Can inner cities undergo 'urban regeneration' without 'gentrification'?

Q3 – Can inner cities undergo ‘urban regeneration’ without ‘gentrification’?

Support your argument with one or more example (s).

Nur Atiqa Binte Asri

‘Inner city regeneration is nothing more than a euphemism for underlying gentrification’—Tanja Winkler, 2009

Inner city regeneration, more generally classed as urban regeneration, is the spatial economic restructuring of city neighborhoods through reinvesting in city spaces made derelict or that have suffered sustained disinvestment (Porter & Shaw,2009). In the literature exploring the processes and outcomes of urban regeneration endeavours around the world, a common observation is made of the inevitable process of gentrification that accompanies recent redevelopment strategies. Although hardline interventions are sometimes employed to mitigate the negative impacts of gentrification, cities have mostly been unable to avoid undergoing urban regeneration without gentrification.

There has only been one case in which urban regeneration has been argued to have avoided gentrification, and that is the case of UK’s government-owned council housing estate redevelopments. Often, the argument put forth for UK’s unique housing situation is its ability to avoid mass displacement.

Unfortunately, displacement, as we will discover, is not the only trait of gentrification that is manifest in urban regeneration projects and UK inevitably falls prey to the all-feared process of gentrification.

Gentrification has, recently, been broadly defined as a process of class remake that is market-driven (Smith,1996). It comprises the rehabilitation or transformation of city neighborhoods by middle-class homebuyers and developers until property values are driven up—driving original lower-class

Q3 – Can inner cities undergo ‘urban regeneration’ without ‘gentrification’?

Support your argument with one or more example (s).

Nur Atiqa Binte Asri

tenants out of the inner cities and also changing the area’s social character (Hamnett,2003). Today, it has also become a strategy of regeneration (Smith, 1989), particularly in the UK’s Going For Growth policy being implemented in many metropolitan areas like Newcastle and Birmingham, and also in the Housing Market Pathfinder scheme. In other cities like Singapore and Johannesburg, where creating world-class cities has become a top priority in the political agenda, top- down international renaissance strategies have caused poorer locals to be excluded from any planning processes and subsequently pushed out of inner cities.

This essay will go on to explore in detail the above examples of urban regeneration strategies that have had to undergo gentrification, whether intentionally or not, and discuss the consequences of these strategies in their contexts. Following that, we will look at ways in which urban regeneration strategies have managed to tackle the negative effects of gentrification—prior to or post- regeneration.

While there is extensive literature on urban regeneration and gentrification independently, studies explicitly comparing the two urban concepts are lacking and often subsume one in the other. This is particularly stark in existing literature on gentrification in North America that largely assumes regeneration as part of gentrification. This may be attributed to the top-down urban regeneration strategies undertaken in cities like New York and Chicago that are often intensely driven by state governments who,

Q3 – Can inner cities undergo ‘urban regeneration’ without ‘gentrification’?

Support your argument with one or more example (s).

Nur Atiqa Binte Asri

instead of resisting gentrification, encourage it despite creating an environment of privatisation (Wyly & Hamnett,1999) and local opposition.

Across the Atlantic, in the UK, the same can be seen in literature on urban renaissance. Housing Rehabilitation and Neighborhood Renewal are the two approaches of urban regeneration in the nation that are often achieved through gentrification. Unfortunately, while there exists literature that attempts to argue a case for urban regeneration without undergoing gentrification, it is often bias or fails to highlight the lack of success in the policies that were lauded to involve and engage locals. In other words, instead of improving the socio-economic conditions for existing residents of the inner cities, these agencies of redistribution have morphed into powerful progenitor of gentrification (Hackworth & Smith,2000).

We first look at two urban regeneration cases in the UK—Newcastle and Birmingham. In both cities, economic restructuring was the main intention of the strategies carried out by Tyne & Wear Development Corporation and Birmingham City Council respectively. The cities were suffering from declining industries

in

the

1980s

and

were

slowly

becoming

classified

as

‘unemployment blackspots’ (Cameron,2003). In order to revive their economies, the cities undertook slightly different foci in their urban regeneration strategies but still faced the social character change of gentrification.

