Problems and questions

Housing estate restructuring tends to target specific areas that need to be restructured. Usually the areas involved are clearly delineated spaces. A main topic of social science research, which aims to evaluate restructuring policies, is also targeting these areas, concentrating on the direct impacts of the physical restructuring processes in the areas themselves. There appears to be a long tradition of area-based regeneration in many Western European countries, while in Central and Eastern Europe the process of regeneration started much more recently. In England, Estate Action, City Challenge, and the Single Regeneration Budget programmes are examples; there is also a debate in France about the relative merits of area-based action (Développement Social des Quartiers; Grand Projet de Ville), although conurbation-wide intervention strategies are also discussed (Contrats de Ville). Usually the results of evaluations of such area-based programmes, undertaken soon after the restructuring, are positive because of the physical upgrading of the area.

With respect to the social upgrading of an area, the results are less clear: sometimes social upgrading does take place, but often only because new residents have replaced the original inhabitants. Evaluation after a number of years often results in a more negative picture: new physical decay and new social downgrading have again become manifest. However, in addition to any drastic social or physical effects there may be in the areas under consideration, the restructuring can also have quite serious short-term or long-term effects on other areas. These effects are often neglected in evaluation studies.

Such effects need not be entirely negative, however. Some people may have moved from the area under consideration to better housing and a better environment. The income or household situations of those involved, who had to move as a result of the restructuring process, could have developed in a way that made the household ready to move anyway. However, the reverse may also be true. Highly problematic households (the long-term unemployed, anti-social tenants) may have been pushed towards the next weakest segments of the housing market. Their move to these areas will result in a reduction of the social level of the areas in which they settle.