Guest editorial - Alan Southern

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John Diamond. Centre for Local Policy Studies, Edge Hill College of Higher Education,. Ormskirk, UK, and. Alan Southern. Management School, University of ...
Guest editorial Research into regeneration: gaps in our knowledge base

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John Diamond Centre for Local Policy Studies, Edge Hill College of Higher Education, Ormskirk, UK, and

Alan Southern Management School, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK Abstract Purpose – The purpose of this editorial is to provide an overview to four papers in this issue that deal with regeneration. Design/methodology/approach – This guest editorial summarizes four papers from a regeneration management conference held at the University of Liverpool. Findings – City growth coalitions are, it seems, in abundance, and one should be aware of their unintended outcomes, likewise, such outcomes that occur during partnership processes. Originality/value – Readers gain a quick overview of regeneration which will be of interest to academics and practitioners alike. Keywords Regeneration, Knowledge sharing, Coalitions Paper type Viewpoint

The term “regeneration” is an ambiguous one. In the UK the history of regeneration is varied with responsibility vacillating between departments of government and positioned in the consciousness of the general public mainly through localized prestigious physical building such as waterfront transformation. Yet the regeneration often written about by academics and practitioners considers the wide expanse of change in the social and economic environment. In fact, much of the current literature on the nature of regeneration has tended to fall into three separate but arguably inter-related areas of agency, that is the capacity to shape change, the structural and organisational frameworks that are present, and there is an emerging interest in the skills and training required to deliver regeneration. Four papers that follow have developed from an initial airing at a “Regeneration Management” conference held at the University of Liverpool in June 2004. This conference brought together a number of practitioners and academics working in the field of regeneration, providing a mix of perspectives on what regeneration is, and why it is important. It is perhaps a worthwhile exercise to outline the rationale for such a gathering prior to introducing the relevance of each article to this journal. Until quite recently little attention has been paid to how this overt process of public sector intervention is put into operation, is managed and led. If previously the private sector would be drawn in through an emphasis on physical regeneration, for instance involving surveyors, engineers and architects, today the emphasis on social and economic regeneration has resulted in a valid role played by the voluntary sector and a

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crucial contribution from the recipients of regeneration, the communities themselves. The wide range of actors involved means that regeneration is one of the most fundamental aspects of social intervention that the government implicates itself in. With regeneration we have a highly visible set of actions that are now tied to a particular time and space; a post-1997 “third way” indulgence that not only has the new Labour administration become noted for, but has resulted in the public sector purse being opened and a diverse range of initiatives becoming operational. There is no lack of career opportunities now in the field regeneration. There is no lack of individuals and organizations that put themselves forward as regeneration “experts” – academics included – particularly those able to identify and be associated with initiatives deemed as “successful”. There is even no lack of critique both in the practitioner publications and also at academic conferences about regeneration and its limitations. Herein lies the rub. Everyone has an opinion today on regeneration and as a theme is has become just about as inclusive as it could get. Despite increased attention that sometimes occupies national newspaper headlines regeneration of whatever type, is not an unforeseeable outcome when communities suffer the manifold problems of degeneration. There is no guarantee of a coordinated outcome. There is no surety of efficient management of resources or even methods of community involvement in setting out the regeneration process. In the private sector, when an organization reaches some point of significant change, key actors often come to the fore and instil a crucial component in the future trajectory of the business. Similarly in regeneration when a community, place or group of people suffer then the matter of leadership can become significant and can be a key aspect of the management of regeneration precisely because of the effort, commitment and resources so dedicated. Yet few could argue that we have “cracked” regeneration and that progress is an inevitable outcome of program delivery. It was the discussion on points such as these that provided the basis for the 2004 Conference. The four papers that follow provide a sample, albeit a coordinated sample, concerning some existing gaps in our understanding of regeneration. Two papers look specifically at the role of partnership in the processes of regeneration. Over the past ten years or more, many presentations and papers have looked at partnerships in academic circles. Yet the two papers on partnerships here achieve two distinct and noteworthy effects. First, they open up new areas of consideration for those of us interested in regeneration as a means to achieve social and economic change. From their initial presentation they can be used for both theoretical and practical development. Second, they complement each other in that one paper outlines a narrative of the processes of city centre renewal, demonstrating the tight coupling of relationships held together by a common vision for renewal. The other paper provides a critique of the dark side of partnerships showing that behind such tight coupling are typically, processes of exclusion and contingency. While the first paper sees the partnership process as crucial in bringing about a particular type of renewal the second notes how it is common to find partnerships lacking in their thoroughness to equity. This leads quite adequately to the third and fourth papers that look quite specifically at an aspect of regeneration that has remained at the periphery, that of race. Those aware of urban policy and its place as an antecedent of today’s understanding of regeneration will reflect on the role of race and immigration and perhaps wonder how this matter

