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THE ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL REVIEW
available, and the degree to which communities can be mobilised to participate
in the regeneration of their neighbourhoods.
The city of Valletta has significant symbolic importance in Malta, but has
lost its key urban functions. A population of more than 15,000 residents in the
1960s has declined to a population of 7,000 today. The city is perceived
primarily as a historic place with its urban function limited to that of a
cultural, administrative and symbolic political city. Crucially, it is not
perceived as a city for residential living any more. This makes it difficult to
conceptualise urban regeneration other than in terms of the restoration of
historic monuments.
Vilnius struggles to re-position itself as a European heritage city, and to
shed all vestiges of its recent past as an outpost of Soviet Russia. In the inner
suburb of Uzupis, the buildings are in a very bad state of repair. Many
dwellings have serious structural problems, including no running water and
no indoor toilets. In some yards, rubbish is piled high, while chickens run
around. No longer controlled by a centralist Soviet state, the current political
regime has opted for an extreme market-oriented form of governance. Housing
was privatised immediately after independence in the early 1990s and now 92
per cent of people own their homes. There is no social housing policy, nor any
provision for those at the lower end of the socio-economic structure. People are
too poor to improve their dwellings so they continue to live in sub-standard
conditions.
Political change in Germany post 1989 has had a major impact on the
spatial configuration of Berlin. For example, the neighbourhood of Kreutzberg,
which was formerly a Turkish and urban bohemian enclave, has, as a result of
unification, been re-positioned much closer to the central downtown. This has
resulted in significant gentrification in the neighbourhood. More broadly, the
city’s unification has also placed enormous financial pressure on the
municipality, leading to a re-orientation of urban policy toward public-private
partnership. Hamburg, the second German city in the study, has seen its
manufacturing base (shipbuilding) completely eroded and has shifted toward
a more service oriented economy.
Cities, then, experience fluctuations in their fortunes due to various
external variables. How does the process of urban regeneration address these
shifts? One solution is to promote capital-intensive urban renewal projects
that can help re-fashion the city image. The centre of Berlin has undergone
massive re-development since German unification in 1990s. Berlin, in partic-
ular, has become a conduit used by architects, urban planners and politicians
to project a new modernist image of Germany, (Gittus, 2002). On a less
dramatic scale, Dublin, Glasgow, Copenhagen and Hamburg have all engaged
in major “flagship” projects linked to harbour-side or riverside development,