Whose Urban Renaissance?

An international comparison of urban regeneration strategies

Libby Porter, Kate Shaw

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781134106080
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

The desire of governments for a 'renaissance' of their cities is a defining feature of contemporary urban policy. From Melbourne and Toronto to Johannesburg and Istanbul, government policies are successfully attracting investment and middle-class populations to their inner areas. Regeneration - or gentrification as it can often become - produces winners and losers. There is a substantial literature on the causes and unequal effects of gentrification, and on the global and local conditions driving processes of dis- and re-investment. But there is little examination of the actual strategies used to achieve urban regeneration - what were their intents, did they 'succeed' (and if not why not) and what were the specific consequences?

Whose Urban Renaissance? asks who benefits from these urban transformations. The book contains beautifully written and accessible stories from researchers and activists in 21 cities across Europe, North and South America, Asia, South Africa, the Middle East and Australia, each exploring a specific case of urban regeneration. Some chapters focus on government or market strategies driving the regeneration process, and look closely at the effects. Others look at the local contingencies that influence the way these strategies work. Still others look at instances of opposition and struggle, and at policy interventions that were used in some places to ameliorate the inequities of gentrification. Working from these stories, the editors develop a comparative analysis of regeneration strategies, with nuanced assessments of local constraints and counteracting policy responses. The concluding chapters provide a critical comparison of existing strategies, and open new directions for more equitable policy approaches in the future.

Whose Urban Renaissance? is targeted at students, academics, planners, policy-makers and activists. The book is unique in its geographical breadth and its constructive policy emphasis, offering a succinct, critical and timely exploration of urban regeneration strategies throughout the world.

1 Introduction

Kate Shaw and Libby Porter

DOI: 10.4324/9780203884539-1

The desire of governments for a ‘renaissance’ of their cities is a defining feature of contemporary urban policy. From Melbourne and Toronto to Johannesburg and Istanbul, government policies are succeeding in attracting investment and middle-class populations to their inner areas. The benefits of reinvesting in city spaces made redundant or derelict by years of neglect and abandonment are clear enough. There are good arguments for ‘regeneration’ even in areas that, while still vital, have experienced sustained disinvestment. But regeneration has a dark side. All the jobs and activity and improvements to the built and natural environments brought by successful regeneration bring, in turn, increases in land values, which can cause displacement or exclusion of lower income users of that place. The effects of regeneration reinforce themselves: the greater the increases in land value, the greater the potential for social exclusion.

The negative consequences of urban regeneration strategies — intended or unintended — are relatively unexplored by their advocates. This is not surprising: the beneficiaries of major projects are hardly likely to advertise their disadvantages. We hear few reflections from politicians, city boosters and property developers on the immediate and long-term effects of elimination of low-income people from city centres. There is little evidence in government decision-making of recognition that urban regeneration affects different people differently. Policy-makers rarely display understandings of the social, economic, cultural, environmental and political complexities of urban regeneration. Nonetheless, urban regeneration has become conventional wisdom within many governments and ‘off-the-shelf’ regeneration policies are being rolled out in city after city in an effort to catalyse the revalorization of urban space. Egged on by celebrity academics such as Richard Florida (2002), governments and markets are implementing formulaic urban regeneration strategies as though they have universal application and no qualifying repercussions. As cities all over the world are now seeking their ‘renaissance’, there is an urgent need to critically assess the nature, impact and meaning of this phenomenon.

Whose Urban Renaissance? examines contemporary urban regeneration strategies in Europe, North and South Americas, the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Australia. We are looking for patterns and differences — does urban regeneration premised on major projects and events always produce building forms and uses of little value to low-income users of city space (Searle and Bounds 1999; Searle 2002; Balibrea 2004; Hall 2005)? Do regeneration strategies designed to increase tourism have similar effects on the locals no matter where in the world they are (Zukin 1995)? Do ‘creative city’ strategies produce a different kind of regeneration, or are they a complement to ‘business as usual’ (Peck 2005; Shaw 2006; Atkinson and Easthope 2007)? Is urban regeneration always associated with the selling or marketing of place? Who benefits from the implementation of these strategies?

Before going further, we will clarify the words we are using as their meanings are crucial to the discussion that follows.

