Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables, figures and photographs
- Preface
- one Introducing Jigsaw cities
- Part 1 How did we get here?
- Part 2 Where are we now?
- Part 3 Where do we go from here?
- Afterword: the urban jungle or urban jigsaw?
- Notes and references
- Bibliography
- Index
- Also available in the CASE Studies on Poverty, Place and Policy series
seven - Britain’s cities of yesterday and tomorrow
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 January 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables, figures and photographs
- Preface
- one Introducing Jigsaw cities
- Part 1 How did we get here?
- Part 2 Where are we now?
- Part 3 Where do we go from here?
- Afterword: the urban jungle or urban jigsaw?
- Notes and references
- Bibliography
- Index
- Also available in the CASE Studies on Poverty, Place and Policy series
Summary
For too long governments have simply ignored the needs of many communities. When they have acted, the policies haven't worked. Too much has been spent on picking up the pieces, rather than building successful communities or preventing problems from arising in the first place…. Too much has been imposed from above, when experience shows that success depends on communities themselves having the power and taking the responsibility to make things better. And although there are good examples of run down neighbourhoods turning themselves around, the lessons haven't been learned properly. (Tony Blair, Bringing Britain together, 1998)
If the Sustainable Communities Plan reinforced by the Barker Review of Housing reads like a house builders’ bonanza, it has made many existing communities shudder. People not only worry about growth pressures and the threat of swamping every outlying village with new estates; they worry if they live in older areas about general decay and the renewed threat of the bulldozer. 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’ our declining cities – the very opposite of community renewal.
Growing gap within cities
In 1998, five years before the Sustainable Communities Plan, New Labour pledged to close the gap between the poorest areas and typical neighbourhoods. Two years later, it announced a National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal, setting out the government's long-term plan for ensuring that no one would be seriously disadvantaged by where they lived. The 3,000 deprived neighbourhoods it targeted were dominated by run-down private housing and low-demand, poorly managed council estates, in every city and most towns too, the majority in older, inner-city areas, including inner London. Over time these neighbourhoods became enclaves of need, remote from the general rise in prosperity and struggling to deal with the multiple problems of crime, housing decay, economic inactivity, neglected public spaces and failing public services. Not enough has yet been done to reintegrate these vulnerable places into the bigger picture of cities. The majority of these neighbourhoods have high levels of council housing, much of which fails to meet the government's minimal decency standard.
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- Jigsaw CitiesBig Places, Small Spaces, pp. 135 - 160Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2007