The utility of development plans in urban regeneration

Abstract

This paper seeks to explore the roles that development plans play in relation to formal urban regeneration processes. It takes the normative position that development plans ought to support these types of urban regeneration processes effectively, and it also takes the pragmatic position that this would be consistent with current government rhetoric about development plans as well as offering potentially valuable support for regeneration initiatives. Since the case studies presented as the core of this paper do not illustrate a relationship in practice which is fully congruent with these stances, however, the paper also addresses the question of what might be done to move the observed reality closer to this desired state.To these ends, after an initial examination of how this relationship is viewed in the extant literature, the central feature of the paper is the presentation of three case studies of urban regeneration processes carried out under the umbrella of City Challenge. The purpose of these case studies is to try to establish the nature of this relationship in recent practice, since there are few published studies of this kind, exploring both how development plans performed in these situations against some normative tests and how these relationships were perceived by key players. The concluding section of the paper looks at the similarities and the differences between the cases in these terms, suggests some possible explanations for these findings and comments on the practice and the research implications of these conclusions.ContextWhile both development plans and urban regeneration have extensive literatures in their own right, perhaps surprisingly there is a dearth of literature which examines the interface between purpose-constructed urban regeneration processes and the statutory development plan (Lang, 1998). Some attention has been given to the limitations of land use plans and their non-statutory local planning manifestations in advancing physical, social and economic policy in inner-city areas (Healey, 1983; Bruton and Nicholson, 1990), and some of the main barriers to a better linkage between development plans and the broad thrust of regeneration efforts have been highlighted in the study by Healey and her colleagues of Greater Manchester and the West Midlands in the mid-1980s (Healey et al., 1988). Even this, however, tends to deal with 'regeneration' as a portfolio concept to do with actions to improve inner-city areas as places and in terms of the quality of life of their residents and users, and as Furbey (1999) argues 'regeneration' when used like this can actually convey a broad range both of meanings and of implied policy stances.When the focus shifts to 'regeneration' in the sense of specific area-based initiatives with particular organisational and financial characteristics (Atkinson and Moon, 1994; Oatley, 1998) as distinct from a general concern with how development plans are faring in the face of the inner-city problem, reviews tend either to be silent or to present the relationship in negative terms. Examples of the former include the work of Robson et al. (1994), Blackman (1995), Newman and Thomley (1996) and Rydin (1998). Examples of the latter include the work of Healey et al. (1992) which raises concerns about whether the property-led stances which typified the specific urban regeneration initiatives taking place at that time were compatible with the regulatory style of development plan making; Deakin and Edwards (1993) who presented local planning authorities as having failed to rise to this challenge to their traditional ways of thinking; and Roberts et al. (1998) who see development plans as having been bypassed by major regeneration initiatives notwithstanding the potential of these two spatially defined policy instruments to operate in mutually reinforcing ways. The advent of Section 54A of the Planning Act with its presumption that planning decisions will be led by the policies of the development plan, and with the potential corollary that this framework could either advance or obstruct area-based regeneration initiatives, does not appear to have made much difference to the broad thrust of these arguments (Macgregor and Ross, 1995). …