Hope Street: regeneration is over

John P. Houghton, a consultant and former policymaker, has written a series of essays on the past, present and future of regeneration in England. In this third and final piece he calls for a new agenda for the poorest places focused in reconnection, resilience and rights.

The era of regeneration is over. In many places, regeneration is a threat, not a promise. The assumption that regeneration equals gentrification is too simplistic, and simply nonsensical in some areas. Yet in too many places, regeneration has led to stasis at best and further damage and abandonment at worst.

The shamans of the old religion still recant the same prayers and promises of a better life, if only we keep the faith. But nobody believes them anymore.

There was a reformation a few years back, when the opponents of top-down, bricks and mortar urban change pinned their objections to the door of ministers and policymakers. Regeneration yielded to the new doctrine of neighbourhood renewal.

This delivered positive change in some places. But many adherents lost belief in the new dawn when it became clear that neighbourhood renewal was unsustainably reliant on expensive and bureaucratic interventions, with too little focus on how to catalyse and support the creations of markets and enterprise.

There is much to learn from past interventions. The collective inability of policymakers and the regeneration industry to learn from previous evaluations of projects, programmes and policies is one of the reasons it keeps failing to deliver.

Yet this time, we need to learn while moving on. The practice of the past must not be adopted but adapted, often quite radically, to make it fit for the new challenges we face.

Having made policies and evaluated programmes, having grown up, lived and worked in deprived neighbourhoods, having managed projects and sat on regeneration boards, I argue today that we need a new approach focused on three imperatives: reconnection; resilience; and rights.

Reconnection: Reconnection means re-attaching the poorest neighbourhoods to the urban fabric and, more importantly, the economic geography which surrounds them.

Too many deprived neighbourhoods are isolated from the surrounding landscape of opportunity. This is not just true in a geographic sense of places like Kings Norton on the outskirts of Birmingham, and the other places which earned their own ‘isolate’ category in a typology of poor neighbourhoods by Robson et al. My evaluation of the New Deal for Communities programme in Kings Norton highlighted the area’s disconnection as a continued structural challenge.

The problem of disconnection also applies in places like Tower Hamlets, in the heart of London, one of the most connected cities on the planet. There are children growing up in the borough now, a few miles from Canary Wharf, for whom its gleaming tower will always be as far as away as the moon. The disconnection here relates to social opportunity and the remove between life in deprived areas the wider economic geography.

The mechanism for achieving reconnection is through national and, as nation states fade, through super-metropolitan / city regional policy frameworks. Such frameworks need to policies like high-density growth in existing urban centres. Not only do these measures help us all to adapt to climate change, they avoid the temptation to deport poverty out of the city into banlieues.

Such policies should also explicitly tie growth goals to the performance of the poorest places. As I argued in the first part of this series, the policy disconnect between economic development and urban development meant regions grow while leaving behind the poorest places. This creates all kinds of policy paradoxes and means we are not using the power of enterprise to drive change in the poorest place. Instead we are relying on the clod foot and heavy hand of the state; always a bad mistake. We should judge the entrepreneurialism of a place by how many kids from the worst schools become the next generation of scientists in fields that are only beginning to emerge now.

To summarise, we need economic and urban development policies in tandem to provide a trellis, a growth framework, for the reconnection of poor neighbourhoods.

Resilience: I know you’ve heard this one before. Everyone talks about resilience, don’t they? But sometimes clichés are clichés because they are true, at least in part. And let me explain what I mean by resilience, by way of what I don’t mean.

Resilience does not mean applauding the gumption of poor places as they grit their collective teeth and battle on through the consequences of climate change and social abandonment.

Resilience in the consequence of finding the path to Hope Street means ensuring that places have the assets and resources they need. Not simply to cope with change but to master and benefit from it.

The problem today is not that poor places lack that first, crude form of resilience. Quite the opposite. Resilience is a requirement of life. The problem is that society has denied them the ability to develop that richer, second meaning of resilience.

To overcome this, we need to push as much power and resource down to the poorest neighbourhoods. This would include a massive programme to transfer physical assets to community organisation. Where this been the case, as the Quirk Review pointed out, ‘ambitious community groups and social entrepreneurs can succeed on the flimsiest of assets bases and despite the apathy of established authorities’.

Deepening resilience would mean devolving public services to community groups, which could take a range of different forms, including cooperatives, social enterprises, and community interest companies. This is where the next wave of public service innovation will come from.

Some in this country make the mistake of hailing local public service as the saviour of the poor. Yet those who really study poverty are much more critical. Research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation into the impact of the post-2007 recession in Bradford concluded that while local public services were ‘highly valued’, they were also ‘formulaic, unresponsive, inadequately communicated or poorly co-ordinated’.

Anne Power has argued that ‘complex public bureaucracy often stands in the way of obvious local solutions’. Clay Shirky put it best: ‘Institutions will try to preserve the problems to which they are the solution’.

Some will call for caution and capacity building in the face of such significant change. I have grown suspicious of capacity change. The problem is not that poor communities do not have capacity to change. It is that bureaucracy has too much capacity to stop them from growing and, following Shirky’s law, will find a way to ever so politely and caringly, defer change from coming. A capacity building programme should be focused on building the capacity of existing institutions to let go and guide communities through their options.

Rights: From the city-regional scale, through the neighbourhood level, down to the individual. We need to reinforce tenants’ rights to protect themselves from predatory development, in places where gentrification is a real threat, rather than an easy slogan. But as with resilience, we need to go beyond a defensive definition of what we mean. We should give tenants to right to bring about change.

That is why I think referendums are too blunt and minimal a mechanism. They offer a binary choice in a world of multiple options and moving parts. When used in relation to Large Scale Voluntary Transfers, as was the case in places like Birmingham where the result was ‘No’, what followed was years of policy stagnation and further deterioration on the ground. Read Jigsaw Cities, which I co-wrote Anne Power, for a more detailed exploration of this.

The third and most important reason I find referenda unconvincing are that they assume the existing power balance is here to stay: that local residents should be granted a last-ditch opportunity say no to plans they don’t like. Instead, let’s given people the right to have first choice at shaping change for themselves.

We need to protect the right to buy. For many working-class families, like it was for mine, the policy is an opportunity own an asset. The problem was not the right to buy, but the lack of replacement. In a functioning housing market, right to buy is one way to ensure there is a flow across tenures, rather a bleeding out of an entire tenure as it was in the UK.

The way to Hope Street

There are many ways to Hope Street. Each promise is unique, has a sense of its own story, identity, and potential.

We won’t arrive there on the back of the bulldozer and the swingball, promising regeneration by devastation. Nor through the bureaucratic gridlock of multi-agency partnership working, promising renewal by red tape. So there are these two noes – but then many potential yeses.

The tempest of economic and social change has washed away the last legible words in the old book of magic. The age of regeneration is over and its proponents, like Prospero, are losing their power. It is for a brave new world.