Series: CASE Studies on Poverty, Place and Policy

 

Poverty is still a real issue within Britain today and this essential series provides evidence-based insights into how communities and families are dealing with it.

Published in conjunction with the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion (CASE) at the London School of Economics, this series draws together fresh research and sheds important light on the impact of anti-poverty policy, focusing on the individual and social factors that promote regeneration, recovery and renewal.

CASE Studies on Poverty, Place and Policy

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  • Goal 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities x
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‘Weak market cities’ across European and America, or ‘core cities’ as they were in their heyday, went from being ‘industrial giants’ dominating their national, and eventually the global, economy, to being ‘devastation zones’. In a single generation three-quarters of all manufacturing jobs disappeared, leaving dislocated, impoverished communities, run-down city centres, and a massive population exodus. So how did Europeans react? And how different was their response from America’s? This book looks closely at the recovery trajectories of seven European cities from very different regions of the EU. Their dramatic decline, intense recovery efforts, and actual progress on the ground underline the significance of public underpinning in times of crisis. Innovative enterprises, new-style city leadership, special neighbourhood programmes, and skills development are all explored. The American experience, where cities were largely left ‘to their own devices’, produced a slower, more-uncertain recovery trajectory.

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This chapter discusses the lessons that can be learned from the industrial collapse, subsequent recovery, and current constraints of European industrial cities. It links the threads of growth, decline, and recovery within ex-industrial cities to bigger trends and patterns that underpin their history, progress, and future trajectories. The chapter describes the main strands of progress of the cities and their strategies for recovery.

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This chapter describes how the three larger industrial cities of Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and Philadelphia responded to the urban crisis. It explains that programmes of renewal evolved in US cities over the long period of urban decline, often driven by extreme racial problems and a gradual recognition that suburban sprawl was itself a problem. Partnerships between the public, private, and community sectors have emerged to drive change. The chapter also considers the recovery prospects of three smaller U.S. cities: Louisville, Chattanooga, and Akron.

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This section suggests that the urban future depends on thinking of cities as the human equivalent of trees, as Gaudi had envisioned in his great basilica – dense, diverse, light and dark, self-regenerating, strong, tall and small, life-supporting, and long-lasting. It explains that trees are magical in their wealth, strength, contrasts, and energy, carefully fitting one layer of growth inside another, just as our urban jigsaw fits together within the frame of the big picture. It further suggests the problems of the cities are not problems of chaos but of ‘organized complexity’ for which new solutions will emerge.

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This chapter examines the role that housing and urban policy played in sucking out people in the interwar years, leaving decay and squalor behind. It notes that the reality of poverty, squalor, and disease drove new forms of town planning that were supposed to overcome the endemic problems of urban poverty. It claims however, that one Utopian model of urban and housing planning was developed in the early 20th century with real enthusiasm and exported all over the world. It notes that the Garden City movement managed to combine enterprise and cooperation, houses and gardens with public and social amenities, in a totally new form of philanthropic endeavour that was eventually to capture the imagination of governments. It also looks at the devastating urban consequences of the First World War.

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This chapter argues for existing neighbourhoods and a closure of the North-South divide as ways of creating a better Sustainable Communities Plan. It notes that in the year after the plan came out, the government suggested that over the period of the plan up to 400,000 demolitions might eventually be required to ‘modernise’ and ‘revitalise’ declining cities – the very opposite of community renewal. It observes that the plan reinforced by the Barker Review of Housing reads like a house builder’s bonanza and made many existing communities shudder as it reinforced a renewed threat of the bulldozer.

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This chapter examines the origins of the Sustainable Communities Plan within the divided and unequal cities, challenging the sustainability of the plans for ‘boom and abandonment’, particularly the intense urban growth proposed for the South of the country. It notes that in 2003 the government set out its big-picture of vision of continuing urban growth for England in the Sustainable Communities Plan, a radical attempt to ‘re-balance’ housing supply and demand in all parts of the country. It claims that the progress report presents a mosaic of encouraging dynamism and new thinking, alongside worrying signs of decrepitude and mistakes.

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This chapter looks at why Britain failed to build a New Jerusalem after the Second World War, using the blunt tools of the bulldozer and high-rise building in green fields. It also explores the legacy of garden cities in the New Towns, Green Belts, and council estates following the Second World War. It notes that governments of all political persuasions have used their housing policies to encapsulate a much broader philosophical approach to the state of cities, and in 1918 and 1945 new housing was the reward for victory in war, a collective national effort. It further notes that the politics of mass housing became so dominant after the wars because people relied on councils to build for the masses and councils are political bodies. It explains that it made housing a stop-go, government spending spree, a quick vote-catcher and steering wheel rather that the undercarriage of urban development.

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This chapter uncovers the roots of urban recovery in the return to ‘small is beautiful’ and inner-city renewal. It explains that the shift to renovation demonstrated that renewal could be cost-effective and quick with nothing like the disruption and damage caused by demolition. It notes that renovation was immensely popular with tenants and low-income owners, particularly from minority ethnic groups who were still often excluded from council housing. It adds that the birth of ‘neighbourhood renewal’ through property renovation led to the rebirth of the inner city, attracting back more prosperous households, as well as holding onto existing communities, and generating new services, jobs, and investment. It explains that gentrification – the displacement of lower-income residents by higher-income newcomers – put pressure on existing communities, but far less than the brutal exclusions of wholesale clearance.

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This chapter explores three final conditions: environmental sustainability; mixing existing communities; and changing ways of running cities. It explains that smart growth, neighbourhood renewal, and these three conditions redirect our energies away from grand, sweeping plans to something more finely tuned, more careful, more respectful of what is already there and what the wider environment can support. It suggests that environmental damage can be reversed and more people can be drawn into cities through well-designed public space within the built environment. It states that the critical challenges within existing communities are threefold: to upgrade homes and environments to the point where they counter the attraction of new-build communities; to add with immense care the buildings needed within the spaces that are bare; and to make each existing and new home into a highly insulated, energy-efficient micro-generator and recycler. It also shows why mixed communities and devolution can make cities work.

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