Improving poorer areas and integrating poorer communities

Over the long period of industrial growth and decline, urban populations were distributed according to their incomes, education, origins and functions in the economy into different parts of the city. Even poorer, working-class areas often had a hierarchy of more skilled and less skilled, more stable and less stable, leading to the ever-greater marginalisation of the poorest areas from city prosperity. Big neighbourhood inequalities have long been highly visible in cities, specifically with regard to income, housing conditions, school performance, crime, graffiti and vandalism. But as deindustrialisation took hold, these gaps widened.

‘Out of bounds’ areas harmed the cities’ attempts to generate new investment, and weak market cities have had many more difficult areas than average, because of their greater job and income losses. As a result, European cities struggling towards recovery focused major efforts on tackling these problems – disadvantaged and declining neighbourhoods loomed large in the thinking of city leaders in former industrial cities. Recovering cities desperate to attract new investors and employers needed three main attributes, in addition to attractive, lively city centres and good transport links to other cities:

• • attractive housing and integrated, accessible, well-serviced neighbourhoods within the city;

• • a skilled, trained, adaptable workforce at all levels to take up opportunities in new services;

• • strong crime control, safe streets, traffic calming and quality urban environments.

Large, conspicuous enclaves of decay, poverty and crime deter progress and give the city a negative image.

Special social and neighbourhood projects in each city became increasingly prominent as they uncovered ways to tackle entrenched social dislocation. There were many more local initiatives than we could include in our study, each with its own particular setting, evolution and impacts. In this chapter we summarise the different approaches to overcoming poverty, neighbourhood decay, barriers to work and skills mismatches in the poorest areas, drawing on initiatives in each city.

Old working-class areas and post-war subsidised housing estates have high concentrations of low-skilled and out-of-work populations, with poor people ever more concentrated in the worst areas as better-off people have moved away. Sheffield illustrates the gap in income, jobs and conditions most acutely, with 14 years’ lower life expectancy in the poorest neighbourhood compared with the richest. But Saint-Étienne, Belfast and Torino also have very high levels of inequality.