has been sidelined. These two paper place race at the centre of regeneration and provide strong justification for further research in this field. In the first paper Williams has identified the common sense of purpose that is needed to tackle complex regeneration problems. This is a specific study of Manchester city centre in the aftermath and destruction of the bombing that took place in 1996. What Williams is able to do through an examination of the partnership that emerged to reconstruct the centre of Manchester, the Manchester Millennium Task Force (MML), is highlight how important the managing of the relationship between public sector and private sector interests becomes and how crucial it remains up to the point of partnership succession. He notes that other relationships, such as between the MML and residents or users of the City Centre, become secondary. The dynamic created in this initiative resulted in much more functional objective setting. Therefore, certain types of skills at public officer level were needed not only to match those commercial abilities available to manage the performance of the partnership, but to take on board potential difficulties such as risk management, and particularly the flow of funding required to support renewal. For Williams this partnership was successful within its own remit but he notes how the context for success has been set out through a competitive ethos. Major cities seek to develop their outward looking stance, supported by the fostering of entrepreneurial cultures within the partnership approach, and the strategic mobilisation around inter-urban competition culminates in the plethora of growth strategies we find today. In many ways, the experience of Manchester, Williams claims, has provided the basis to draw out lessons on a more universal scale and these are readily seen in contemporary city developments. While this may well lead to improvements in the physical environment, and subsequently support cultural renaissance in some parts of the city, when such a collaborative action is targeted on a small spatial area within the city then this may well exacerbate inequity within the city overall. Rowe also focuses on the relationships within partnerships although rather than adopting a specific case he provides, in the second article, an indication of typical partnership behavior. Rowe begins by reflecting on the difficulties that are encountered when partnerships are put into practice noting that the partnership processes are aggravated by efforts both to adapt and to undermine, and this leads to very real experiences of inequality within partnership operation. Having sought to change the emphasis on partnerships during the post-1997 period, the Labour government have attempted to achieve greater levels of efficiency by encouraging partnerships to work across organizational boundaries. At the same time, third way philosophy has been used to persuade the private sector that social concerns requiring state intervention were not simply another name for welfarism, but were important points for business performance as well. This, according to Rowe, has been hampered by a genuine confusion about what governance is about at a local level coupled to an inability of public agencies to engage community groups and the voluntary sector in any form of consultation that is able to go beyond simple wish lists and narrowly focused complaints. In turn, we can expect consultation to centre on the presentation of change, dominated by narrow interests, rather than enabling involvement in the process of decision-making that sets out the way regeneration can be shaped.