Urban regeneration is an elastic term. As Allan Cochrane (2007) observes:

The definition of the ‘urban’ being ‘regenerated’ and, indeed, the understanding of ‘regeneration’ have varied according to the initiative being pursued, even if this has rarely been acknowledged by those making or implementing the policies. So, for example in some approaches, it is local communities or neighbourhoods that are being regenerated or renewed (learning to become self-reliant). In others, it is the urban economies that are being revitalised or restructured with a view to achieving the economic well-being of residents and in order to make cities competitive. In yet others it is the physical and commercial infrastructure that is being regenerated, in order to make urban land economically productive once again. And there has also been a drive towards place marketing (and even ‘branding’), in which it is the image (both self-image and external perception) of cities that has to be transformed

(pp. 3–4)

All these aspects are indeed the subjects of vaguely defined urban regeneration strategies, in various combinations and sometimes all at once, as the chapters in this book show. But there is broad coherency in the term. We use regeneration to mean, simply, reinvestment in a place after a period of disinvestment. We refer to regeneration strategies as the various mechanisms by which regeneration occurs, whether state or market driven. Regeneration policies are particular public policies (no matter how ill-defined) implemented by governments to achieve this.

Urban regeneration is often seen as a euphemism for gentrification. We agree that the two can mean the same thing, but they do not necessarily. We accept the broad definition of gentrification as a ‘class remake’ of the city (Smith 1996), involving the revalorization and ‘production of space for progressively more affluent users’ (Hackworth 2002:815) and requiring displacement or exclusion of lower status residents, businesses and other users of that place. This process too can be driven by the state or by the market. There is an argument that regeneration should be seen as carrying the same class character as gentrification (Slater 2006). We don't entirely accept this assessment. Regeneration, as a process of reinvestment, may or may not intend (or bring about) such a transformation. We see regeneration and gentrification as occupying different spaces on a continuum of social and economic geographic change, where maximum disinvestment, or ‘filtering’, is at one extreme, and ‘super-gentrification’ — where corporate executives displace university professors (Lees 2003a) — is at the other. Regeneration becomes gentrification when displacement or exclusion occurs. The concept of ‘exclusionary displacement’ (Marcuse 1985) is important here: if people are excluded from a place they might have lived or worked in or otherwise occupied had the place not been ‘regenerated’, then we regard this as gentrification as much as had they been directly displaced.

Regeneration can have benevolent overtones, then, and it can also mark the beginning of gentrification. Sometimes there is little distinction to be made between the intents behind regeneration and gentrification strategies, and we allow the authors in this book a certain blurring of the terms to reflect this.

Urban renaissance, in contrast, is an expression with no real content at all, used loosely and uncritically by its usually neoliberal advocates to refer to a desired re-emergence of cities as centres of general social well-being, creativity, vitality and wealth. Including environmental concerns about urban sprawl, and recognition of the benefits of more ‘compact cities’, urban renaissance encapsulates a confusion of ideals of social, cultural, economic, environmental and political sustainability. We use it here in parody of the all-encompassing range of its common usage.

Reclaiming regeneration: the contribution of this book

This book is situated at the cross-roads of urban geography, urban policy and planning. There is a wealth of literature detailing the global economic and social restructuring that precipitated the withdrawal of investment from cities in the twentieth century (for some of the best examples, see Harvey 1985; Fainstein 1993; Sassen 1994; Smith 1996,), so we do not explain these processes here. There is a rich field on the causes and effects of gentrification (for summaries and syntheses of the various perspectives, see Rose 1984; Lees 1994; van Weesep 1994; Shaw 2002; Atkinson 2003; and Lees et al. 2008), so neither do we cover this ground.

Our starting point is a curiosity about the prevalence of urban regeneration strategies — throughout the world. In order to examine the phenomenon more closely, we asked researchers from 21 cities how these strategies are being used in the places they live. Each of the cities has at some point experienced disinvestment and more recently undergone a process of reinvestment. We asked the researchers to detail the mechanics of the process and discuss its effects. The resulting chapters are short accounts of specific regeneration strategies at work in particular places. Some of these are market led; most are driven by government policies. The chapters look at the intent of the strategy: was it to ‘improve’ the social demographics of a neighbourhood by replacing low-income with higher income people? Or did it lift the median income by providing decent housing, jobs and services for existing residents? They look at the consequences of the strategy: was there any displacement (of residents, businesses, other users)? Who benefited and who lost from the transformation?

