(187633852) jurr_convert - Alan Southern

Southern PROOFS ONLY CITE AS: Southern, A. (2013) ‘Regeneration’ in a time of austerity will mean the death of this metaphor, but what will come next? Journal of Urban Regeneration & Renewal, 6 (4) pp.399-405.

‘Regeneration’ in a time of austerity will mean the death of this metaphor, but what will come next? Received (in revised form): 25th March, 2013

Alan Southern is at the University of Liverpool, where his current research is focused on enterprise in low-income communities. He has work under way on how enterprise can be stimulated in low-income neighbourhoods, small business, community assets and on community land trusts. Much of his research is focused on the Liverpool city region, although comparative work includes research into low-income communities in Boston and Lower East Side, Manhattan.

Abstract Regeneration as it came to be experienced over the past fifteen years or so is in retreat. This metaphor of physical regrowth and moral revival is in danger of losing its previous meaning, suffering from a terminal prognosis in light of severe austerity cuts. There is an ideological drive behind the cuts, with real impacts on welfare, on communities and local economies, accompanied by a harsh, if Victorian-like, language about the poor. Yet, there are other concepts in play, wrapped up in rhetoric about the Big Society and localism, there are those who advocate a Red Tory or Blue Labour approach to a virtuous defence of communities and individuals. It is here that regeneration may take a new and challenging turn. Keywords: Regeneration, golden age, Blue Labour, Red Tory, poverty, policy

Alan Southern University of Liverpool, 126 Mount Pleasant, Liverpool L69 3GR, UK E-mail: alan.southern@ liverpool.ac.uk

INTRODUCTION This is the end of ‘regeneration’ as we know it.Yes, the end is a consequence of austerity, although there are choices to be made, and scaling back public expenditure provides a convenient window to hide some of the ideology behind the changes taking place. In some respects, the severity of public sector cuts has overshadowed those advocates of new ideas about localism and the ‘Big Society’. There are two aspects to this that may help explain how regeneration will take shape in the future. First, while different beliefs exist within the Coalition Government about what regeneration might come to look like, there is a general perspective that seeks to redefine the role of the state.1

Henry Stewart Publications 1752-9638 (2013)

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This includes an aggressive scaling back of local and national activities that previously involved the public sector. Second, this debate lacks a substantive alternative from the Left who, despite some exaltation about pre-distribution, appear to be in reactive mode to the material shock of public expenditure cuts. These two developments have arisen after a period of urban renewal during which a language and set of practices about regeneration took hold. Regeneration as we have come to know it, grounded in economic restructuring, a local institutional infrastructure and civil society,2 has been strongly shaped by the experience of the last fifteen years or so, when the then ‘New Labour’

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administration embraced a holistic approach to regeneration. This followed a series of social and economic initiatives under the Conservatives in the 1980s and early 1990s that included Urban Development Corporations and the Single Regeneration Budget (SRB). The intention in this paper is to indicate how contemporary perspectives about local development are being used to typify the exuberance of the previous Labour administration, and this somehow justifies a terminal prognosis for regeneration. What will come next is still to be resolved. THE REGENERATION THAT WE CAME TO KNOW Regeneration is a metaphor for physical regrowth and moral revival. The term regeneration draws on biological principles to create a persuasive narrative within a political and economic context. With time and space beyond this paper, one might examine this in more detail, paying attention to the work of the Chicago School, debates on Social Darwinism and the use of biological analogy to understand aspects of economic behaviour, which to an extent have led to the current preoccupation with urbanism and complexity.3 In practice, regeneration has always been a negotiated space, although, by drawing on figurative language, policy makers and practitioners have been able to drive a discourse that has been both powerful and commonplace. This is not an abstract or neutral term; when used in the context of low-income communities, regeneration implies problems to be solved and simultaneously insinuates malevolent notions of causation. Urban and social policy initiatives have often reinforced a pathological characteristic to people in communities and problems endemic to places, while at the same time concealing


