ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on urban regeneration policy in Europe. The political and ideological reaction to the many social changes posed a strong challenge to the prevailing interpretation of social and economic relations: The Keynesian or social-democratic welfare state. Policy-making has mostly been conducted in the form of general or universal regulation. The limits to area-based strategies are clearly related to the area's spatial extent. The success of the spatial approach as a political strategy depends on the policy issue as well as on the geographical scale of the processes and relations involved. The political arid cultural transformation of the member states of the European Union has shifted the predominant focus away from the national setting not only toward local and regional but also to European settings.
