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After Urban Regeneration is a comprehensive study of contemporary trends in urban policy and planning. Leading scholars come together to create a key contribution to the literature on gentrification, with a focus on the history and theory of community in urban policy. Engaging with debates as to how urban policy has changed, and continues to change, following the financial crash of 2008, the book provides an essential antidote to those who claim that culture and society can replicate the role of the state. Based on research from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Connected Communities programme and with a unique set of case studies drawing on artistic and cultural community work. The book sets out the argument that post-2010, UK urban policy has ended what was termed “regeneration” policy. In the current context, driven further after May 2015, communities, towns and cities are left to fend for themselves. The book concludes by arguing the role of the university in its relationship with urban communities also has to change with this context. The resources of universities can help local communities better understand the challenges they face and possible solutions.

Despite the improved supply and quality of housing in the United Kingdom and Europe over the last sixty years, the future of housing remains uncertain. Will the supply of new housing meet demand? Is decent, affordable housing an achievable goal? How far will governments seek to shape the market? How will they respond to demographic pressures in different parts of the country? Will housing wealth become a central issue in wider debates about the future of public services? This book looks at the big questions affecting the future of housing as a key indicator of social and economic well-being in the twenty-first century. It brings together contributions by housing experts who explore a wide range of themes and issues affecting the prospects for the coming twenty years or more. Drawing on the evidence of the past and present, the experts analyse the implications of current trends to consider how markets and governments might respond to the challenges ahead. The book is not a work of prophecy or a manifesto for action. It is designed to stimulate and contribute to informed debate about possible futures and what can be done to influence what happens.

In 2003 the Labour Government published its ambitious Sustainable Communities Plan. It promised to bring about a ‘step change’ in the English planning system and a new emphasis on the construction of more balanced, cohesive, and competitive places. This book uses historical and contemporary materials to document the ways in which policy makers, in different eras, have sought to use state powers and regulations to create better, more balanced, and sustainable communities and citizens. It charts the changes that have taken place in community-building policy frameworks, place imaginations, and core spatial-policy initiatives in the UK since 1945. In so doing, the book examines the tensions that have emerged within spatial policy over the types of places which should be created, and the forms of mobility and fixity required to create them. It also shows that there are significant lessons that can be learnt from the experiences of the past, which can be used to inform contemporary policy debates over issues such as migration, uneven development, key-worker housing, and sustainability.

Drawing on practices and theories of environmental justice, this book describes China's contribution to global warming and analyses its policy responses. Contributors critically examine China's practical and ethical responsibilities to climate change from a variety of perspectives. They explore policies that could mitigate China's environmental impact while promoting its own interests and meeting the international community's expectations.

This book provides a review of the findings of the largest-ever programme of cities research in the UK, the Economic and Social Research Council's ‘Cities: Competitiveness and Cohesion programme’. Chapters present the findings of this wide-ranging programme, organised around the themes of competitiveness, social cohesion, and the role of policy and governance. The book develops understanding of key processes, issues, and concepts critical to cities and urban change, and examines a large body of evidence on a wide range of policy issues at the heart of current debates about the performance of cities and the prospects for urban renaissance.

Seen through the eyes of parents, mainly mothers, this book tells the eye-opening story of what it is like to bring up children in troubled city neighbourhoods. The book provides a unique insider view on the impact of neighbourhood conditions on family life and explores the prospects for families from the point of view of equality, integration, schools, work, community, regeneration, and public services. This book is based on yearly visits over seven years to two hundred families living in four highly disadvantaged city neighbourhoods, two in East London and two in Northern inner and outer city areas. Twenty four families, six from each area, explain over time, from the inside, how neighbourhoods in and of themselves directly affect family survival. These twenty four stories convey powerful messages from parents about the problems they want tackled, and the things that would help them. The main themes explored in the book are neighbourhood, community, family, parenting, incomes, locals, and the need for civic intervention.

