The problem of the decline of poor working-class areas, and the possibilities for their regeneration, have been a key concern of urban policy for many years. More than many other cities, Liverpool has over this time been a focus of most of the initiatives – from the early Community Development Projects through to Objective One and the Single Regeneration Budget – that have attempted to deal with these problems. Their failure significantly to impact on poverty in the city says much about the systemic limitations of past and current regeneration strategies in the face of structural economic change and decline and widening inequality that cannot adequately be examined here. But they also reveal a high degree of continuity in the assumptions made about such neighbourhoods that need to be challenged.

Most regeneration initiatives have been based on a view, implicit or explicit, of poor communities as deficient and defective. It is an assumed lack of capacity – and hence the need to build it – that is seen as lying at the heart of the problem. Whether it is through apathy, the lack of education and skills, the absence of social and support networks, or the loosely defined threat of ‘antisocial behaviour’, the problems of poor communities, like the problem of poverty itself, are frequently seen as located within the individuals and communities who suffer from it.

This chapter sets out to challenge such assumptions. Based on a series of interviews in two working-class communities in Liverpool, Dingle and Speke (see Andersen et al., 1999), it attempts to give a voice to those who have been involved in community action and regeneration, some for many years, but whose views are often not heard or are simply ignored. What these interviews reveal are communities that, despite their obvious economic problems and lack of material resources, are in many other ways vibrant and resourceful. They show people who, despite numerous setbacks and a constant uphill struggle to get their voices heard, remain committed to their area and to their own role in its improvement. Above all they show communities that have the capacity, the skills and the knowledge to bring about substantial improvement and change, but whose aspirations are blocked by the implementation of regeneration strategies ‘from above’.