IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/loceco/v20y2005i2p141-153.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

A Step Change or a Step Back? The Thames Gateway and the Re-birth of the Urban Development Corporations

Author

Listed:
  • Mike Raco

    (Department of Geography, University of Reading, UK)

Abstract

The delivery of the government's Sustainable Communities: Building for the Future proposals in the Thames Gateway area will be spearheaded by two new Urban Development Corporations (UDCs). During the 1980s and 1990s, UDCs were at the forefront of property-led regeneration in Britain and their impacts were extremely controversial. For some they represented a necessary institutional form that successfully facilitated and delivered regeneration to areas with chronic social and economic problems. For others they embodied a broader Thatcherite programme that marginalised local authorities and local communities from the heart of development planning. This paper examines their reintroduction and compares and contrasts the new agencies with those that existed in earlier decades. It argues that although the new UDCs will have broadly similar powers, the political contexts in which they are being established differ markedly. They are now expected to embed themselves into regional and national strategic development agendas and work in development partnerships with local authorities and local communities. The paper outlines the possible political and practical impacts that they will have and what their emergence tells us about the nature of Labour's broader modernisation agendas for local governance.

Suggested Citation

  • Mike Raco, 2005. "A Step Change or a Step Back? The Thames Gateway and the Re-birth of the Urban Development Corporations," Local Economy, London South Bank University, vol. 20(2), pages 141-153, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:loceco:v:20:y:2005:i:2:p:141-153
    DOI: 10.1080/13575270500053241
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1080/13575270500053241
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/13575270500053241?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Simona Florio & Sue Brownill, 2000. "Whatever happened to criticism? Interpreting the London Docklands Development Corporation's obituary," City, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 4(1), pages 53-64, April.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Graham Haughton & Philip Allmendinger, 2015. "Fluid Spatial Imaginaries: Evolving Estuarial City-regional Spaces," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 39(5), pages 857-873, September.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Ute Lehrer & Jennefer Laidley, 2008. "Old Mega‐Projects Newly Packaged? Waterfront Redevelopment in Toronto," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 32(4), pages 786-803, December.
    2. Santos, Georgina & Behrendt, Hannah & Teytelboym, Alexander, 2010. "Part II: Policy instruments for sustainable road transport," Research in Transportation Economics, Elsevier, vol. 28(1), pages 46-91.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:loceco:v:20:y:2005:i:2:p:141-153. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.lsbu.ac.uk/index.shtml .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.