Q3 – Can inner cities undergo ‘urban regeneration’ without ‘gentrification’?

Support your argument with one or more example (s).

Nur Atiqa Binte Asri

In Newcastle, business and industrial parks, like the Newcastle

Business Park, and flagship mixed-used development schemes were established to introduce new employment, leisure facilities and also housing.

New council-housing developments were planned along the riverside and together with many other services, created a 10-mile band of activity along the riverside and central area (Cameron,2003). Growth in business services has been reportedly increasing and MNCs are greatly attracted to Newcastle (Newcastle City Council, 2013).

Birmingham’s choice to focus its urban regeneration efforts, instead, on business tourism and expanding its service sectors has been successful in restructuring establishment

its of

economy ‘quarters’

and

also

with

international

specific

image.

identities—Jewelry

With

the

Quarter,

Gunsmiths Quarter—within the city centre, and the opening of the International Conference Centre in 1991 (Cameron & Doling,1994), Birmingham has seen further external investment in its tourism industry. For example, international hotel chain, Hyatt, has recently opened a branch in the city, and leisure amenities that have become city attractions in themselves have also seen a rise in numbers. Mostly located in the Broad Street redevelopment area, the City Art Gallery and Indoor Arena are merely examples of newly- opened attractions catering to the business-types.

Although Birmingham’s urban regeneration efforts have not included a significant number of housing, there is still a commendable circular collar of council housing around the city centre.

Q3 – Can inner cities undergo ‘urban regeneration’ without ‘gentrification’?

Support your argument with one or more example (s).

Nur Atiqa Binte Asri

The absence of major social impacts on the city neighborhoods of both

Newcastle and Birminham has resembled that of the process of gentrification.

The lack of investment in public services over that made in the businesstourism industry faced greatest scrutiny by the residents of Birmingham.

Social spaces that were created in the Broad Street development, or other mixed-use developments like Brindley Place catered to the national or international tourists travelling in and out of the city for business. Local use of the amenities has been minimal especially amongst the lower-income residents of the city who mostly do not participate in MICE tourism—Meetings, Incentives, Conventions and Exhibitions.

In Newcastle, locals complain of not having access to high-priced new riverside housing and also their inability to enter new job markets created by business services due to lack of training. The very specialised industry parks require the knowledge and skills of the middle-to upper-class residents of the city and have since segmented the labour market tremendously (Cameron & Doling,1994).

These urban regeneration efforts, mostly state-led, neglect local needs and are often irrelevant to the residents of surrounding areas. Also known as part of the ‘Going for Growth’ nationwide strategy (Cameron,2003), these urban renaissance efforts link regeneration proposals to wider economic and demographic objectives and rely greatly on investment to attract middle- class incomers. Unfortunately, the economic restructuring for growth and tourism

Q3 – Can inner cities undergo ‘urban regeneration’ without ‘gentrification’?

Support your argument with one or more example (s).

Nur Atiqa Binte Asri

has caused an oversight on community consultation. Conflicts between community requests and the need to maintain large- scale redevelopment are commonplace and as a result simply highlight the inability of British cities to undergo urban regeneration without gentrification. A “mosaic of little worlds which touch but do not interpenetrate”, Park et. Al. (1925), best describes the consequent city landscapes in Newcastle and Birmingham and while the City Challenge has attempted to tackle the inner cities’ problems head-on with a people-centred urban regeneration scheme, the lack of ‘trickle down’ is still significant and the disadvantaged still lack access to the cities’ mainstream economy.

Looking beyond the UK, many nations around the world have also been actively urban regenerating in the last two decades. From Africa to Asia, cities like Johannesburg and Singapore have each taken steps to restructure their economies in order to compete as global cities (Wong,2006). Like the UK, these strategies are led top-down, but are even more unresponsive to local needs and sometimes deemed patriarchal.

Johannesburg’s 2030 vision aims to equip the city for specialisation in the service sector. The inner city regeneration strategy, as part of this vision, aims to raise and sustain private investment in order to increase property values and economic competitiveness (Porter & Shaw,2009). Gentrification underlies this strategy, sadly, as a result of the local authorities’ overreaching goal of seeking ‘higher calibre of people’ that will be able to transform the

Q3 – Can inner cities undergo ‘urban regeneration’ without ‘gentrification’?

