accountability, efficiency and engagement are much more likely to be achieved when this is the case.’New Local Government Network, 2005PROS: Associated with the devolution of decision-making and a transfer of power from central government. Links strongly with ideas of neighbourhood renewal and civic identity.CONS: Still associated with local government rather than citizens. You can have local decision-making without tackling poverty and disadvantage. The risk is that localism becomes a euphemism for laissez-faire.

It’s the way you tell ’em...

‘Poverty in this country is not just about poor education, unemployment or low wages, and lack of opportunity. It is typically associated with poor housing and poverty of place – badly designed estates or low quality neighbourhoods, with dysfunctionally designed, energy inefficient homes, unsafe passage-ways and poor public spaces.’

In such a context, regeneration has to be a sine qua non for a stable and cohesive society. Without constant action to reinvigorate neighbourhoods and towns that are distressed, and to generate new opportunities for people whose potential has been frustrated, we face ever more severe social consequences.

And those consequences are already severe enough. Department for Work and Pensions figures for 2007/08

showed four million children living in poverty after housing costs are taken into account. For working age adults it was seven-and-a-half million, and for pensioners two million.

Those are just the bald figures. As the department stated in evidence to the Commons work and pensions committee: ‘The impact of poverty on children goes well beyond material disadvantage... Children who experience poverty are more likely to have low self-esteem and lower expectations for their future. They are more likely to be poor themselves and there is a strong association between parental earnings and the earnings of their children when they enter work.’

But despite a wealth of analysis and initiatives, we seem stuck with the same problems.

In 1998 the Social Exclusion Unit’s report, Bringing Britain together, offered this critique of previous initiatives: ‘None really succeeded in setting in motion a virtuous circle of regeneration, with improvements in jobs, crime, education, health and housing all reinforcing each other.’ Ten years on, the 2008 Monitoring poverty and social exclusion report concluded that the comprehensive vision of the Blair government had been lost in favour of a crude focus on worklessness:

‘Ten years ago, the challenge was to get child poverty reduction added to the government’s agenda. Ten years on, the challenge is to prevent it dominating the social policy agenda to the exclusion of virtually all else….. the answer is nowhere near as simple as “work is the route out of poverty”.’

Does this mean, though, that we’re stuck in a continuous loop of improvement and decline, boom and bust, with regeneration acting as little more than a government-dispensed palliative? That would be a dispiriting case for regeneration indeed.

TOWARDS CITIZEN-LED REGENERATIONThere is an alternative approach that takes us towards a new, positive way of thinking about regeneration without glossing over the difficulties or resorting to utopian !

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fantasies. It is to see regeneration in terms of re-creation rather than just as a response to failure.

Reinvention of place is needed because of time and change: our preferences change, technologies shift, we discover new ways of doing and being. Regeneration is required most in places that struggle to cope with time and change, but even those that aren’t struggling sometimes need to repurpose. It’s about rethinking place and community for each new generation.

So regeneration needs to start with the people who live in and use a place. Regeneration that works, that creates home, begins with citizens defining their hopes and problems, not with programmes and budgets.

A citizen is an individual who has rights and a stake in the place where she or he lives, but that stake is a social one – citizens can only exercise their citizenship by engaging with other people. And just as citizens are anchored in community, so they are anchored in the places where they seek to create home.

The future for regeneration policies, at all spatial levels, must lie in the action and assent of engaged citizens. This is a seismic shift from regeneration that originates in the legislative process, or is led by masterplanners and developers. Policymakers, masterplanners and developers must become the servants of alert, engaged and creative citizens making up their own minds about their homes.

So here’s a working definition of regeneration to play with: Regeneration is the action of citizens and those who work with them to recreate home for new times, especially where there is poverty or disadvantage.

See if you can think of a better way of putting it, and please contribute your suggestions and join our conversation (see panel). Over the rest of this year we’ll explore further how this idea of regeneration can be fleshed out and embedded in the way we think about the future. The next article will examine what values should attach themselves to citizen-led regeneration, and how we should rethink the idea of value to produce better decision-making.

Here are three ways you can join in our debate about the future of regeneration:

Write a response: our feedback section (see pages 26 to 31) is a forum for your views – or if you’d like to make a more substantial contribution relating to this series, contact Julian Dobson at [email protected]

Engage with us online: talk to @NewStartMag or @juliandobson on Twitter, blog your thoughts at www.newstartmag.co.uk/blog, or comment on other readers’ blogs

Co-host an event: if you’d like to partner us in taking this conversation forward at a face-to-face event, or would like us to speak or facilitate a discussion at an event you’re putting on, please get in touch – email [email protected]

JOIN THE CONVERSATION

The last 20 years has delivered some remarkable urban regeneration schemes in

the UK – from Tate Modern to new waterfronts in Newcastle-Gateshead and Liverpool, from the occupational transformation of Shoreditch to the Scandi-style minimalist repaving of most city centres.

But the debt-fuelled boom is over: bank lending is tighter, housebuilders daren’t start on site, the mathematical foundations of ‘value uplift’ have been wrecked by low land values and the number of people in poverty has increased, when the very purpose of regeneration is to help poor people become more prosperous.

Urban regeneration needs a new narrative. What might it be?

There are those with heavy pens, pumping millions of pounds into the system, redrafting the interdependency of the public

and the private and rolling out statism as innovation.

Then there’s the crew wielding luxury Mont Blancs: lawyers and accountants reframing the idea of value-uplift and calling it a TIF, or politicians like David Cameron or Tessa Jowell heralding a new age of ‘localism’ or ‘mutualism’ – but not giving us much of a clue on cast or story.

What seems clear is that economic change will be less reliant upon property developers, unless they are prepared to innovate by shifting to sustainable development or become increasingly transparent and flexible. Local development will become more answerable to ‘the people’ and we’ll see less of a ‘massive-shopping-centre-with-a-town-attached’ approach to urbanism.

The industry will now push for ‘value’ to be assessed on a broader basket of assets and currencies, over and above rental income.

More time, attention and pride is about to be invested in

local councillors and planning officers.

Small projects are back in vogue, rather than physical projects so big that they make the earth tilt.

And new, non-aligned organisations or aggregated civic organisations at the most local level are about to become flavour of the month, so long as they offer a genuine bridge between citizens and state, engender trust, express identity and promote the welfare of the larger community.

Who are the poster boys and girls of this new world?

There’s the army of activists who lead their communities but believe in collaboration, the welfare of the larger community and power of collective bargaining.

Then there are the people who understand that enterprise in all of its many forms – social, as well as commercial – is a key route to progress.

At the centre of this narrative are two of the oldest characters

in the book: the taxpayer and the consumer.

But the new element is the collective. The new vehicle: the non-profit. The new hero: the social entrepreneur.

The politicians suggest we are at the dawn of the ‘social economy’. However, only one or two investors in regeneration see value in life-cycle costs, mutualism or assets other than land.

Some time soon a bright spark is going to come up with a marketable link between carbon credits and the financing of urban renewal.

In the meantime, everyone talks of ‘paradigm shift’ and only a few engage with what’s likely to become the new key theme of regeneration: equity.

David Barrie is principal consultant at David Barrie & Associates and specialises in regeneration, community involvement and the design and delivery of public projects. David blogs at http://davidbarrie.typepad.com

Urban regeneration needs a new narrative, says David Barrie


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