Introduction

In one form or another, all UK governments since 1945 have pursued policies aimed at addressing urban problems. A concern with community has been evident throughout, although the assumptions about how communities would be engaged with, and benefit from, these policies have varied enormously. In the first two decades after the end of the Second World War, communities were regarded as the passive beneficiaries of planned decentralisation to new towns and the replacement of ‘slums’ with modern public housing. Partly due to the backlash against such policies, the late 1960s witnessed the emergence of neighbourhood-based, often experimental, urban policy initiatives designed to address what Home Secretary James Callaghan described as the ‘deadly quagmire of need and apathy’ in some innercity communities. Since then, there have been numerous shifts in the way in which communities are framed by urban policies, with some initiatives framing ‘communities’ as the solution and others promoting them as the problem. As this chapter demonstrates, this shifting approach to community reflects a deeper set of long-run tensions in urban policy, with policy change tending to emerge as a response to previous policy failure.

The chapter is divided into three main sections. The first section provides an overview of urban policy, with an emphasis on understanding the key shifts in policy since the first area-based initiatives (ABIs) were established in the late 1960s. The tendency for urban policy experiments to serve as a barometer of political and ideological change is noted and the consequences for policymaking are highlighted, with particular emphasis on the circular nature of urban policy debate. The second section examines in more detail the turn, or, more accurately, return, to community in urban policy from the early 1990s onwards. It is shown how community involvement, and ultimately community leadership, came to be seen as the solution to previous policy failure. Yet, it is argued, urban policies continued to repeat the mistakes of past initiatives by misrepresenting the causes of neighbourhood decline. The final, short section briefly examines the contemporary urban policy context. For the first time since 1968, there are effectively no ABIs in England and national government policy has shifted from targeted intervention to a philosophy of general ‘facilitation’.