Hope Street: why regeneration failed

Regeneration programmes in the 30 years to 2010 failed to embed themselves fully within communities and broader local economic structures.  John P. Houghton, a regeneration consultant and former policy-maker involved in neighbourhood renewal in the 90s, has written a series of essays on the lessons from past programmes. In the first of a three-part series, he writes here about why so little has changed in places that received large amounts of regeneration funding.

Despite, not because of…

The Deptford neighbourhood of south east London was the recipient of almost every national programme that was delivered during the era of regeneration and renewal: Estate Action; City Challenge; Single Regeneration Budget; and several elements of the National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal. It also featured prominently in regional initiatives like the Thames Gateway Development programme.

A community-based study in 2001 calculated that around £150m was spent on regeneration activities over the preceding decade, in direct funding alone, by 18 different programmes and agencies. Despite this barrage of interventions, Deptford’s position in the poorest 10% of neighbourhoods in the country barely shifted.

The same piece of research highlighted one of the main reasons for this cycle of frustrated effort: ‘Each of these programmes was meant to “involve the community” but they all failed in the sense that local people did not get to identify the priorities or develop solutions, let along steer the strategic direction of these interventions’.

Local community groups responded to this failure by taking matters into their own hands. They successfully bid for and managed their own programmes. The ‘Get Set for Citizenship’ application to the local Single Regeneration Budget programme as developed through a two-year programme of community participation and development that supported local people to identify problems on their doorsteps and develop long-term solutions. The funding was then invested in projects run by local volunteers and community groups and in the development of networks based on the area’s natural neighbourhoods. The vibrancy of Deptford today is testament to the hard work and persistence of local community leaders who pioneered these programmes.

In this sense, Deptford was an outlier, being exceptionally blessed with civic innovators and dense social networks that were able to adapt official programmes to meet local needs. In most places, this did not happen. Local communities were prevented from being active participants in determining their own future.

Money was still spent in all these places. Considerable amounts of it. But when the circus left town, things didn’t look or feel much different from before.

Why did so little change?

Without putting too much pressure on one example, the case of Deptford as described above gives us a useful starting point. The absence of community ownership is the fundamental flaw from which a whole host of others problems flow.

Without the active involvement of local people, interventions were designed without the crucial input of the very people they were supposed to help, and implemented without their knowledge. Frustrated programme managers often complained of resident apathy or, even worse, laziness when residents didn’t sign up to local schemes. Yet in many cases, those residents simply didn’t know what was going on or, if they did, could not see the benefit of getting involved.

With residents disengaged from what was happening, the emphasis shifted away from real and lasting outcomes for people to short-term, measurable outputs. So it was that New Deal for Communities partnerships, for example, were often able to hit their process targets without delivering lasting behavioural or cultural change. They could get ‘bums on seats’ for a training event without the participants learning very much. They could organise the target number of healthy living events without anybody exercising more or eating healthier food as a result.

Without the grounded input of residents, the model of partnership working which was supposed to drive improvement was bogged down in bureaucracy. This is true of neighbourhood renewal interventions in particular. For all the criticism they received on the grounds of democratic unaccountability, the small, business-minded boards of the 1980s and 1990s did at least have a clear focus and a limited cast list of decision makers.

In contrast, some of the Local Strategic Partnerships of the 2000s became rather lumbering bureaucracies, spawning sub-boards and task-and-finish groups in an attempt to meet every demand and reflect every policy initiative. It became increasingly difficult to innovate in this atmosphere. The evaluation of the National Strategy found that while some Neighbourhood Renewal Fund money had been used to fund marginal innovations, ‘few represent genuinely radical departures from traditional models of service delivery’.

With so much energy directed inward, on the administration of the system, there was precious little focus on the need to wire what was happening at the neighbourhood level into city- and region-wide patterns of opportunity and growth.

Even if greater attention had been paid to this task, it is questionable what progress would have been made. Regeneration and renewal professionals in the UK almost speak a different language. The children of Robert Moses concern themselves with the bricks and mortar, demolition and construction, clean slates and grand plans. The descendants of Jane Jacobs focus on evolutionary, people-centred processes of renewal that build on what already exists. This historical bifurcation forced future generations of practitioners to choose, like the children of divorcing parents, between two irreconcilable positions.

Why ‘hard’ regeneration won out over ‘soft’

Urban regeneration became associated with the ‘hard stuff’ of economic development and physical redevelopment and tended to operate at the higher spatial scale of regions and sub-regions. Neighbourhood renewal became associated with the ‘soft stuff’ of social services and community development, and was highly targeted at the neighbourhood and estate level. As the Joseph Rowntree Foundation put it: ‘Fragmented policy and governance arrangements, particularly in relation to social inclusion and economic development, remain key barriers to the delivery of more effective interventions.’

The author of the JRF report, Marilyn Taylor, has often criticised the tendency of practice within the UK to split into silos, with planning, economic development, community development and other skills and professions operating hermetically sealed from one another.

Geoff Fordham Associates in Linking neighbourhood transformation to wider strategies: the experience of the core cities described this ‘twin track’ approach: large-scale, physical interventions aimed to economic development happening at one level and through one set of delivery arrangement; and highly targeted social policy-focused programmes aimed at community development being delivered at the neighbourhood level through local agencies.

They reviewed the over-arching urban strategies of Britain’s core cities. Only three of the cities sought to make neighbourhood renewal in the poorest areas a pre-condition for growth. In the others, the needs and potential of the poorest areas were seen as a separate problem, or something which could be at a later stage or as a happy by-product of general prosperity.

The language of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ revealed the implicit gender assumptions behind these two approaches. Regeneration was linked to the men’s world of developers’ boardrooms and building sites. The inclusive and people-centred approach of neighbourhood renewal was seen as better suited to ‘woman’s skills’ – just as the Central Housing Advisory Committee advised local authorities in the 1930s to adopt the approaches of the ‘lady housing managers’.

By the end of the era of regeneration and renewal, we were left with activities that didn’t catch-on with the people they were supposed to help, leading to a focus on simplistic, tick-box targets over meaningful change and strengthened community capacity. All implemented inefficiently by a bloated and over-manned delivery infrastructure that neglected the importance of reintegration and could not think holistically across the gendered silos of ‘hard’ regeneration and ‘soft’ renewal.

This is why so little changed and why so many places remained dependent on government programmes but disconnected from the real economy.