Paul Hickman

Neighbourhood Renewal and Urban Policy: A Comparison of New Approaches in England and France

This article seeks to re-animate the Anglo-French debate on neighbourhood renewal and urban policy that characterized the mid 1990s. This is appropriate given the apparent similarities between the recent approaches adopted in the two countries. The common challenge is integration: reconciling the territorial problems of diverse places with the functional organization of the principal actors. This has led to a partnership approach (National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal in England, Contrat de Ville in France) and an emphasis on community involvement and concentrated, local management initiatives. However, there are also informative differences: the long-standing multi-sector partnership approach in England, with its greater experience of community involvement, versus the public sector led approach in France, with its greater experience of strategic working between tiers of government.

Approaches to tenant participation in the English local authority sector

This paper examines how approaches to tenant participation evolved in the English local authority housing sector in the 1990s. It does so by examining data gleaned from two national studies of tenant participation activity conducted by teams based at Glasgow and Sheffield Hallam universities, with particular attention focusing on data derived from nine case studies undertaken as part of the latter study. In order to facilitate this analysis, reference is made to Cairncross et al.s typology of approaches to tenant participation which identified three ideal types of authority: traditional, consumerist and citizenship. The paper notes that the approaches local authorities took to tenant participation changed in the 1990s with more adopting multi-dimensional approaches, which made the neat categorisation of authorities into ideal types impossible. The characteristics of the two most commonly occurring types, traditional and consumerist, appeared to have changed.

Transforming Social Housing: Taking Stock of New Complexities

The last 10 years has been a period of rapid change in the social rented sector, reflecting broader changes in the nature of housing problems, structures of housing provision and patterns of housing consumption in the UK, rooted in fundamental shifts in the political, economic and social landscape. By way of introduction to this special issue, this paper cuts across conventional frameworks of analysis to explore the pressures and challenges raised by these changes for the social rented sector through consideration of three key facets of the contemporary housing system: market change, community dynamics and modes of governance. Within this framework, patterns of increasing differentiation and fragmentation within the UK housing system are revealed and the extent to which the transformation of the social rented sector is working with the grain of these changes is considered.

Transforming Private Landlords: Housing, Markets and Public Policy

requirements. According to Solinger, the strategy is to politically pacify at minimum cost and the consequence for those who receive the support and their children will be ‘a ticket to a permanent underclass’ (p. 254). The book concludes with some brief reflections by the editors. Here they offer contrasts between the marginalization of economic redundancy suffered by the laid-off urban poor and the institutional discrimination experienced by migrant workers. The pace of Chinese urbanization is breathtaking. And the social and economic transformations and tensions associated with this process are equally dramatic. Taken as a whole, this well-written and well-edited volume provides the best available account of the stresses and strains in China’s exploding cities.

Resident participation in housing regeneration in France

The involvement of local residents in housing regeneration policy and practice has become a ‘new orthodoxy’ across Western Europe. This paper considers the experience of France, a country noted for its history of ‘third sector’ activism and innovative practice in, for example, neighbourhood management. It is argued here that—notwithstanding three decades of central government rhetoric and exhortation—there remain few examples of genuine involvement of residents in formal regeneration decision-making processes at a local level in France (especially in respect of strategic issues). There exists a ‘participation deficit’. This paper explores this phenomenon empirically through case studies of housing regeneration in Lyon, Marseille and Mantes la Jolie. It also seeks to explain the ‘participation deficit’, drawing a distinction between those factors that are pan-European and those that are particularly French, not least the apparent resilience of representative democracy.

Responding to Unpopular Social Housing in Vaulx en Velin, Greater Lyon: An English Perspective

ABSTRACT In recent years, in many parts of England and France a mismatch between housing supply and demand has resulted in an increasing number of neighbourhoods experiencing problems of empty properties, depressed house prices and high stock turnover. This paper looks at the response of policy makers and social housing landlords in one area in France – Vaulx En Velin, Greater Lyon – to this phenomenon. It does so with reference to four key themes that have been a recurring feature of attempts to tackle the problem of unpopular (or low demand) housing in England: partnership working; community participation; neighbourhood management and demolition. The paper draws on a range of data sources including an in-depth case study, which encompassed a number of interviews with key local actors and documentary data analysis. The paper concludes by offering some initial insights into how policy and practice appear to differ between England and France and relates these to their specific national contexts.

Professions, Occupational Roles and Skills in Urban Policy: A Reworking of the Debates in England and France

The past few years have seen a proliferation of skills analysis in urban regeneration in England. In France, in contrast, researchers have linked questions of skills to the styles and form of public-sector work. This paper reworks the debates in the two countries to provide a comparative analysis of neighbourhood management. There are three main sections and themes: the implications of a bottom—up perspective in the study of policy implementation; the emergence in France of the chef de projet as an ideal type figure of transversal working; and finally, in relation to England, the fragmentation and diversity of policy initiatives, agencies and funding streams. This fragmentation and diversity have implied, in turn, an emphasis on flexibility and generic rather than specialist skills in urban regeneration.

A flawed construct? Understanding and unpicking the concept of resilience in the context of economic hardship

Increasingly, the construct of resilience has been used by social scientists and (social) policy makers in relation to individual resilience to economic hardship. There are a number of issues within the literature on the subject that are unresolved including: whether it is an attribute or a process; the extent to which resilience is a positive phenomenon; the extent to which individuals living in economic hardship have agency; and whether it is finite. The article unpacks these issues, drawing on qualitative data from a longitudinal study in Northern Ireland. It found resilience to be a negative experience for study participants, although they did exhibit a number of attributes that may be described as being positive. They were often unable to exercise ‘positive’, transformative agency, because the choices available were limited and pernicious in nature. The article concludes that as an analytical tool for exploring the experiences of people living in economic hardship, the construct of resilience is not helpful.