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the reality of local ‘ownership’ and autonomy in regeneration practice. Parliament has always held ultimate control, acting as a centralising force to translate contesting views about the causes of neighbourhood deterioration and deprivation into consensus-based types of intervention. From the state-inspired corporatist local planning of the 1960s and 1970s that became the epitome of local government retreat in the 1980s, to the urban policy initiatives of Heseltine, one can map the more sophisticated manner in which recent regeneration practice has developed. There was a move away from Pahl’s urban managerialism,4 a break between administration and politics and a neoliberal drive towards urban entrepreneurialism.5 The introduction of the SRB was to provide a comprehensive approach to renewal, while alongside the slogans of the Right, of the ‘no such thing as society’ mantra, came a new public sector management that laid the foundation for the regeneration management professional of the late 1990s and early part of the 21st century.6 We may well look back and lament the golden years of regeneration under New Labour, influenced as it was by the third-way ideas of Giddens, by notions of communitarianism and the embrace of the market. THE GOLDEN AGE OF REGENERATION The last few decades have witnessed a wide range of initiatives that provided a regeneration dividend, particularly, but by no means exclusively, in the northern towns and cities in England. Physical, environmental and economic renewal has been accompanied by attempts to upgrade human and social capital, believed to be as fatigued as the old industrial places and institutions that communities had relied


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‘Regeneration’ in a time of austerity with mean the death of this metaphor

on.2 The regeneration that one has come to know and understand since the 1990s contained two very distinctive features. One of these was the amount of resources made available to regeneration. A significant step came in the establishment of the Social Exclusion Unit, which in turn set out a National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal, and out of this came 18 Policy Action Teams.7 As Beatty et al.8 note, the New Deal for Communities Programme, which was a key part of the National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal, launched regeneration projects in some of the poorest communities in England, attracting almost £2bn of government investment, equating to around £50m per community. This was typical of just one of a number of regeneration initiatives. Second, the practice of regeneration became very much dependent on enhancing the role of local managers and officials. The often ambitious targets and financial controls that were strictly imposed from the centre not only disguised the locus of real executive decision making, but diverted attention away from the structural causes to very real material problems of poverty.1 This was achieved by a determined central state that operated a devolved managerialist role, often for quangos working at a local level in partnership with local authorities or other local-based agencies. Examples of this include English Partnerships and the Housing Corporation and, of course, the radical focus on regional administration in England through the now defunct Regional Development Agencies. These administrative bodies became a critical means by which government strategy was put into operation. They provided a channel for scarce resources and facilitated local management of projects, many of which one should note, provided a positive impact on communities. Nevertheless, there were many arms of the


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state involved in the delivery of regeneration, in trying to ‘join up’ mainstream public sector services to support those communities in need of renewal, and this added greater levels of complexity to the process of policy operation.9 If this was a golden age of regeneration, one reason why was the view that everyone was a winner. Capital benefitted because new opportunities arose for investment, and new channels emerged to see a profitable return from private finance. Just as Harvey10 explained, the public sector was able to assimilate the greater risk associated with attracting new private finance into ‘problem’ places. As a consequence, new retail investment, new public buildings from public–private investment and new private-sector-led housing investment all took place as the physical environment in many places was upgraded. Communities ‘won’ because they too became recipients from an all-positive metaphor of area-based regeneration. Attempts were made to curb anti-social behaviour; new education and training initiatives were launched; support for young families was introduced; new arts and sporting facilities were made available; opportunities to incentivise self-employment through regeneration projects and initiatives to make credit more accessible for social enterprise and households were all put in place. The professional class had the advantage of proudly contributing to and receiving from this new boost to the industry of regeneration, as many more employment opportunities emerged. Ultimately in this period, what mattered most was what worked,11 although the desire to put local communities at the centre of renewal was not always consistent with achieving that aim. Regeneration ideology was, as Sage12 noted, rooted in a form of communitarianism that demonstrated a


