Housing Policy Areas: Criteria and Indicators in Principle and Practice

Abstract

The social area analysis of cities has grown in response to the needs of public policy. Criteria for the classification of clearance areas and three types of house-renovation grant area are examined, special attention being paid to Housing Action Areas. The criteria are found to be ambiguous and unstable. In the process of classification, data relating to a particular area must be tested against these criteria. The Central Millfield Housing Action Area, Sunderland, is analysed as a case of an area in which tendencies to misreport classificatory data are not likely to be present to an exceptional extent. Its classifica- tion as a Housing Action Area was ostensibly scientific, but it was the culmination of a process in which few checks on accur- acy appear to have been applied. The case raises questions about social structure and culture within which knowledge is actually generated in public agencies, and the factual basis on which political judgements are made. URBAN MORPHOLOGY, SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY INTEREST in the morphology of urban areas, especially classification based on social criteria, has been increasing among academics of various disciplines: sociologists, geographers, town planners, social workers and architects. Theoretical discussion suggests key social phenomena; appropriate indicators and operations are being explored; the processing of data is being refined. The availability of computers and computer programs has transformed all three phases, conceptual- ization, operationalization and statistical manipulation, in both scale and skill. Interest in precise allocations of different areas to appropriate classes has been a reaction to public need, not only a spontaneous efflorescence within the community of scholars. With great rapidity in the last 20 years the scope for the private pursuit of housing, health, leisure, educa- tional and other interests in the city and the mutual adjustment of co-operating, competing and conflicting individuals have been progressively curtailed. Conversely, the responsibilities of agents of the public have expanded. The welfare of the citizens is to be furthered by collective arrangements based upon foresight and planning in place of trial and error. The recipient of public funds and the subject of public regulation is sometimes a person, sometimes an institution, but sometimes, as a way of reaching a particular population group, it is an area. Urban areas are designated for purposes of town and country planning, or as Educational Priority Areas where positive discrimination will be instituted, or as a C.D.P. area for community development purposes, and so on. The principal argument for the supersession of an individualistic, laissez-faire or market system by a collectivistic system of public regulation is the latter's ability to base action upon knowledge. The classification of urban housing areas for control and resource allocation is a good example of the application of knowledge for public purposes, and clearly poses the following problems: