Suchergebnisse

Regeneration projects take place within complex local policy environments and are also influenced by the global doctrine of neoliberalism, although the degree of influence will vary depending upon the historical, economic, social and political context. This article reviews and reflects upon the complexity of a neoliberalising policy environment in the regeneration of the divided city of Belfast. The territorial conflict in Northern Ireland has been expressed spatially and has thus affected urban regeneration. These issues are illustrated by a case study of the regeneration of the Crumlin Road Gaol and Girdwood Park in North Belfast, which sought to include both a neoliberalised economic development agenda and efforts to improve community relations through the promotion of shared space. The paper asks whether the management of community cohesion in cities experiencing conflict requires state intervention that at times goes beyond the 'roll out' and 'roll back' distinction found in neoliberal theory.

Housing policy formation under the United Kingdom's devolution settlement is currently under-researched and insufficiently understood. This article uses the example of social housing policy-making in Northern Ireland to reflect on its impact. Five factors with the potential to influence post-devolution policy-making are identified: common UK citizenship and ideology, policy networks, the political process, the mechanics of devolution and membership of the European Union. A post-devolution review of social housing policy in Northern Ireland is followed by a discussion of three key issues from the 2007 to 2011 administration: governance, procurement of new social housing, and 'shared space' and a shared future. Interviews with policy-makers indicate that 2007– 2011 marked the beginnings of a trend away from the technocratic domination of officials towards greater intervention and policy ownership by politicians, but that the significance of this should not be overstated. The implications for multi-level and multi-jurisdictional policy-making in devolved and federal states are considered.

'Housing in Hard Times' was the theme of the Housing Studies Association annual conference in April 2011. The papers featured in this special issue are drawn from that conference. They examine the uneven impact of economic change on housing policy and related areas, with reference to conceptual ideas pertaining to urban marginality, inequality and class. Whilst the empirical focus of the papers is the UK, their intellectual contribution represents an attempt to 'bring class back in' to the housing studies literature and encourage more critical, theoretically informed scholarship.

This article examines the processes and outcomes of community involvement in six Irish urban regeneration case studies, three in Dublin and three in Belfast. The findings are part of a wider study using a Complex Adaptive Systems perspective to analyse public sector decision making. Key points included: (1) the community 'vision' of the regeneration as an emergent property, which converged towards the vision held by the implementing agencies in the four most successful programmes; and (2) the identification of three features that contribute to non-linear (unpredictable) behaviour: a history of community involvement; the availability of resources; and the intervention of key individuals at crisis points.

This paper responds to the empirical and conceptual challenges concerning public benefit. In an era of neoliberal urbanism the waterfront has become a focal point of planning intervention; however, this raises important political issues concerning the distributional consequences of redeveloping large tracts of derelict land and dilapidated property. The central line of inquiry concerns what benefits, for whom and where emerge on the waterfront under neoliberal urbanism? In grounding the empiricism we focus on the neoliberal planning of Belfast's waterfront through a detailed discussion of Laganside (1989–2007) and Titanic Quarter (2001–present). Despite major transformation in Belfast city centre and on the waterfront, plus the ongoing peace process, the imprints of volatile identity politics and severe social deprivation are entrenched in other areas of the city. Given this, Belfast provides a unique and instructive case to critically explore the socio-spatialities of public benefit in a neoliberalised, politicised and polarised urban landscape. More broadly our research talks to ongoing debates on the conceptual merit and practical utility of public benefit as a central organising principle for spatial planning.