The ‘neighbourhood’ is receiving increasing attention from politicians and policy makers at all levels throughout Europe (Allen and Cars, 2002). Targeted neighbourhoods are subject to major ‘revitalisation’ programmes, stimulated by government and frequently undertaken in partnership. Neighbourhoods have also proved attractive as spaces for community governance in which the complexity, fragmentation and remoteness from the public of the prevailing system may be overcome by combining network organisation and a citizen orientation (Sullivan, 2001b, 2002; McLaverty, 2002). Intertwined with these ambitions is an aspiration that neighbourhoods might also contribute to renewing democracy through the development of new pathways for public participation in decision making offered by devolved institutions (Pratchett, 2004; Sullivan and Howard, 2005).

Attention on the neighbourhood has coincided with the emergence of new governance arrangements in many western democracies characterised by: an up-scaling of authority to global institutions and a down-scaling of responsibilities to the sub-national level (Brenner, 2004, p 3); technological advances and moves to privatisation and partnership that create options for more responsive and particularised forms of service delivery; and a ‘new politics’ that utilises new kinds of political agency and organisation to connect international concerns with their impact on local communities. Lowndes and Sullivan argue that, in combination the elements of the new governance “combine to create space for the emergence of neighbourhoods as an important institution in the multi-level and multi actor environment” (2007: forthcoming).

In England, policy makers have been drawn to the neighbourhood as a space for policy action since the 1960s, although definitions of ‘the neighbourhood’ have always been rather ambiguous (Lowndes and Sullivan, 2007: forthcoming). While New Labour has demonstrated particular enthusiasm for the neighbourhood as a source of economic, social and democratic renewal, each of these ambitions had antecedents in the policies of other postwar governments.

Perhaps foremost among these ambitions is the attempt to alleviate poverty and stimulate economic regeneration through targeted neighbourhood action. This was a key claim of the architects of programmes in both Conservative and Labour administrations from the 1970s. Criticised for failing to take sufficient account of the fact that the root causes of disadvantage may lie in wider processes of economic and social change beyond the neighbourhood (Bradford and Robson, 1995), governments persisted with these programmes because of a fluctuating awareness that persistent inequality in neighbourhoods may be due in part to the actions of unresponsive and uncoordinated public service organisations (Sullivan and Skelcher, 2002).