ABSTRACT
The focus of this chapter is the urban regeneration process in the United Kingdom (what in other countries might be called urban renewal or urban revitalisation), and particularly how work in the field of crime prevention has moved from being a barely considered element in a process that was essentially about property development to being a central feature of a holistic process that aims to improve not just the quality of localities but also the quality of the lives that people lead within them. The British case is an interesting one in this context, because the regeneration effort is based upon two considerations in particular. The first is that the significance of major urban areas to the national economy is at last being recognised. As David Miliband, at that time the Minister of Communities and Local Government, put it at the formal launch of the new Sheffield City Strategy on 31 October 2005: Britain has over 50 large urban areas with populations in excess of 100,000, and so if they are doing well then we can be fairly sure that Britain as a whole is doing well (see also Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, 2006). The second is that the need for regeneration is recognised as being very widespread, which is not surprising in a country where most urban areas are relatively old and have been through several economic cycles, and thus urban regeneration practice has both a strong national policy dimension to it and a considerable amount of local variety. These characteristics make the British case of interest elsewhere, and the story of how crime prevention has moved from the periphery to the centre of this process is of itself part of that interest.