Support your argument with one or more example (s).

Nur Atiqa Binte Asri

urban area into a world-class city. Intensive urban management has been employed in the city in order to realise this ‘imagined class transformation’ (Porter & Shaw,2009) and this includes tenant eviction—a direct displacement of original inner city inhabitants, characteristic of gentrification.

While Singapore’s urban regeneration strategies seem less hardline to that of Johannesburg’s, in the early 1990s, the city saw some of its most famous revitalisation strategies come to life in the Central Business District and adjacent waterfront areas. Singapore’s urban renewal policies, headed by the Urban Redevelopment Authority, aimed to establish Singapore’s image as a global city. Like London’s Canary Wharf and New York’s Battery Park developments, Singapore’s Marina Bay transformed the traditional core into a new and verticalised built environment characterised by high- rise office and residential blocks. This was in response to the earlier urban renewal plans, which were critiqued to have caused a death in the city after office hours (Wong,2006). By introducing residences to the inner city, the authorities had hoped for a revival of the core and increased foreign investment. However physically successful, the plans have been carried out at the expense of the lower-income residents. The new residences in the inner city, located close to offices of MNCs, are priced far above the average citizen’s means leading to a clustering of expatriates working in the knowledge-intensive and information technology- oriented economic sectors (Wong,2006).

Q3 – Can inner cities undergo ‘urban regeneration’ without ‘gentrification’?

Support your argument with one or more example (s).

Nur Atiqa Binte Asri

In addition to the residential blocks in the inner cities, the state-led

regeneration strategies’ new focus on waterfront housing along the Singapore and Kallang Rivers has brought gentrifiers, the middle-and upper-class, into the area. Tanjong Rhu and Marina Bay may have the potential to attract those that serve the sought-after specialised services in the Central Business District and revitalise life along the historic river and city centre but affordability has become a rising concern. In a way, Singapore has indeed realized its regeneration and revitalisation strategies via gentrification— encouraging the influx of gentrifiers to exemplify its Global City image (Wong,2006). While displacement of the inner city’s former inhabitants has been dealt with through public housing schemes provided in other parts of the island, we cannot ignore the change in social character of the city centre and its adjacent area today. The Marina Bay development, which houses Singapore’s second business district, is also property to some of the world’s richest and caters mainly to the upper- class residents and tourists of the area.

Both cases, driven by rapid rates of globalisation and aims of accomodating a new class of highly mobile professionals to drive its services sectors (Watt,2008), show preference for capital accumulation, neglecting the formulation of social policies. Although there have been some effort to counter the gentrification problems found in both cities, they are still often deemed counter productive to the growth and development of the economies. In the 2007 Inner City Regeneration Charter by the city of Johannesburg, a

Q3 – Can inner cities undergo ‘urban regeneration’ without ‘gentrification’?

Support your argument with one or more example (s).

Nur Atiqa Binte Asri

commitment was made to the poor by prioritising resident access to the city’s social package, however, its success in creating social cohesion remains to be evaluated. Striking a balance between economic growth and social responsibilities is proving to be the greatest difficulty in urban regeneration strategies of cities around the world, hence, leading them to face the ills of gentrification—displacement of classes and the transformation of social character in inner cities (Glass,1964).

Others,

however,

might

argue

that

‘integrated

regeneration’

(Butler,2007), involving and giving power to locals while limiting role of local authorities, has successfully enabled an inclusive reinvestment. These are now cases that we might argue have undergone urban regeneration without gentrification. Such urban regeneration projects would involve providing secure housing, good work and services, activities and places that people on low incomes want. In the UK, local strategic partnerships and other bottomup approaches to urban regeneration predicated on social diversity and mixed-use

planning

attempt

to

counter

gentrification.

Coin

Street

Development is the most widely-used example of successful community empowerment having been entirely led by a development trust, bought and amanged by the local residents’ social enterprise. Its success must be attributed to the underlying intention of the development to maintain existing residents in the area and harnessing positive change to improve the locals’ living conditions. This is ascetically different from the intentions of states that

Q3 – Can inner cities undergo ‘urban regeneration’ without ‘gentrification’?

