ABSTRACT
Town planners have always played a central role in the process of urban renewal and regeneration. The form and nature of their role has changed over time in response to a variety of pressures. Analysing this role has become problematic, particularly since the emergence of the debate on ‘the inner city’ during the late 1960s and 1970s. Stewart and Underwood (1994, p. 105) observed that the boundaries of the inner cities policy sector were unclear, which heightened the debate about the role of planners and planning in this area. They argued that whilst work on inner cities represented a significant area of planning practice there was much confusion over the tasks of describing, analysing and explaining the nature of the problem and much debate over the type of intervention proposed. In addition defining what ‘planning’ meant in this context was also problematic:
… planning for inner cities is not at first sight an activity of a particular type, undertaken by a particular institution, does not involve the guidance/regulation of particular classes of events, and is not undertaken by particular people who consider what they do to be planning. One might indeed argue that inner cities policy is so multi-faceted yet so opaque that it defies analysis. It is, however, precisely because it is like this – and resembles so much of the wide ranging but ill-defined planning initiatives of recent years – that it deserves attention.
(Stewart and Underwood, 1994, p. 105)