Introduction

Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, urban policy was dominated by property-led regeneration. Behind this regeneration lay the diagnosis of our cities’ problems as a shortfall of physical infrastructure to support the activities of global corporate investors. The removal of supply-side constraints to investment in cities, including the minimisation of local government and community involvement in planning for regeneration and its implementation, was the mantra of Margaret Thatcher and her governments (see Thornley, 1993). Regeneration, Thatcher-style, was characterised by the use of public subsidies, tax breaks, and the reduction in planning and other regulatory controls, as mechanisms to create a context to encourage corporate capital to invest in cities. Cities were, in the words of Michael Heseltine, Minister of the Environment in the early 1980s, to be “incentivised”. This, the government argued, would generate investment and create a ‘trickle-down’ of wealth into local communities so that all would benefit (DoE, 1985).

For many commentators, however, the consequence of Thatcher's social and economic agenda was the intensification of inequality and poverty in the cities (Fainstein et al, 1992; Pacione, 1997; Imrie and Thomas, 1999; Schoon, 2001). As Logan et al (1992) indicate, inequalities in household incomes in London became substantially greater between 1977 and 1988. The ratio of the income of the lowest quartile to the median fell “from 54% in 1980 to 39% in 1988, and that of the lowest docile from 30% to 20%” (Logan et al, 1992, p 132). Other data confirm such trends. For instance, Burgess and Propper (2002) demonstrate that during the 1960s 10% of the British population was in poverty, a figure that declined to 6% by 1977 and then rose sharply to 20% by the early 1990s. Poverty was more evident in some places than in others. In 1991, for instance, Liverpool City Council reported that 40% of Liverpool's population lived in poverty in the previous year, a figure that translated into 6 out of every 10 households in the inner-city wards (see also Merrifield, 1996).

Such data formed part of a recognition that benefits were not necessarily accruing to local communities, and that economic development and related programmes were by-passing the inner cities (Holman, 2000).