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rejection not only of the idea of no such thing of society (an illustration of the neoliberalism on which Thatcher’s concept was formulated), but also the approach to social and economic rights espoused by the Left. Even if in practice this was difficult to implement amid the practices of a financial hegemony rooted in the City of London, gone were the claims about having a ‘right to a job’ or a ‘right to a home’. In its place came a responsibility to participate in a new citizenship, of which regeneration was one part.13 FROM WHERE WE WERE TO WHERE WE ARE GOING This type of regeneration was never a passive process, however, particularly as the groups who coalesced around the myriad initiatives represented a wide variety of views from the public, private, community and voluntary sectors. Those who could be included were encouraged to be so, and those who remained excluded were forgotten about.14 Concern with the causes of poverty, inequality and the distribution of wealth became less important to regeneration and, over time, were replaced with a new professionalism and fixation on operational features, particularly targets and tight control of budgets, which were coupled to abstracted views about community participation and capacity building. In this golden age of regeneration, the older politics were abandoned, and the new obligations of communitarianism were explored, if never truly fulfilled. The heyday of regeneration saw broad third-way ideas mixed with neoliberal policy objectives. Now, as one of the consequences of the financial crisis of 2007–08, the country enters the territory of Blue Labour and Red Toryism. There is a shift taking place in the domains of urban and social policy. While the focus is


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on austerity-led change, it should be acknowledged that there is still an argument to be won, and outcomes are by no means determined. The potential for a significant difference in the way regeneration is discussed and practised looms, and the term might even wane to a point of uselessness. In this period of frugality, those principles about communitarianism, which remained opaque and distant in regeneration are currently being interwoven with rediscovered perspectives on distributism. At the same time, one is already seeing attempts to provoke a populist response to the size and purpose of the welfare state. If the debate on wealth redistribution and alleviating poverty became a technical problem in the golden years of regeneration, the response was better management of those obstacles that conspired to exclude socially and economically certain groups of people and places. This is why initiatives were launched by the previous Labour administration to focus on social inclusion — the targeting of support for young families, for example — while existing practices were subject to a more coordinated approach, such as using policies related to taxation and in-work benefits with a focus on economic inclusion. And as the politics were taken out of regeneration and an emphasis was placed on making things work, the cuts to the public sector, at least initially, have pushed back the managerialism that had become so familiar. Housing associations have removed officers from frontline desks, libraries and sports facilities have closed, community workers have been made redundant, community-based drug support has been removed from those in need, and there is evidence of early family support being withdrawn; the list demonstrating the scaling back of interventionist provision goes on, and more is expected. Austerity has meant


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many professional workers in regeneration have been removed from their role, and this has led to gaps in the supply of many types of local, social support. BLUE LABOUR AND RED TORY: IDEAS FOR A NEW REGENERATION? As these financial cuts have been implemented, parts of the Coalition Government (and it should be emphasised that there is an ideological debate in play on this) have returned to argue how there remains a pathological character (perhaps caricature) to poverty and have trumpeted a heroic cause to wealth creation. In other words, in going forward some have gone backwards and have reintroduced an older ideological debate about the undeserving poor. Iain Duncan Smith, who holds the influential position of Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, reflected this view recently when he stated how social (read ‘public’) housing ‘once a support for families working hard to give their children something better, has too often become a place of intergenerational worklessness, hopelessness and dependency’.15 In synchronised fashion, many of the same people are giving a utilitarian message about how all can benefit from the trickle-down effects if only more wealth generation can be encouraged.Yet, as Sage notes,12 his attachment to an era more identifiable with Thatcherism is being questioned, with the idea of ‘community’ also heard in the Coalition narrative on welfare. Red Tory and Blue Labour ideas are influencing a new perspective on regeneration. The coalition has stripped out what it regarded to be a layer of regional administration and bureaucracy and has sought to justify this through ideas about the Big Society. Norman16 argues that the Big Society builds on the work that reigned back the state in the years of Thatcher; it operates on three distinct


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levels of citizens and neighbourhood groups, public services delivered by social, private and state providers, and government. He adds that the Big Society shares a belief with Thatcherism in ‘the “vigorous virtues” of human beings’.16 This may seem some way from Blond’s Red Tory call for a wholly new capitalism ‘to target those left behind … through local communities and civil society’.17 Levitas1 counters, making a strong case for how the coalition adheres more to ‘a neoliberal shock doctrine providing an excuse for further appropriation of social resources by the rich’ through their Big Society approach. It is interesting to see how the Red Tory and Blue Labour concepts have converged. They have both drawn on distributist ideas, particularly those of Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton.18 White is explicit on how elements of radical conservatism are able to inform Blue Labour.19 He argues that Blue Labour can focus on community organising, drawing on the US perspective to create a relational dynamic within local activism.20 Blue Labour is also about providing a greater understanding and emphasis on a new politics of property ownership and wealth as part of a wider social justice strategy. This conservative type of socialism, according to Cooke,13 can act as an ‘eviscerating corrective’ to the paternalistic and managerialist tendencies of the previous (New) Labour administration. Blue Labour can enable ‘powerful city mayors able to drive economic development’ as part of a ‘more relational, democratic and productive capitalism’ (Ref. 13, p. 35). These are early signs of something beyond neoliberalism that may well have profound effects on the regeneration practices of the future and irrevocably change those of the previous fifteen years or so. Initiatives such as city mayors, community involvement in planning and


