Regenerating the Inner City: Lessons from the UK’s City Challenge Experience

This paper uses the findings of the evaluation of Stratford City Challenge (SCC) to critically examine the effectiveness of the City Challenge policy and to question the extent to which it was an innovation in urban policy, with lessons which have been incorporated into subsequent policies. It examines the particular characteristics of the policy which contributed to its innovative status, many of which have been incorporated into policies such as New Deal and the Single Regeneration Budget (SRB). What local evaluations such as the one which has been carried out in Stratford suggest is that many of these distinctive characteristics actually constrained the capacity of local programmes to be effective and achieve their aims, as to some extent they dictated the types of projects most likely to succeed. The author suggests that there are lessons which could be drawn from the City Challenge experience, but that many of these were overlooked or not fully considered by policy makers when they introduced subsequent policies such as the SRB and New Deal. Thus these policies may encounter similar problems in achieving their aims, and an opportunity to learn from these evaluations and build on past experiences has not been fully maximized. This paper uses SCC as a case study to draw out some of the wider implications of the experience for national policy.