The Challenge of Urban Regeneration in Deprived European Neighbourhoods - a Partnership Approach



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THE ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL REVIEW

rehabilitative work (refurbishment of housing stock in Vilnius). Vilnius offered
a unique example of “partnership” as a relationship brokered between a
municipal regeneration agency and the individual, whereby financial aid is
offered to the homeowner to upgrade their home and environs. Since
individuals generally share their living space with others this requires co-
operation with family and neighbours. Paradoxically the programme requires
people to become instrumental about their property in order to improve its
value (consumerist ethic) but they can generally do so only through co-
operative relations with others (communitarian ethos). The clientelistic
approach is quite far removed from a rights based approach to democratic
practice, and does not emphasis the building of capacity within the
community.

Given the variety of means through which people are brought into the
regeneration process, it is instructive to reflect on the extent to which they
become stakeholders in the planning and implementation of urban
regeneration projects. What are the outcomes of engagement for the
communities in deprived neighbourhoods across the ENTRUST cities? There
has been a “participatory” turn in European social policy, but this has not been
uniform across all the countries. Degrees of engagement are predicated to a
great extent on the nature of the pre-existing political culture. As a result,
communities in the case studies varied widely in terms of their actual
participation in the regeneration process. At one end of the spectrum there is
active agency on the part of communities and at the other end, communities
are restricted to a consultative (or passive) role. In between there are a variety
of collaborative relations between the regeneration participants. There is a
tendency for partnership structures generally to cluster in the centre of this
continuum under the
collaborative tendency. Activist tendencies are present
when we can see a bottom-up approach to regeneration, where traditions of
participatory democracy are strong and where the institutional actors react to
the claims of the community rather than vice versa (Copenhagen and Berlin).
Here collectivist (as opposed to) individualist solutions are promoted. These
instances represent a kind of communicative rationality where the interests
and concerns of the residents are not only articulated but listened to from the
outset of the project. Consultative relations render the community much more
passive, or indeed, irrelevant. Here, individuals are targeted as rational
instrumental actors to enter into “partnership” that will result in a tangible
outcome for the participating individual only (Vilnius, Lisbon). In between
there are a myriad of collaborative arrangements where a given set of actors
or stakeholders work together pragmatically toward a common end (all cities).
While collaboration infers a relationship between the various stakeholders it



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