Impacts of previous renewal/redevelopment practice

Many British neighbourhoods have experienced one or many rounds of renewal/regeneration projects, but the effects of previous practice were seldom successful in escaping the exclusion process. In those areas which had experienced

property-led redevelopment, although some stakeholders did gain many benefits from the process, the promotion of the places did not usually fully capture the real needs of all local residents. In practice, the variety of disadvantaged groups, including low-educated or low-skilled labour, immigrants, elderly, disabled or single-parent families, were greatly marginalised from the local promotion process. The updating of industries, beautification of the local physical environment and the incoming flow of a richer population simultaneously brought rising housing prices and increased the daily cost of living to the local community. Most of the poor tenants who used to live in dilapidated conditions, could no longer afford the local cost of living after the redevelopment projects. The result was that they had to be relocated out of the

“redeveloped, promoted or gentrified” neighbourhoods. Since the late 1980s, because of the deregulation of the housing market, the people evicted by the property-led redevelopment projects were sent to be concentrated in some specific geographic areas together with other losers of the socio-economic restructuring. That means that the majority of people suffering intolerable living conditions were not eliminated at all but were only relocated and concentrated in some more “invisible” neighbourhoods in cities.

Most of these areas are the residual public housing estates on the peripheries of cities, which were mostly inheritance of the large scale “demolition and relocation” movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and then excluded by the property-led redevelopment projects in the 1980s (Forrest and Murie, 1983).

In addition to the property-led redevelopment projects, in past decades there were also some regeneration projects which targeted more the promotion of social well-being rather than economic renaissance. They were either supported by public aid or based on self-organised community activities. These initiatives were usually carried out on a very limited scale and focused only on this or that specific problem, or return the exclusion in one or two aspects of the deprived urban neighbourhoods. However, the effects of these attempts were very similar to the over-marketised property-led redevelopment process: the approaches in this or that single domain might achieve short-term success, but this did little to help stop the decline in other aspects. Therefore, the vicious circle of “marginalisation-exclusion-decline” still occurred in these neighbourhoods.

In the case of Craigmillar, several rounds of regeneration initiatives have already been launched in the past thirty years. Among them, the ideas and approaches of the self-organised “cultural-led regeneration” must be marked, which is closely linked to

the Craigmillar Festival Committee (called the Craigmillar Festival Society after 1970).

The community-based organisation launched frequent community activities, pulling out local talent and staging a People’s Festival of music, drama, and the arts. Besides, many artists, politicians and researchers were attracted by the community arts; they soon formed a powerful partnership with local communities, and became dedicated to fighting to address the decline of local social well-being. As a result of this work, the area has gained some of the missing facilities and opportunities to enhance local services. Also, the activities enhanced the self-confidence of the people suffering deprivation, by encouraging them to undertake some public service themselves. The activities also encouraged local people who were trying to re-discover their lost local identity and spirituality, most of which was then transferred into useful recommendations for improving the quality of life in Craigmillar.

However, the achievements of the community-based initiatives were still quite limited.

Despite the high passion of self-driven social improvement movements, some fundamental problems of the multiple deprivations, such as unemployment, education, health and crime, could not really be solved by the community themselves. Many of the above problems were not new but longstanding and interactive. Many young people had to face this unequal treatment as soon as they were born in the community. After more than ten years of neo-liberal reform with the retreat of public services, the problem has become more significant.

In earlier official documents produced by the New Labour government, as well as in some research reports by academicians (SEU, 1998; Carley, 2000), the tremendous costs of unsuccessful previous regeneration policy and practice around Britain have been described as follows:

“The failure to get to grips with the problems of the poorest neighbourhoods represents a costly policy failure. Public money has been wasted on programmes that were never going to work and generations of people living in poor neighbourhoods have grown up with the odds stacked against them. We are all paying for this failure, whether through the direct cost of benefits and crime, or the indirect costs of social division and low achievement.” (SEU, 1998, p. 5)

Furthermore, the following official documents (SEU, 2001b) summarised some significant lessons which should be learnt from the reasons behind the failures, as the follows:

“Too much reliance was put on short-term regeneration initiatives in a handful of areas and too little was done about the failure of mainstream public services in hundreds of neighbourhoods. There was too little attention to the problems of worklessness, crime, and poor education and health services. Government failed to harness the knowledge and energy of local people, or empower them to develop their own solutions. There was a lack of leadership, and a failure to spread what works and encourage innovation.”

(SEU, 2001b, p. 7)

The critical overview of previous practice did provide some possible positive changes to the later new style of regeneration policy and practice in the New Labour era for the most deprived areas like Craigmillar. First, the new regeneration strategy with longer-term, holistic, mixed targets (across economic, social and other areas) must be carefully proposed. Second, the barriers between governmental departments should be broken. Also, the role of the local community in both decision making and implementation need to be further emphasised and the self-organised activities should be coordinated with the aid of incoming public funding and private capital from outside.