three - Connecting community to the post-regeneration era

Summary

Introduction

This chapter aims to bridge the discussion of the history of community in urban regeneration with the rest of the book. It does this by advancing a central argument: that urban policy has entered a post-regeneration era. This argument runs alongside a specific discussion of the ‘Connected Communities’ programme. The chapter begins by outlining how and why the era of urban regeneration came to an end, building on the discussion in Chapter Two, with a specific focus on the combination of broader socio-economic structures and ideological decisions that have shaped urban policy since 2010. The ideas of localism, city mayors, Big Society and decentralisation are considered, along with practical developments such as the National Planning Policy Framework. These agendas and events are then used to understand the ‘Connected Communities’ programme and the way that its focus, specifically on co-production and co-development with communities, has come to represent the leading edge of academic research in this area. The chapter concludes by looking forward to the rest of the book, arguing that we are now in a post-regeneration era, and what is more, we need new ways of knowing this.

The chapter does this in three ways. In the first instance, it questions the sustainability of discussing regeneration in the current policy context. It therefore introduces the idea that the UK, but England in particular, may be in a ‘post-regeneration’ state, based on current academic definitions of the term. This builds on discussions of the post-political that featured in both the scoping for ‘Connected Communities’ (Tsouvalis and Waterton, 2011) and discussions of urban regeneration itself (Deas et al, 2013). In this context, the unquestioned dominance of much of the ‘What works?’ approach to urban policy (as discussed in Chapter Five), along with the insistence on the primacy of economic growth, has led policy narratives away from what have traditionally been seen as the defining features of urban regeneration: both spatially targeted initiatives in specific neighbourhoods (Matthews, 2012; Deas et al, 2013) and as linked to major building and development projects (Miles, 2010; Plaza, 1999). The argument here is that the lack of public and private funding, along with the marginalisation of those elements adding value to regeneration projects, such as culture or community development, means that a different era is facing those involved in the practice of, or research on, regeneration.