ABSTRACT
Housing renewal can involve either the demolition and redevelopment of dwellings, often as part of a slum clearance scheme, or the rehabilitation of housing by means of repair, improvement, conversion or modernisation. Although both forms of renewal take place in each of the housing sectors to a varying degree, demolition and redevelopment was undertaken overwhelmingly by local authorities particularly from the 1950s to the early 1970s, while rehabilitation took place mainly in the private sector in the 1970s and early 1980s. ‘Partitioned renewal’, as Merrett (1979) described this dichotomy, was superseded by the privatisation of funding on an increasing scale across all housing sectors from the mid-1980s into the last decade of the twentieth century.
