The central argument of this book has been that Britain, and particularly England, faces an era of urban policy very different to what has come before. This idea has multiple bases, from the backdrop of ‘austerity’ and central government spending retrenchment, through the Coalition's rescaling of policy from regional to city and parish level, to the specificity and particular situations in spaces and places across the UK. The central planks of the regeneration era, of buildings, property and state investment, are seemingly replaced by a demand from the state that society and atomised communities should simply deal with urban problems themselves. These trends will only continue under the Conservative administration elected in May 2015.

This, therefore, is a curious conclusion to write. In making the case for a post-regeneration era, After urban regeneration has sought to bring together a range of approaches that are seemingly far from each other, from locally specific artistic interventions that seek disruption by co-production, through to wide-ranging, large-scale analyses influenced by a more positivist social-scientific tradition. A simple description of each chapter would not do justice to the eclectic nature of the book. As a result, this conclusion will not attempt a neat synthesis. Indeed, this would be to miss the key points of the text and the common themes running across the multiple ways of thinking about community in urban regeneration exhibited in the text. Rather, this conclusion will consider where the book's discussions leave the study of urban regeneration and how the problems, issues and debates identified in the text might better be dealt with following the experiences of the researchers working on this collection.

The post-regeneration era

The key thrust of the text has been to argue for a post-regeneration era. This requires new thinking from academics studying regeneration as well as the associated new modes of urban practice and governance. One route into a consideration as to the status of studying urban regeneration is to situate the post-regeneration era between those seeking to overturn the conception of regeneration itself, specifically seeking to argue that it is merely gentrification, with all of that phenomenon's associate evils (Lees et al, 2007), and those seeking to trumpet the possibilities of success found in urban interventions, whether cultural or on the level of more generic social, economic or built environment impacts (Shaw, 2009; Matthews, 2012).