Community participation has become the new orthodoxy within urban regeneration policy in the UK. Yet, it remains a perennial problem for policymakers, especially at the neighbourhood level. A major reason for this, it is argued, is that policymakers often set up local partnerships with insufficient knowledge of the ‘culture’ (i.e. structure, processes, practices, relations and agents) of the neighbourhoods and communities they seek to regenerate and involve in decision-making. Furthermore, policymakers also lack a critically reflective understanding of their own cultural practices. It is argued that collaborative planning theory and applied ethnography offer policymakers a way forward in realising more effective community participation. Collaborative planning and applied ethnography provide a governance and methodological framework that have the potential to promote inclusionary argumentation and consensus building, and give partnership stakeholders an opportunity to become more aware and critically reflective of their cultural relations, practices and processes, thus paving the way forward for more effective community participation.
Over the past twenty or so years, the focus of urban regeneration in the UK has changed from being based on outcomes that primarily involved property redevelopment -by either the public or private sectors -to a broader mix of issues and a far greater emphasis on the process of urban regeneration and the partnership ideal. The evaluation undertaken here takes a critical stance towards the ways in which the partnership principle has been adopted and the policy guidance that requires it as a near-compulsory model. It is argued that, to date, there is little interest in the managerial effectiveness of partnerships and the broader implications of this for regeneration policy. A survey of the contemporary regeneration literature is undertaken to highlight the partial and inconclusive nature of most existing evaluations of partnerships, particularly given the emphasis on the role of local community leaders in the formulation and implementation of partnership projects. Then, some wider issues of the 'political economy' of urban policy are considered in the context of the partnership approach. This is followed by a juxtaposition of trends in property development in general with urban regeneration partnership management processes. Finally, it is concluded that the partnership ideal is a useful policy device but that it has to be thought through more clearly and applied in specific contexts, rather than seen as the best and universally applicable model of urban regeneration.
A major justification for urban regeneration partnerships (URPs) is that they provide synergistic benefits for their participants. Some argue that the major beneficiaries will be private-sector agencies. This proposition is examined in the light of evidence from a survey of property-related agencies. The opinions of developers and property consultants on the success of the partnership process in regeneration schemes with a significant property redevelopment component are examined. Many were found to have concerns about the URP model, centring on governance structures, decision-making, cost implications and time-frames. This suggests that synergy benefits may not actually exist. It is concluded that management and decision-making structures in partnerships need to be of greater concern in policy debate than is currently the case.
The State Government in Western Australia has portrayed itself as a champion of revitalising local democracy and civic engagement. This can be seen in the plethora of community consultation/participation policy documents that have emerged from the Premier's Citizens and Civics Unit over the past five years. Dialogue with the City, a major participatory planning process that formed part of the development of a new strategic planNetwork City-for metropolitan Perth, has been heralded as an exemplar of deliberative democracy. This paper draws on deliberative democratic theory, performative policy analysis and institutional discourse analysis to interrogate the efficacy of this claim by examining the discursive practices leading up to and including the Community Forum, a major consultative and participatory event of the Dialogue Initiative. It is argued that, whilst the Dialogue Initiative was supported by rhetorical deliberative utterances from political leaders and planning experts and exhibited, superficially at least, a number of attributes associated with deliberative democracy, the overall process fell short of this ideal. The primary reasons for this were that the process was scripted and stage-managed and lacked sufficient space and time for citizens to engage in genuine inclusionary argumentation and social learning. Hence the Dialogue Initiative may be viewed as an exercise more reflective of a mix of consultative and participatory planning conducted widely.
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