The Question of Scale in Housing-Led Regeneration: Tied to the Neighbourhood?

Abstract

Despite recognition of the fluid, interconnected nature of urban drivers and outcomes operating across a variety of spatial scales, the use of area-based initiatives in urban regeneration and renewal policy continues to fix space in order to identify scope, determine legitimacy, and clarify accountability. Even if multiple scales are acknowledged in policy discourse and strategy, actual boundaries defining a policy's geography of interest have typically focused on the neighbourhood. The emergence of citywide or subregional regeneration initiatives, such as England's Housing Market Renewal pathfinder programme and Philadelphia's Neighborhood Transformation Initiative, have been accompanied by different considerations as to how space is negotiated and enrolled both in strategic and in delivery terms. Using these ‘market shaping’ initiatives as a basis for discussion, I seek to add to debates regarding the tensions tied up in fixing space from the practical perspective of programme implementation. While a partial defence of boundary setting is offered, the influence and impact of scale arising from the delimitation of space are seen as crucial factors in determining how complex initiatives sustain their rationale and deliver in practice. Exploring the challenges created by the disjuncture between the spaces of strategic thinking and the impact of those policies as experienced on the ground, the paper concludes by offering some perspectives as to why the neighbourhood retains a pervasive hold within regeneration policy as the point of mediation between the local and global.