Support your argument with one or more example (s).

Nur Atiqa Binte Asri

seek economic gain and marketable images of global cities, or developers who aim to profit- maximize.

While these interventions may deliver housing in South East England and a number of social enterprises in Hoxton, London, investment in education and skills- training still require heavy state-led interventions to realise. Positive local mobilization can encourage a proactive inner city community rather than a rejection towards ‘external forces’ (Redfern,2003) but it is not sufficient to renew and revitalize inner cities. Unfortunately, some sense of gentrification would be required for urban regeneration to be successful because recolonization of middle classes is required to deliver ‘sustainable communities’ (Atkinson,2000). Critics consider this practice of urban regeneration as a promotion of gentrification by the back door (Atkinson,2004) but its benefits of greater fiscal self- sufficiency far outweigh the social costs in city neighborhoods. Again, although urban regeneration might seem to have initially avoided gentrification, state interventions return to mobilize gentrification processes.

Aside from the above attempts at ‘integrated regeneration’, UK’s compulsory acts on affordable housing since post-war necessarily maintain that mass displacement cannot occur, and hence, neither can gentrification.

Council housing estates are ‘cordon sanitaire’ (Cameron & Doling,1994) which resist the penetration of high- income residents attracted by restructuring of cities. While this might be the case in some UK cities, a problem that often arises in housing is that of meeting the viability demanded

Q3 – Can inner cities undergo ‘urban regeneration’ without ‘gentrification’?

Support your argument with one or more example (s).

Nur Atiqa Binte Asri

by private developers who have been sold council housing estates en-bloc by local authorities. Early phases of housing are often targeted at middle- to high- income earners in order to meet initial profits and this therefore leads to only half of the required percentage of social housing in city neighborhoods being met (Shaw,2008). Although affordable housing is mandated across the UK, developers often find a way around these measures to meet their own profit motives and even when this is overcome, business infrastructures and schools built in inner cities are often aimed at attracting higher- income purchasers, like in the North Northants Development Corporation in Northamptonshire (Cameron,2003). Furthermore, such regeneration plans raise land values and change social characters of neighborhoods albeit stimulating an overall cycle of improvement.

As we have seen in Newcastle, often, locals don’t benefit from jobs, and conflicts over use of green, cultural, social and retail spaces often arise with urban regeneration that cater specifically to gentrifiers. Alienation among old residents who find the new public and commercial services too expensive to consume, or are disturbed by incoming crowds of consumers, is not uncommon. Today, it seems that gentrification should usefully be accepted as a part of urban regeneration.

Let us return to the question at hand: Can inner cities undergo ‘urban regeneration’ without ‘gentrification’? While we have seen cases of reinvestment in disinvested neighborhoods that include the provision of

Q3 – Can inner cities undergo ‘urban regeneration’ without ‘gentrification’?

Support your argument with one or more example (s).

Nur Atiqa Binte Asri

secure housing, good work and the kinds of services and places that lowincome people will want, often the underlying intentions of urban regeneration agents negate the postive interventions described above. Between states pushing for economic growth or the marketing of cities and, developers and private homebuyers pushing for profitmaking, the outcomes of urban regeneration policies and projects often fall short of satistfying social needs of original inner city inhabitants, causing them to be directly evicted from the area or indirectly being edged out by property values and social exclusion.

Therefore, it has become more imminent that urban policy makers find a way to use gentrification as a positive public policy tool. Despite the minor negative impacts of gentrification accompanying urban regeneration, these redevelopment projects must continue to flourish in cities around the world as it is proving to be a reasonable policy in assisting underused, declining or deprived city neighborhoods (Shaw,2008). As long as gentrification is anticipated and equitable policy interventions are set in place and bottom-up controls are increased to counter the effects of displacement, urban regeneration must be continued, particularly in economically- rising cities around the world seeking growth.

Q3 – Can inner cities undergo ‘urban regeneration’ without ‘gentrification’?

Support your argument with one or more example (s).

Nur Atiqa Binte Asri

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Q3 – Can inner cities undergo ‘urban regeneration’ without ‘gentrification’?

Support your argument with one or more example (s).

Nur Atiqa Binte Asri

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