Community Business and Urban Regeneration

Managing Urban Economic Development: Learning to Change or the Marketing of Failure?

“…Inadequate Community Infrastructure: Casestudy of Community Businesses McArthur (1993a) suggests that Scotland has been a closely-observed testing ground for community businesses . He reports that, after a decade of development, the contribution of the sector in economic terms remains extremely marginal .…”

“…In assessing the experience of Barrowfield Community Business (BCB), Andrew McArthur points to deficiencies in the internal knowledge base of the organisation which could have been put right in time to save it (McArthur, 1993a) . Barrowfield was widely tipped in early 1989 for an award as an outstanding example of community initiative in job creation .…”

The community programme revisited

“…Conversely, this dependence may be regarded as a success of CP. Starting under an Urban Programme initiative of 1978 (Hayton, 1996), community businesses grew to over 1, 200 jobs in 1986200 jobs in (McGregor et al, 1988 and almost 2,000 by 1990 (McArthur, 1993), excluding jobs in managed workspace let by community businesses. What is surprising, in view of their alleged dependence on CP, is that in a third survey of 1992 (Hayton, 1996), three years after the end of CP, the sector appeared to have maintained roughly its 1990 level of employment.…”

“…Proponents of ILMs have envisaged that at least some ILM activities will eventually be sustainable free of subsidy (for example Simmonds and Emmerich, 1996). However, the most recent evaluations of Scottish community business experience are rather pessimistic about its capacity to create viable unsubsidised employment in the long term (McArthur, 1993;Hayton, 1996).…”

Lets

“…Drumchapel is an 11,000 home relocation estate on the outskirts of Glasgow, built in the early 1970s, and is the site of many major mainstream economic development initiatives including three major community businesses which have received considerable state support (McArthur, 1993a;1993b). The estate also has a credit union, a food co-op, a "men's group", and a health project -in fact it is fair to say there are few economic development initiatives that have not been tried on Drumchapel.…”