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Rowe puts forward an innovative typology to explain his critique on the partnership model we have come to understand in the UK. He talks of infantilising partnerships that are subject to strict, bureaucratic systems of control by public agencies that limit the contribution to regeneration from the wider community. There are shotgun partnerships that rather than provide a bottom-up approach to regeneration provide, to play on Rowe’s trope, a marriage with a tendency to act before any attempt at building up a set of relationships within the partnership. The third type is the partnership of convenience whereupon, through the provision of public funding, partners become complicit in a cynical allocation of resources. Finally there are those abusive partnerships that are dominated by a select elite who protect their own privileged access to decision-making and who seek through their operation, to ensure who is included and who is excluded in the partnership process. Rowe’s use of metaphor creates a set of typical relationships and behaviours in a Weberian sense that will prove useful for researchers in the future. Two articles that follow pay specific attention to race within the processes of regeneration. This is to be welcomed, as too little focus has been paid to race as a feature of regeneration. As Speeden argues, in this sense we really should have anticipated that within regeneration the characteristics of institutional racism may be located in the practices and organizational culture of public agencies. For Speeden, regeneration has a distinct impact on race with an emergent relationship taking shape between the equalities agenda, and the experiences from social inclusion and community cohesion policies. These have come together from different policy agendas and as such we find a variance of policy objectives with potential unintended consequences that impact disproportionately on marginalised groups, such as those in ethnic communities. One way in which this can be addressed suggests Speeden, is through equality impact assessments. Such a method could help to address the persistence of racism within regeneration and public policy practice in general, particularly if it proves to be a way of assessing the potential impact of regeneration outcomes on equality matters. This can be achieved by setting out clear equality objectives that seek to rectify existing or unintended inequalities and which raise awareness of good equality practice. Yet as Speeden acknowledges, reducing issues of inequality, whether about race or other form of discrimination, to a method of regeneration management inevitably means that the resolution of conflict becomes a technocratic process. The question is whether addressing matters of race inequality through an operational solution is not only a depoliticised act, but an admission that the democratic process is inadequate to face such concerns. The second article to consider the same subject is presented by Pemberton and his colleagues situated at the Merseyside Social Inclusion Observatory, at the University of Liverpool. Pemberton et al., take a different but equally pragmatic approach to taking on board the fact that local regeneration has failed to address the needs of Black and Other Racial Minority (BRM) groups. This, they argue, must raise a number of questions about the intention from intervention (that is regeneration policy and implementation) and whether an integrated approach brings with it sustainable improvement, particularly as the evidence suggests that this is a visible failure, and that BRM groups continue to be over represented in areas requiring regeneration.

Pemberton et al., develop their work to focus on how data about BRM communities are collated and constructed. Using BRM communities in Liverpool as their case, they show that while there is a developing set of data at the national level, this is particularly poor at a local level. This has arisen because historically BRM communities have only a low level of representation in regeneration initiatives and there is scarce evidence to suggest previous regeneration has made any lasting difference. The authors suggest that there is a lack of appropriate intelligence on BRM communities and their local circumstances. This poor level of baseline evidence is because of a lack of understanding about BRM diversity such as the different capabilities that exist to engage with regeneration and specifically, low levels of consultation with BRM groups. They argue that ways to address this should include improved levels of BRM community engagement, more sophisticated ways in which BRM community capacity can be built, and by raising the aspirations within BRM groups. Both articles, from Speeden and from Pemberton et al., show that in spite of institutionalised racism long being recognised in the public domain more thought is obviously required to conceptualise instances of regeneration and inequality. These articles help to reinstate race as part of the lexicon of regeneration. As a small but focused collection of articles the papers presented here demonstrate some of the current gaps that exist in our knowledge base on regeneration. The paper by Williams should lead us to question the primacy of particular approaches to regeneration. City growth coalitions are it seems in abundance, and we should be aware of their unintended outcomes. Likewise, such outcomes that occur during those partnership processes are introduced by Rowe. Greater use of his typology to explore regeneration would assist us in understanding the inequities that exist as scarce resources are designated to implement change. Finally, there is still much work to do to take on board as a serious matter the question of race as part of the regeneration process. It seems inconceivable that this can be ignored. Juxtaposed, race, city growth and inequity are surely pertinent and potentially fruitful areas for further investigation.

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