Housing Neighbourhoods and Urban Regeneration

It is widely suggested that recent policies for physically and economically restructuring the cores of cities have often not brought benefits to the residents of low-income urban neighbourhoods. This issue is examined using two case-studies—the cities of Birmingham and Newcastle-upon-Tyne. It is argued that, because of housing market segmentation and the dominance of social renting in deprived neighbourhoods around the urban core, regeneration policies in the UK do not generally have a negative effect on these neighbourhoods through gentrification and displacement. On the other hand, because of labour market segmentation, they do not have a positive influence because economic opportunities are not shared by disadvantaged neighbourhoods. The paper goes on to examine City Challenge, a regeneration initiative in England which generally focuses more directly on deprived urban residential neighbourhoods than did the property-led commercial regeneration of the 1980s. The paper discusses what kinds of policies might improve the access of residents of deprived areas to economic opportunities, and how these relate to housing policies.