Where next for urban policy?

Urban policy reports used to be so frequent it was hard to keep up, but nowadays they are rare occurrences. It was therefore very refreshing to be able to read the recent report by the Work Foundation: People or Place: urban policy in the age of austerity. This is required reading, and stimulated wider debate and thinking about future directions for urban policy. I found Tim Williams’ response particularly thought-provoking. My colleague, John Hitchin has also responded.

What I am left with from all of this is a feeling that more clear thinking is needed about the purpose and scope of ‘urban policy’, and how it operates at different spatial scales.

As the title of the report suggests this is presented in terms of the longstanding debate about whether policy is overly focused on people or places. The people side of this debate has been gaining the upper hand recently – particularly with Ed Glaeser’s book, Triumph of the City. He argues that more emphasis should be placed on investing in people (see here for a video if you want to see what he is implying).

I always found the ‘people vs place’ argument sterile. Those interested in urban policy and neighbourhood renewal are not somehow ‘anti-growth’ or not against investing in people.  The ‘areas effects’ literature does not mean you should not target places.

Place-based programmes often focus on people. The point for me is that what place (or community-based) programmes can often do is help the people who can’t take advantage of traditional services. This is acknowledged by those working on even the most important ‘people-focused’ policy areas – e.g. skills , where a focus on community learning is needed alongside national structures. Many policy levers have place elements as highlighted in this wider review here.

Following my work on one of the New Deal for Communities programmes, for example, skills was a key priority for continuing to improve the area:

‘Poor skills are the missing link in tackling many of the remaining issues – such as child poverty, youth unemployment and worklessness. A more personalised approach has been started, and the adult learning centre is an important resource.’ The full EC1 NDC evaluation report is available here

The Work Foundation report looks at the evidence for urban policy through two key initiatives (the NDCs and the regional development agencies) in the west Midlands, and some of the evidence available to support them. This is probably where the report is at its weakest – overly relying on a quantitative assessment of these programmes. This was also a major problem of the policy framework – the relative effectiveness of particular interventions got confused with the wider ‘system effects’ of housing, labour and education markets. It was simply untenable for these interventions to lead to a narrowing of the gap. This is illustrated well by a separate report on the west Midlands which shows how a range of structural factors, including migration and economic re-structuring, explain why areas remain poor over time.

The report also offers a decent critique of the coalition approach, and is particularly strong on drawing out how the range of new incentives in the system have the danger of creating a ‘winner takes all’ environment. Those areas that are already pre-disposed to growth are likely to benefit, for example from business improvement districts, New Homes Bonus, business rate retention, the new affordable rent regime and so on. What happens in terms of resource allocation to those areas of greatest need is an important unanswered question.

Work Foundation’s report rightly reminds us to build on the lessons of the past, including less central control.  The risk of less central control (some may have called it support?) is that local areas take a long time to learn from previous experience.

I was pleased to see the case still being made for holistic regeneration, and an emphasis on the importance of community development and social capital, encouraging local asset building and social enterprises. Whether there is an appetite for a challenge fund for deprived areas remains to be seen. A number of initiatives are already proving to be the bedrock of a new approach – such as Big Local, Community Organisers – see here for a map of these. It may be better to build on these than create something anew.

The ‘Community Improvement District’ idea and other forms of decentralisation are also worth a proper look here.

Getting the right action at the right level is a complex matter, and getting the links is even harder. The work done by Labour in the late 1990s was probably the most concerted attempt to look at this, and could be usefully re-assessed. Renaisi has made a small contribution to this debate, by attempting to draw some focussed understanding on where neighbourhood-based interventions are best pitched, but this whole area could be much more developed.

I am not even sure the term ‘urban policy’ has much meaning anymore – perhaps better to think in terms of a series of inter-linked policy frameworks operating at different spatial scales – city-regional, district and neighbourhood.

Linking activities between the different spatial scales, and between growth and deprivation, seems to me to be the major omission from current thinking and practice. The Work Foundation report contains recommendations to strengthen local enterprise partnerships and to encourage community development, but not much on how to get the two working in tandem. The focus on economic growth should be supported by a parallel emphasis on linking people to that opportunity. Renaisi has been trying to make these links, for example by a new approach to apprentices in growing tech businesses, or getting some social benefit out the major Olympic legacy contracts, but it is not easy in the current policy environment.

Neighbourhood renewal and economic development were always uneasy bedfellows but are now in danger of becoming distant cousins.