ABSTRACT

The idea of citizen participation is a little like eating spinach; no one is against it in principle because it is good for you.

(Arnstein 1969: 216)

INTRODUCTION

The last twenty years or so have seen a major growth in the phenomenon of place marketing or ‘selling the city’ which has shaped urban regeneration on both sides of the Atlantic (Neill 1995). The need for constant renewal and change of the fabric of cities is a manifestation of their response to the economic and social pressures placed on them. However regeneration is not a fast process and cannot be simply left alone to conventional property developers, planners and urban regeneration agencies to go it alone like lemmings in a regeneration game. The general belief that imposed solutions to complex long-term problems do not work is evidenced in the failure of property-led regeneration, a method favoured in the recent past to quickly turn around disadvantaged areas without showing any real concern for how it would impact on local residents. In other words, city centre planning and regeneration processes have been leaving inner city neighbourhoods behind made up of alienated, marginalized and disempowered residents. As Hastings et al. (1996) acknowledge ‘although the property led approach to regeneration was responsible for a great deal of physical development and improvement of urban areas, it was weak in meeting the needs of residents living in disadvantaged communities’. It has been realized that for urban regeneration policies to become effective it is necessary to consult with local people, to facilitate a more open approach to decision-making (Short 1996). This is not a new phenomenon however despite the rhetoric of inclusive planning, with consultation and participation becoming the buzz words of the 1990s and beyond, the reality is that the participatory debate has been long running (Davidoff 1965).