Urban policy and communities
Urban policy and communities
The late 1960s witnessed the emergence of geographically-targeted urban policy initiatives designed to address what the then Home Secretary James Callaghan described as the “deadly quagmire of need and apathy" in some inner-city communities. This chapter considers how these urban policies have evolved since the late 1960s, with a particular focus on the experimental character of these initiatives and their changing interpretation ‘community’. It focuses particularly on the (re)turn to community in urban policy from the early 1990s onwards, when community involvement, and ultimately community leadership, came to be seen as the solution to previous policy failure. The chapter argues that community-led urban policies repeated the mistakes of past initiatives by misrepresenting the causes of neighbourhood decline. It also suggests that the effective abandonment of urban policy experiments since 2010 is arguably be the biggest regeneration experiment to date.
Keywords: urban policy, communities, community involvement, area-based initiatives, policy experiments
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