Housing Market Renewal revisited: a defence of place-based policy in austere times

This paper revisits an assessment, published ten years ago in PPP, of the then-flagship regeneration programme Housing Market Renewal. It finds that the emergent concerns in 2007 with affordability, which partly underscored a justification for the programme’s cancellation, remain while suggesting that HMR’s key regeneration objectives have gone unaddressed. The paper briefly reviews some ways that the landscape now is similar and different to 2007. The key difference is in the government’s overall approach to regeneration, which now relies more on attempts to foster regional economic growth through people-based strategies. By looking at HMR through the lens of competing logics of economic geography at a time of ‘austerity urbanism’, the paper tentatively concludes that government needs to rediscover a more obviously place-based approach to regeneration

Nystagmic Poetics in Lorine Niedecker’s Postwar Poetry

In this article I explore the work of Lorine Niedecker, a poet not conventionally associated with disability studies, in order to flesh out an account of the function of visual disability in midcentury poetics and praxis. To do this I read Niedecker’s formative sequence “For Paul,” the late long poem “Wintergreen Ridge,” and other poems, through deformative practices in the belief that such an engagement shows how Niedecker’s hybrid objectivist praxis can be integrated with critical models of disability studies. Such an integration is then bodied forth in what I’m calling a “nystagmic poetics.” In such a poetics, the physical eye unseats ableist models of untroubled optical agency, such as those found in imagist and objectivist poetry, and extends the relevance of its revised understanding of visual modality to all bodies. Thus nystagmic poetics responds to the call to substantially address the fact of disability and to consider whether a more fully imagined poetics of partial sight is a productive critical lens for thinking about literature

Taking preventative health messages into the wider caring professions: the views of housing staff and tenants.

In order to harness the potential impact of the wider public health workforce, innovative services are providing opportunities for social housing staff to extend their public health role. This study explored the views of housing professionals and social housing residents on the delivery of preventative health messages by housing staff in the context of the evaluation of the roll-out of a new service. We conducted semi structured interviews with 21 neighbourhood housing officers, 4 managers and 30 social housing tenants to understand their views on the widening role and the potential impact on the preventative healthcare messages being delivered. Neighbourhood officers were willing to discuss existing health conditions with tenants; but they often did not feel comfortable discussing their lifestyle choices. Most tenants also reported that they would feel discussions around lifestyle behaviours to be intrusive and outside the remit of housing staff. Resistance to discussions of lifestyle topics during home visits was found among both housing staff and tenants. Appropriate staff training and the development of strong and trusting relationships between officers and tenants is needed, if similar programmes to extend the role of housing staff are to succeed in terms of health impact