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In the 1980s race riots in Liverpool, Bristol and other cities contributed to a re-thinking of the Conservative government’s urban policies and resulted in Michael Heseltine’s initiatives for inner city renewal. A series of regeneration schemes were encouraged by the Thatcher government, and councils looked favourably on these because of the cash injection they offered at a time when rate- capping, public expenditure cuts and ultimately the Poll Tax constrained local authority investment. Inner city redevelopment and the renovation of mills, warehouses, and other historic buildings followed.


Projects such as Castlefield in Manchester and Glasgow’s Merchant City and the GEAR (Glasgow East End Renewal) project were encouraged by the inclusion of Development Corporations in partnership with private builders and local authorities. This, combined with the listing process for historic buildings and the obligation to develop local neighbourhood and city-wide structure plans in the 1980s, stimulated interest in heritage and encouraged the re-use of existing buildings and


“ De-urbanisation has been a direct


result of a failure to consider city centre amenities sufficiently


brownfield sites. Re-use replaced demolition; rising incomes for those in work fuelled consumerism and inflationary house prices as footloose capital investment sought inner city opportunities. The Tenants’ Right to Buy in 1979 (and 1980 in Scotland) produced significant sales of council houses. With local government expenditure restricted, the cash flowed to the Treasury, leaving councils with the costs of upkeep for roads, policing, and social expenditure while suffering reduced rental income from council properties. The ancient system of property-based local taxation – the Rates – was replaced by the Poll Tax in an effort, widely despised, to contain the basis of local government finance.


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The development of existing properties has produced a temporary over- supply of housing


As house-building cycles dominated the property market for a century before it was disturbed by council-house building in the 1920s, looking to the future there is no reason to suppose that the inherent characteristics of boom and bust will not continue, or that demand will not eventually pick up and exhaust the current oversupply of accommodation and office space. Historically, house building has experienced 20-year cycles, but with less council house building, it looks as though there might be a return to the market conditions of the 19th century with substantial intervals between each peak in house building.


There are no signs that council house building will resume on any scale, and unless the councils maintain their ageing stock, it may well decline. The effect of inner


12 SOCIETY NOW AUTUMN 2010


city regeneration has been to privilege facilities for Dinkies (Dual Incomes No Kids) and a younger cohort in the housing market.


Family properties – three-bedroom flats – have been scarce, and where builders are obliged to produce low-rental properties these have often been too few for the number of low-income families who do not have access to the private housing market. As a result, social infrastructural investment has been accorded a lower priority. Inner city schooling is a central issue to address when considering housing policy because the middle classes reject such schools, either by putting their children into private education or by moving to areas of white settlement in the small towns and villages nearby. In this way, de-urbanisation has been a direct result of a failure to consider city centre amenities sufficiently for the local population as a whole. There is a long-run (post-1970) trend to de- urbanisation in Europe and North America, partly induced by greater mobility, better roads, and the possibilities of home-working.


But it is also a product of white flight – in Europe as much as in America – though few would admit to this, least of all politicians. In English cities, more so than elsewhere in the UK, the issue of race and housing remains unstated, and the concept of multiculturalism so widely extolled for Leicester and some other English cities remains a myth; segregation by race and faith is strong and almost universal. ‘Pillarisation’ exists, as in the Protestant/Catholic divisions of the 17th-century Low Countries, and in contemporary Northern Ireland.


De-urbanisation, therefore, has also been fuelled by the desire for ‘better’ schooling on the part of those able to quit the city. The result has been a pronounced movement of population to smaller towns where a single comprehensive school provides a decent public education for a white majority.


The long-run effects of structural changes in the housing market are profound. Social segregation has been reinforced and the declining unit of resource available to local government has meant that, compared to Victorian cities, the civic agenda has been weakened. Housing finance has produced centrifugal forces that have propelled families, especially poorer families, to the margins of the city, leaving migrant communities and the very poor to inhabit the city centre.


Recent emphasis on downtown regeneration projects has provided ample housing units for young couples, yet they are necessarily highly mobile in response to short-termism in the labour market. The implosion of a manufacturing base in many British cities has compounded the impermanence of communities.


Cumulatively, the effects on civil society have been adverse, resulting in reduced commitment to civil society clubs and associations and so, as sociologists confirm, social and community ties have been weakened.


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