ABSTRACT
This book has emphasised the importance of interrogating the successes and failures of past efforts to promote bottom-up community participation and top-down responsiveness to communities. The Haringey case reveals a problematic legacy of poor responsiveness to communities in deprived localities across several decades. In Haringey the politics of community participation in planning and regeneration were arguably defined by the perceived abilities of community actors to engage in unsolicited community activism rather than by top-down institutional responses. Various central government efforts to press the local authority to engage in different forms of community capacity building and, before then during the 1980s, efforts by Haringey Council to engage with its tenants and its black and ethnic minority communities seem to have done little to build community capacity, at least when it came to the ability of communities in deprived areas to contribute to debates and decisions about planning and regeneration. Within the Haringey realpolitick these tended to be viewed as passive clients. In 1998 Tony Blair committed New Labour to regenerating Britain's cities through neighbourhood renewal and community involvement saying ‘unless the community is fully engaged in shaping and delivering regeneration even the best plans on paper will fail to deliver in practice’. The New Labour critique of declining neighbourhoods attributed their decline to little or nothing being done to empower residents or provide them with the ‘means to develop their own solutions’. In 1999 Richard Caborn, the then Local Regeneration minister stated that ‘success depends on giving communities the responsibility for making things better and confidence to get involved, and the power to really achieve their aims’ (cited in Imrie and Raco, 2003: 3–5). Community became, not for the first time within British urban policy debates a fetishised term. More recently, David Cameron has promoted the idea of the Big Society with an accompanying rhetoric that presented community empowerment as the panacea.
