Brownfield Residential Development: What Happens to the Most Deprived Neighbourhoods in England?

The strategic re-use of brownfield land for housing in the late 1990s in England is a policy instrument introduced to achieve multiple sustainability and urban regeneration objectives. Previous research, mostly relying on qualitative data and local authority case studies, tends to focus on barriers and drivers of brownfield regeneration, rather than on its impact. This study aims to bridge this research gap by examining the impact of residential brownfield development in the most deprived urban areas during 2001–08. Policy impacts in terms of changing housing markets, residential density, population growth and economic deprivation are systematically examined with a series of indicators through GIS analysis and the analysis of variance tests. Conclusions are then drawn on the effectiveness of brownfield development in tackling deprivation and the relevance of these findings for the international debate about planning and land use policy. </jats:p

What about the Urban Periphery? The Effects of the Urban Renaissance in the Mersey Belt

Cities in the UK have undergone an urban renaissance since the late 1990s, when New Labour started an initiative of the same name. However, the effects of urban growth have been limited mainly to the cores of second-tier cities, creating new challenges in the urban fringe of city regions and for cities outside the major agglomerations. In this article, we examine the process of reurbanisation in the Manchester and Liverpool city regions and to take a closer look at on one of the local authorities in the fringe of these city regions which is trying to grapple with the challenges posed by a new urban age. We find increasing evidence that places in the spatial in-between of urban regions face particular challenges as a result of the urban renaissance, with the already problematic areas requiring increased attention to avoid structural urban problems similar to that of the inner urban areas in the past.  * This article belongs to a special issue on reurbanisatio

LIFE in a ZOO: Henri Lefebvre and the (social) production of (abstract) space in Liverpool

Building on recent critical contributions towards conceptualising neighbourhood change as socially produced and politically ‘performed’, this paper takes a closer look at the work of Henri Lefebvre to understand the production of urban space as a deeply political process. A common critical characterisation of neighbourhood change—occurring through a grand Lefebvrean struggle between ‘abstract space-makers’ and ‘social space-makers’—is critically examined through an in-depth historical case study of the Granby neighbourhood in Liverpool. Here, these forces are embodied respectively in technocratic state-led comprehensive redevelopment, notably Housing Market Renewal and its LIFE and ZOO zoning models; and in alternative community-led rehabilitation projects such as the Turner Prize-winning Granby Four Streets Community Land Trust. By tracing the surprisingly intimate interactions and multiple contradictions between these apparently opposing spatial projects, the production of neighbourhood is shown to be a complex, often violent political process, whose historical trajectories require disentangling in order to understand how we might construct better urban futures