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high street retail incentives might well indicate a localism of a sort, although they do appear to be lacking in imagination and more slanted to business and enterprise speak rather than towards communitarian values. While Sage12 draws a distinction between Red Tory ideas and those of Blue Labour, noting that the former emphasise the ‘big state’ as problematic, while the latter cite unfettered market forces, he also recognises how they are both rejecting the idea of technocratic solutions as a response to the problems of social and economic inequality. Levitas,1 however, takes a more robust perspective, arguing that these ideas are by no means able to respond to the failures of the market and cannot make up for the dismantling of the welfare support. And in response to arguments for greater localism, she contends that the state has to be arbiter of equality in terms of social and economic justice. The principles that supporters of Red Toryism and Blue Labour are articulating may well shape the next phase of regeneration. As much as the debate on the Big Society and localism can be tied back to ideas about a fairer and more efficient capitalism, the potential for the state to pass on to the ‘feckless poor’ the bill for the financial crisis is more than possible. Indeed, Levitas1 has argued that austerity is the debt collection service for mobile capital and, as a consequence, one should be aware that there are material and objective consequences behind pursuing such Big Society ideology. Thus, new perceptions on regeneration that underpin current coalition policies may well reinforce practices that place responsibility for depletion on those very communities who feel the pain from poverty. This will be a marked difference from the centralism, administrative paternalism and managerialism experienced in pursuit of previous regeneration.


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CONCLUDING REMARKS

In this paper, it has been suggested that regeneration as we have come to know it has reached its end. Regeneration is a metaphor for the types of intervention and renewal initiatives seen over the past few decades, but particularly during the last Labour administration, and it is losing its metaphorical meaning and purpose. The author has argued (even exaggerated to make the point) that this was a golden age of regeneration and, as so, it was built on a number of elements. Resources for regeneration supported the renaissance of many towns and cities, and the public sector was enabled to take the risk out of inner urban sites to make them ready for private finance and to ensure that welfare support was underpinned through a range of social initiatives. This form of regeneration relied upon top-down, centralised imposition of strategy coupled to target setting and local management of resources.Yet the communitarian ideals that were part of the third way never really overcame the Labour administration adherence to neoliberalism. What mattered was what worked. Austerity measures have already cut deep into urban and social policies, and they have had an impact on local regeneration initiatives. There is more to come. Change is taking place to such an extent now that emergent concepts on what regeneration will look like in the future are contained within the ideas articulated in both Conservative and Labour politics. The notion of the Big Society brings with it a language that underplays the influence of those who advocate new types of welfare and the role the state may play. There is a conduit between the work of Red Toryism and the language about the feckless poor that is gaining purchase in and beyond the Conservative grouping. In response, the Left have opened up to Blue Labour. The point about Blue Labour and Red


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Toryism is that there is a revisited narrative about localism, communities and welfare that may well become totemic in a new regeneration. For those who are interested in the practices of regeneration, the principle alternatives that are opening up may be stark; the choice will be somewhere between holding individuals responsible for their own poverty and the belief that localism will be the mediator between state and market. Either way, the structural relations that drive inequality seem to be moving further away from public consciousness.

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10. 11. 12.

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Notes and References 1.

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4. 5.

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7. 8.

