Regeneration Breakdown
This from a piece I wrote for The Eel fanzine
“There are areas and sections of the community that experience significant disadvantages typically in terms of high unemployment, low incomes, high benefit dependency, high crime and low educational attainment. If these areas are to continue to prosper the Council needs to remove barriers to business growth, enable disadvantaged communities to share the benefits of sustainable economic growth and offer a pleasant and safe place to live and work. These are the Council's regeneration challenges.” London Borough of Hackney 2005
Ask someone at the Council about the goings on at Tony’s café and the whys and wherefores of the Wratton deal and at some point they’ll mention the word ‘regeneration’. Regeneration has become one of those catch-all phrases that was rarely used in the past, now it crops up everywhere from stem cell research to Dr Who. Perhaps it’s most common use has been on all those utopian-pictured and corporately-badged billboards hiding new brownfield development sites and on their accompanying pamphlets stuffed through our letterboxes. The intended message goes something like “things here are changing for the better – we represent progress!”. The difficulty when reading these things is getting a handle on what is being planned, why is it happening and perhaps more importantly who are the “we”?
Unfortunately the digger you deep the more complex ‘regeneration’ becomes. London is a quagmire of regeneration partnerships, Government quango agencies, strategic bodies and alliances, housing associations and that’s even before you get a-looking at the 33 London Borough and their typically idiosyncratic (re)structures. Each has their own mission statement and targets, each claim to be working with each other and each claim to represent the interests of people.
This latter point is important because it raises an interesting question about 'accountability' and the erosion of local democracy. All of these bodies, partnerships and strategic alliances are desperate to involve ‘the people’, you ‘the residents’, because it helps to legitimise their work, telling their funders and partners that you, the masses, are on their side and so long may they continue. In return you get to make some ‘choices’ – choices because we are in so much love with shopping and consumerism, we are desperate for decisions about public services to be made in the same way. The trouble is that for regeneration the important choices tend to be made elsewhere and the presented choices are highly doctored and simplified, amounting to no more than a colour preference. Increasingly these optional consumer choices are replacing the impact that people can make at the ballot box.
Back to the ‘regeneration’ which as I said earlier is a catch-all term. Defined simply in this context, ‘regeneration’ is the response to something which is in a process of decline. This can be an area which is physically in a poor state of repair, and/or has a poor state of economy, and/or has a poor state of social well-being. Regeneration programmes aren’t necessarily about property schemes, they can also be as much about health projects, community safety initiatives, employment schemes and community development work. In fact there are some Government-sponsored schemes that are working reasonably well, but, rather than singing from the rafters about them, the Government keep quiet about them for fear of looking a bit, y’know, ‘leftie’.
But there’s also plenty of dross…. many schemes are promoted as last chance saloon opportunities for the poor but are really concerned with easing the conscience of the wider population. ‘We’re doing something for them’ makes some voters believe we have a compassionate re-working of capitalism in this country. For others, the belief that poor people have been given every opportunity to climb out of their situation and yet have failed to do so has led to this now ritualistic castigation of them as sub-human (see the media-propelled “chav” label).
Then there is commercially-motivated regeneration – or 'economic development', still following the Thatcherite ethos that if you bring money into an area, it will somehow trickle down to the people who really need it. But a short stroll through the Poplar community overshadowed by the adjacent Canary Wharf will show this not to be true. Capital, rather than flowing or even tricking, has a tendency to stay (and grow) in the hands of the people who already have it.
For the major regeneration schemes though, the thing that has always kind of saved London in recent decades has been the difficulty for planners, developers and regenerators act on a more strategic scale – thereby limiting approaches to composite schemes within each of the 33 boroughs. This has helped London escape those strategically master-planned schemes that have helped blight so many provincial cities and sometimes turned them into identikit towns. Compared to this, London has progressed with in a slightly more distinct and organic piecemeal style. This though is changing and two major schemes will have a significant affect on East London in coming years. The first is the 2012 Olympics project, the second is the Thames Gateway scheme.
The Olympics project I won’t dwell on, but the computer aided designs show a huge ripple sculpting a huge part of East London into what looks like a huge monolithic golf course….let’s see, maybe more on that another time. The Thames Gateway is both more interesting and altogether much more significant, as it threatens to change the composition and distribution of communities in the city. The project – which is already underway – is seeking to build houses for up to a million people adjacent to the Thames between Newham in inner London stretching out to Thurrock in Essex. Several ‘new towns’, ‘urban villages’ and ‘sustainable communities’ will be created in the process – for example Barking Reach will be a new 200,000 population town built on the river between Barking and Dagenham. Most of the housing is intended to be “affordable”, which means it will be targeted at those people currently renting from the Council or housing association, key workers (like teacher and nurses) or first time buyers. The process is being led by the London Development Agency (the economic development arm of the Greater London Authority) together with a number of specially set-up Urban Development Corporations (arms-length management companies in a similar vein to the London Dockland Development Corporation set up to develop Canary Wharf). The barely concealed agenda is to free up inner London’s land from social housing, and inject further pace into the gentrification process, bringing in more economic activity and creative buzz into London so that it can’t continue to compete as a “world class city”.
Council’s are already playing their part in the deal by helping to break up their social housing stock and selling it off to housing associations and anyone else who might be interested.. Then when the packaged homes promotions come, the flight will begin and inner London (like inner Paris) will be the preserve of the middle classes, with social problems out of sight, the sirens out of earshot.
So what can we do to stop Broadway Market and the rest of Hackney and the East End becoming this homogenised Theme Park for the professional classes? I would point to three areas to support:
1. Developing a voice for the area with strong local support. As we have seen countless times through London and elsewhere, where there’s a vacuum in support for local interests, politicians, regeneration strategists and developers will have it all their own way. Critically, this ‘voice’ must be able to articulate its own vision for the area even if this involves ‘leaving things as they are’.
2. Use the Council’s own institutional powers - A nagging concern I have regarding laying the boot into local Councils is that it is dangerously swimming with the tide. The Government is keen to do away with local government and is doing all it can to set government-authored bodies to take its place. Big business is no fan either. The danger in highlighting the corruption in one inner London borough might just help bring its longer-term extinction (to be replaced by more of the quango bodies). Therefore working to make the Council more accountable and less corruptible should be a goal itself.
3. Raise awareness of local economic patterns to show which patterns of spend are having a positive and detrimental impact on residents’ preferred vision for the area. Note: lining the pockets of the niche-trade organic lifestyle framer driving down in their SUV from Oxfordshire may not always represent the most ethical consumer decision.
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