Urban Regeneration

As Peter Townsend argued nearly 35 years ago, ‘the idea that society’s ills are concentrated in certain areas and communities has a long history’ (Townsend, 1979: p. 543). Indeed, efforts to improve conditions for Britain’s poorest areas have been underway since at least 1945, and this was to become a key theme of the New Labour governments. In their first term of office, New Labour gave a commitment to address the legacy of poverty which, they argued, had been left by the Conservative governments. In line with their Third Way ideology, New Labour’s emphasis shifted away from the input-driven systems of ‘old-welfare’ and market-oriented approaches associated with the New Right towards those of ‘joined-up thinking’, addressing ‘cross-cutting issues’ and producing ‘citizen-centred’ services (Tallon, 2013). New Labour stressed that they were fundamentally concerned with issues of social exclusion, and urban governance became a key focus for the new government and an incredibly active area of policy-making with a ‘broad and eclectic range of ideas and policies’ (Bache and Catney, 2008: p. 416). Such was the frenetic pace of regeneration initiatives, plans and programmes that Jones and Ward (2002) describe this context as an ‘Amazonian jungle of institutions, policies, programmes and acronyms’ (p. 473).