Urban Renaissance under Labour Government, UK

This paper examines the impact of the neoliberal approaches of the Labour government on the regeneration of British cities over the last decade with a specific interest in the role envisaged for community empowerment. The emergence of neoliberalist policies is traced through the previous Conservative governments with the introduction of new institutions and area-based programmes, aimed at enhancing the role of the market and rolling back the role of the state. Whilst an incoming Labour government might have been expected to have redressed these respective roles, the new Labour government did not. Indeed it sought increasingly complex partnerships with private sector agencies in order to deliver urban regeneration programmes. The paper argues that, despite much emphasis on the role of local communities in such programmes, there is an inherent contradiction in seeking to enhance the role of market mechanisms asa solution to the problems of relatively deprived communities. With the onset of the ‘credit crunch’ and the subsequent recession, these approaches were inevitably doomed to fail with the result that the scale of urban deprivation confronting the new Coalition government remains as challenging as ever.