From a framework to a toolkit: Urban regeneration in an age of austerity

Abstract

An age of austerity presents considerable challenges for those engaged in purposeful acts aiming to regenerate communities of places. Driven by an intense period of global economic uncertainty and a crippling banking crisis, the last rites were effectively read for holistic notions of area-based regeneration in England across the space of a few months. Of central concern to this research is investigating the recalibrated urban policy measures involving the examination of the transition from a dense national regeneration framework accompanied by a plethora of area-based initiatives to a minimalistic ‘regeneration’ toolkit to enable growth. Drawing on interviews with some principal agents of regeneration, the paper explores emerging new agendas. The research material generated indicates that the public policy field of regeneration has largely been subsumed by a single-minded pursuit of economic growth as a spatially unjust neoliberal toolkit is unmasked. Views from practitioners, however, also indicate the complexity of actually existing regeneration projects as well as some potentially progressive activities associated with the retreat of the state.