Since the turn of the 21st century, there has been a greater pace of reform to planning in Britain than at any other time. As a public sector activity, planning has also been impacted heavily by the wider changes in governance. Yet whilst such reform has been extensively commented upon within academia, few have empirically explored how these changes are manifesting themselves in planning practice. This book aims to understand how both specific planning and broader public sector reforms have been experienced and understood by chartered town planners working in local authorities across Great Britain. After setting out the reform context, successive chapters then map responses across the profession to the implementation of spatial planning, to targets, to public participation and to the idea of a ‘customer-focused’ planning, and to attempts to change the culture of the planning. These correspond to the four key themes of reforms to, or heavily affecting of, the planning system over the past decade: process, management, participation and culture. The aim of this book is to explore how planners have responded to them, and what this reveals about how modernisation is rolled-out by frontline public servants. Drawing on a neo-institutionalist frame, we conclude that ‘the coalface’ plays a vital role in shaping the contours of modernisation and argue for a more nuanced approach that simply looking at structures and policy discourses from a state-centred approach.

There is an alleged crisis of cohesion in the UK, manifested in debates about identity and ‘Britishness’; the breakdown of social connections along the fault lines of geography, ethnicity, faith, income, and age; and the fragile relationship between citizen and state. This book examines how these new dimensions of diversity and difference, so often debated in the national context, are emerging at the neighbourhood level. Contributors from a range of disciplinary backgrounds critically assess, and go beyond the limits of, contemporary policy discourses on ‘community cohesion’ to explore the dynamics of diversity and cohesion within neighbourhoods and to identify new dimensions of disconnection between and within neighbourhoods. The chapters provide theoretically informed critiques of the policy responses of public, private, voluntary, and community organisations and present new empirical research evidence about the dynamics of cohesion in UK neighbourhoods. Topics covered include new immigration, religion and social capital, faith schools, labour- and housing-market disconnections, neighbourhood territoriality, information technology and neighbourhood construction, and gated communities.

Community safety emerged as a new approach to tackling and preventing local crime and disorder in the late 1980s and was adopted into mainstream policy by New Labour in the late '90s. Twenty years on, it is important to ask how the community safety agenda has evolved and developed within local crime and disorder prevention strategies. This book provides the first sustained critical and theoretically informed analysis by leading authorities in the field. It explores the strengths and weaknesses of the community safety legacy, posing challenging questions, such as how and why has community safety policy making become such a contested terrain? What are the different issues at stake for ‘provider’ versus ‘consumer’ interests in community safety policy? Who are the winners and losers and where are the gaps in community safety policy making? Do new priorities mean that we have seen the rise and now the fall of community safety? The book provides answers to these questions by exploring a wide range of topics relating to community safety policy and practice, including: anti-social behaviour strategies; victims' perspectives on community safety; race, racism, and policing; safety and social exclusion; domestic violence; substance misuse; community policing; and organised crime.

Older people in the countryside are vastly under-researched compared to those living in urban areas. This co-authored volume describes the impetus for and principal findings and policy implications of the Grey and Pleasant Land (GaPL) project, a recent major interdisciplinary study of rural ageing in southwest England and Wales. The topic of this research is older people’s participation in rural community life, in particular the ways in which rural elders are connected to their communities and their contributions to rural civic society. This volume offers a unique interdisciplinary perspective on this issue focusing on older people’s role as assets in rural civic society and demonstrates how the use of diverse methods from across disciplines aims to increase public engagement with this research. The authors examine the ways in which rural elders are connected to community and place, the contributions they make to family and neighbours, and the organisations and groups to which they belong. Highly topical issues around later life explored through these perspectives include older people’s financial security, leisure, access to services, transport and mobility, civic engagement and digital inclusion – all considered within the rural context in an era of fiscal austerity. In doing so, this book challenges problem-based views of ageing rural populations through considering barriers and facilitators to older people’s inclusion and opportunities for community participation in rural settings.