Dilemmas of Integrated Area-Based Urban Renewal

Urban renewal policies underwent significant changes in Europe in recent decades. With some simplification, the following periods can be distinguished: 1970s: “hard ” urban renewal- extensive physical interventions 1980s: “soft ” urban renewal- efforts to keep the original population in place 1990s: “integrated urban renewal ”-combining physical, economic and social interventions The last decade brought heated debates about the understanding of the problems of disadvantaged neighbourhoods and about the potential methods to handle these problems. Previously, the common understanding was that the problems of disadvantaged neighbourhoods were caused by physical characteristics of the places and the composition of their population. Claude Jacquier (see Jacquier 2008) was one of the first to call attention to the role of the crisis of local institutions and their incapacity to regulate the interactions between place (environment), people (social) and institutions (economic and political). According to Jacquier, an integrated programme for sustainable urban development has to manage and improve the interactions between all three components, in order for deprived areas to have a chance to become a “normal ” part of the settlement pattern. From this statement it follows that disadvantaged neighbourhoods need complex interventions which have to cover not only physical and social issues but the whole range of government and governance issues. Thus the “new generation ” of integrated area-based urban renewal programs aim at improving deprived areas through complex and interlinked multi-sectoral interventions. Behind this common understanding, however, there are two sensitive dilemmas which are heavily debated