urban regeneration in deprived european neighbourhoods 407
new cathedrals of consumption, and “new economy” investment. One of the
key drawbacks of this approach is that while it may “lift” the city as a whole,
putting it on the tourist map and developing a new circuit of consumption, it
fails to address the problems of social exclusion embedded in neighbouring
locales. As identified above, an alternative model of urban regeneration has
emerged in recent years structured around the concept of partnership,
mediating between state and market and rooted in localities and communities.
It is this model that formed the basis of the ENTRUST investigation. Four key
themes emerged as points of reference within the ENTRUST transnational
learning network: the aims of urban regeneration, private sector involvement,
community participation and mainstreaming/anchoring, (ENTRUST, 2004). In
this paper I will focus on just two of the challenges identified in the ENTRUST
project as crucial to advancing partnership in local urban regeneration
processes: (1) mobilising the private sector and (2) gaining the commitment
and trust of the local population.
V MOBILISING THE PRIVATE SECTOR
Private sector and employer participation in partnerships has been
strongly promoted by the EU, although the evidence available shows that at
least at the local level, their involvement is frequently formal rather than
substantive. The ENTRUST participants very quickly uncovered the com-
plexity and ambiguity surrounding the idea of public-private partnerships.
Discussions that took place about the definition of a public-private partner-
ship illustrated the fundamentally contested nature of the overall concept.
Who are the key partners, and what exactly is meant by the term private when
talking about public-private partnerships? This question more than any other
exercised the ENTRUST city teams. The definitional debate centred around
the role of the not-for-profit sector, and the way in which services that hitherto
were delivered by the public sector might be delivered in the future.
Ultimately, there was no clear agreement among the eight cities on what
should be considered under the rubric of the private sector. While Glasgow
regarded the not-for-profit sector that is independent of government - even if
partially funded by it - as part of the private sector, Berlin and Copenhagen
argued that such actors’ primary role is coterminous with that of the public
sector. This dichotomy reflects the different political contexts of the
participating cities, and the fact that the dynamics between state, market and
civil society have been reconfigured, and continue to be reconfigured in
different ways across European cities. In Glasgow, serial attempts by the local
government to regenerate very deprived areas seemed doomed to failure. A