Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book attempts by successive Labour and Conservative governments both to increase understanding about deprivation and to find solutions to challenges it presented through a series of action-research programmes and administrative reforms. The first paradigm conceptualised urban deprivation as community-defined problem created by individual social pathologies. The book examines creation and implementation of series of policy reforms and pilot projects including Labour's Urban Programme, Education Priority Areas, Community Development Projects, the Comprehensive Community Programme and Conservative's Six Town Studies and Neighbourhood Scheme. It highlights the limits of post-war strategies, and of urban policy in 1970s, and shows that government action was never aimed at resolving the fundamental issues underpinning deprivation. The book shows how different liberal approaches, progressive and classic or neoliberalism, and political economy remained the dominant underlying factors, as hopes to generate self-help morphed into greater emphasis on supporting private capital.