Some of the chapters tell of violent, revanchist appropriations of low-cost space for high-income users. Others tell stories about strategies that did not come to fruition. In these cases, we want to know, why did they not? What are the implications of this? Others chapters are stories of contest. Where there was opposition to the strategy, what form did it take, who was involved, how successful was it in altering the original (stated) course? Still others look at whether the urban regeneration strategy itself had socially equitable intents, and whether these intents were achieved. Or were there multiple intents, even contradictory ones? Or was there a different policy intervention in play at the same time, attempting to counter the effects of gentrification?

Case studies that tell a different story to the exemplary becoming of a ‘creative city’ (Landry 2000; Florida 2002) are rarely collected and analysed, especially by those responsible for promoting and implementing regeneration strategies. Far more influential on government decision-making is the long-established public policy literature that focuses on the drivers of inner city decline, the need for regeneration (gentrification) of derelict neighbourhoods, and the policy tools available to governments to achieve this (Donnison and Middleton 1987; Bianchini and Parkinson 1993; Carley and Kirk 1998; Roberts and Sykes 2000). This body of work neither evaluates the differing impacts of such policies, nor questions the assumptions about knowledge and place that underpin them. It therefore fails to assess what has been lost in the process of regeneration (Porter and Barber 2006).

Many regeneration policies are based on a logic about cities in which a lack of middle-class presence (residents, investors, visitors) is a ‘problem’. These areas, according to this logic, become marked by deprivation and disadvantage (Atkinson 2002; Seo 2002). Deprivation and urban decline are depicted as improper parts of urban life, requiring usually state-led intervention to eradicate them from the city and the city's image (Baeten 2004) — especially if that city is positioning itself in the global marketplace of city competitiveness. This logic begs the question, following Cochrane (2007), of why a particular problem is identified as requiring policy intervention at a particular time, and further, why it is identified as an urban problem requiring an intervention into urban land.

We propose that the neoliberal policy dogma of urban renaissance has two defining characteristics: first, it constructs urban places as ‘in decline’ and in so doing targets for ‘renaissance’ those neighbourhoods with the most vulnerable populations. Second, it produces policies with the aim of restructuring and revalorizing urban space, where success is measured primarily by the rise in land values. That there is particular unanimity among politicians, policy-makers, city boosters, developers and property owners — that is, those who have most to gain from regeneration — is rarely discussed. As Erik Swyngedouw (2007) argues, an apparent evacuation of politics has made much policy-making a highly consensual business.

There is a powerful strand of critical geography, however, that does explore the negative consequences of urban regeneration strategies. The extensive literature in this field takes urban regeneration, along with renewal, revitalization, rejuvenation and of course renaissance, as depoliticized euphemisms for gentrification. All these terms, as Neil Smith (1996, 2002a) points out, omit any connotation of class restructure and displacement. This literature starts from the premise that the transition from a lower to higher socio-economic status population, involving displacement of the former, is precisely what the advocates of regeneration intend. It analyses the strategies employed and emphasizes the various injustices to individuals and social groups that result (e.g. Deutsche 1996; Smith 1996,2002a; Atkinson 2002; Atkinson and Bridge 2005; Slater 2006; Lees et al. 2008). Part of the power of this work is its clarity that processes of disinvestment and reinvestment are a knowing activity on the part of the ‘producers of gentrification’ (Smith 1987) — the investors, developers, real estate agents, banks, governments and mainstream media — who act, in effect, as the collective initiative behind gentrification.

The drawback of this approach is that it does not allow that regeneration can occur in any other way. It neither allows for different and competing objectives among the producers of urban regeneration, nor does it consider that various injustices might sometimes be unintended. It precludes the possibility of governments acting beyond the interests of the producers of gentrification. We are not certain that they cannot. The state is not always and already repressive: it can be the site of our ‘freedoms and our unfreedoms’ (Scott 1998:7). Sandercock argues that the role of the state ‘is not a given (not simply “the executive committee of the bourgeoisie”) but is dependent on the relative strength of social mobilizations, and their specific context in space and time’ (1998:102). What of the impa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Front Chapter
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• PART I On urban renaissance strategies
• PART II On local limits to regeneration strategies
• PART III On grass-roots struggles
• PART IV On the possibilities of policy
• PART V New theoretical and practical insights for urban policy
• Bibliography
• Index