Suchergebnisse

Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Author's Note -- Foreword by Mark Birdsall -- Acknowledgements -- Preface -- 1 The First World War -- 2 The Interwar Years -- 3 The War's Beginning -- 4 D-Day -- 5 The Cold War -- 6 Berlin -- 7 London Spies -- 8 Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Places of Interest -- Picture Section

Habermas' critical theory, and particularly his theory of communicative action, has been applied in the theory and practice of communicative planning. The concept of creating a public sphere in planning processes has been used as an 'ought' that planners should seek to achieve to create a communicative rationality. Accepting some of the critique of communicative planning from an agonist and Foucauldian perspective, this paper presents a new application of Habermas' critical theory. Evidence is presented from community activists in two neighbourhoods of their ongoing reflection on the changes to their built environment over 20 years of regeneration. In this context, Habermas' theoretical work does explain the long-term discourse as the community moved towards a shared consensus on their neighbourhood. This is used to suggest that instead of looking for consensus in the tense conflicting of moments of initial engagement, planners should focus on the longue durée, and the Lifeworld of lived experience, where shared subjectivities over the built environment can develop.

For forty years area-based initiatives (ABIs) were the primary tool used by UK governments to tackle problems of concentrated deprivation and dereliction. The last decade saw these initiatives end, replaced by new forms of city-wide or region-wide governance: Local Strategic Partnerships in England and Community Planning Partnerships in Scotland. It was argued in both policy documents and policy analysis that this change would deliver more effective regeneration for all communities. Challenging this narrative, I present this policy shift as a change in the meaning of regeneration policy using the methodology of interpretive policy analysis. The evidence from Scottish experience suggests that for a key policy actor—community activists in deprived neighbourhoods—the approach of ABIs had a great deal of meaning as regeneration. Furthermore, this meaning was still present a decade after an ABI had ended. Meanwhile, the newer strategic partnerships were delivering little meaningful change. This difference in meaning is used to reimagine strategic regeneration as a more positive process.