Urban and Regional Regeneration in Practice
Regions and cities the world over currently face immense pressures to change land uses and adapt to wide-ranging economic, environmental and social pressures. Pressures of competition and globalisation have led to the decay and decline of traditional production-based industries and seen the growth of new, more high-tech service sectors and cultural businesses. Many places are thus being forced to re-invent themselves and rise to the multiple challenges of finding new ways of using the urban and industrial landscape, finding new forms of work and sources of income for local people, and developing new place identities and images to attract business investment, visitors and talented, creative people. As a result, regeneration strategies which once focused upon reconfiguring the physical fabric of run-down areas are having to become much broader and wider and to encompass the economic, social and cultural transformation of towns, cities and regions. Similarly, local economic development approaches are broadening with traditional strategies for business competitiveness and place marketing, being applied alongside more novel approaches based around the development of social enterprises and initiatives encouraging more locally embedded, sustainable business activities.
This raises a number of challenges for the design and delivery of regeneration policies and strategies. Understanding these challenges and different ways and means by which they may be addressed is thus the principal focus of this module. The module will focus on understanding the nature, role and merits of different policy and practice interventions around the built environment and local economic development. To achieve this, it will combine insights from academic theory with case studies and practice-based perspectives on contemporary regeneration strategies, projects and local economic development policies and initiatives drawn from both the UK and international experience.