Levitas, R. (2012), ‘The just’s umbrella: Austerity and the big society in coalition policy and beyond’, Critical Social Policy,Vol. 32, No. 3, pp. 320–342. See also the special edition of The Political Quarterly,Vol. 11, Issue Supplement s1, 2011. Southern, A. (2010), ‘International perspectives on regeneration management: Common themes and the making of value’, in Diamond, J., Liddle, J., Southern, A. and Osei, P. (eds) ‘Urban regeneration management international perspectives’, Routledge, New York. See Penrose, E. T. (1952), ‘Biological analogies in the theory of the firm’, American Economic Review, Vol. 42, No. 5, pp. 804–819; Atkinson, A. (2004), ‘Urbanization in a neo-liberal world’, City,Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 89–108;Van Overtveldt, J. (2007), ‘The Chicago School: How the University of Chicago assembled the thinkers who revolutionized economics and business’, Agate, Chicago; Mehmood, A. (2010), ‘On the history and potentials of evolutionary metaphors in urban planning’, Planning Theory,Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 63–87. Pahl, R. E. (1970), ‘Whose city?, and other essays on sociology and planning’, Longmans, Harlow. Harvey, D. (1989), ‘From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: The transformation in urban governance in late capitalism’, Geografiska Annaler, Vol. 71B, No. 1, pp. 3–17. Compare Gray, A. G. (1998), ‘Business-like but not like a business: The challenge for public management’, Public Finance Foundation, CIPFA, London; and Gruening, G. (2001), ‘Origin and theoretical basis of New Public Management’, International Public Management Journal,Vol. 4, pp. 1–25. Social Exclusion Unit (2001), ‘National strategy for neighbourhood renewal: Policy action team audit’, Cabinet Office, London. Beatty, C., Brennan, A., Foden, M., Lawless, P., Tyler, O., Warnock, C. and Wilson, I. (2010), ‘The New Deal for Communities Programme: Assessing


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14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

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impact and value for money, The New Deal for Communities National Evaluation: Final report — Vol.6’, Department for Communities and Local Government, London. Jones, M. and Ward, K. (2002), ‘Excavating the logic of British urban policy: neoliberalism as the “crisis of crisis-management”’, Antipode,Vol. 34, No. 3, pp. 473–494. Harvey, D. (2009), ‘Social justice and the city’, revised edn, University of Georgia Press, Athens, GA. Southern, A. (2001), ‘What matters is what works? — The management of regeneration’, Local Economy,Vol. 16, No. 4, pp. 264–271. Sage, D. (2012), ‘A challenge to liberalism? The communitarianism of the Big Society and Blue Labour’, Critical Social Policy,Vol. 32, No. 3, pp. 365–382. Compare Levitas, R. (2000), ‘Community, Utopia and New Labour’, Local Economy,Vol. 15, No. 3, pp. 188–197; and Cooke, G. (2011), ‘New and blue’, in Glasman, M., Rutherford, J., Stears, M. and White, S. (eds) ‘The Labour tradition and the politics of paradox’, Oxford London Seminars, London. Weber, R. (2002), ‘Extracting value from the city: Neoliberalism and urban redevelopment’, Antipode, Vol. 34, No. 3, pp. 521–540. Cited in Harkness, S., Gregg, P. and MacMillan, L. (2012), ‘Poverty: The role of institutions, behaviours and culture’, Joseph Rowntree Foundation,York, p. 21. Norman, J. (2010), ‘The Big Society: The anatomy of the new politics’, University of Buckingham Press, Buckingham, p. 210. Blond, P. (2010), ‘Red Tory: How Left and Right have broken Britain and how we can fix it’, Faber & Faber, London. For more on distributism, see Belloc, H. (2002), ‘Essay on the restoration of property’, IHS Press, Norfolk,VA; Belloc, H. (2008), ‘Economics for Helen: A brief outline of real economy’, IHS Press, Norfolk,VA; Chesterton, G.K. (2002), ‘Utopia of usurers’, IHS Press, Norfolk,VA; Sagar, S. (2008), ‘Distributism’, in O’Huallachain, D., Sharpe, J. and Carlson, A. C. (eds) ‘Distributist perspectives,Vol. II: Essays on the economics of justice and charity’, IHS Press, Norfolk,VA. White, S. (2011), ‘How conservative should Labour be?’, in Glasman, M., Rutherford, J., Stears, M. and White, S. (eds) ‘The Labour tradition and the politics of paradox’, Oxford London Seminars, London. There is a slightly different focus on community organising in the US compared with the UK. Arnie Graf is credited with advising Ed Miliband, and he has a background in US community organising, raising points about relational activism. For a good introductory debate to the US community activism and community development, see Journal of Urban Affairs,Vol. 19, No. 1, 1997.


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