Sustaining urban regeneration – Is effective place management the answer?

A recent United Nations report predicted that 70 per cent of the world’s population will be urban by 2050 (United Nations, 2010). Today, a hundred of the world’s largest cities are responsible jointly for 30 per cent of global GDP and some thinkers would argue that these megacities will continue to drive growth and innovation into the future, often overshadowing the sovereign states they belong to (Khanna, 2010). Yet, growth may often come at a price, and place identity can be one of the first casualties (Zukin, 2011). In Europe, we are just emerging from the worst economic downturn since World War II. A downturn, which could be arguably blamed, at least in part, not on the individualization of profit but the socialization of risk (Wallerstein,1983), and one that countries like the UK and Germany are only just tentatively beginning to recover from after nearly five years of uncertainty. Meanwhile, much of southern Europe continues to struggle to find firm ground to build a sustained recovery upon (Urban Land Institute, 2013). Major urban regeneration projects have taken a hit financially through the mothballing of key developments in expectation of less uncertain times. Reduction of financial input by major institutions has had an influence on projects both in terms of the type of developers coming forward and the scale and type of development that is viable. Regeneration projects are by their very nature, complex and challenging – particularly because of these difficulties around financial viability. Dixon et al. (2011) note how the financial crisis and economic downturn since 2008 has placed many urban regeneration policies in jeopardy in the UK and around the world (see also Evans et al, 2009). In the UK, the urban development sector, like the country’s economy, entered altogether an age of austerity (Southern, 2013), that it is only now just beginning to emerge from. Urban regeneration, which in the UK has traditionally favoured physical revitalisation as opposed to more integrated strategic approaches adopted elsewhere (Chin-Tay and Coca-Stefaniak, 2010), has evolved considerably in its outlook and philosophy. Place making, for instance, has been linked to parallel place branding processes (Trueman et al., 2008). Bradley et al. (2002) argue that much of the supposed transformation of former industrial cities had involved a process of investment marketing and the promotion of rejuvenated urban images. In spite of the evident practice and conceptual parallels that exist between city management (including town centre management) and place branding (Coca-Stefaniak, forthcoming), few studies have explored the links between place management and urban regeneration (Otsuka and Reeve, 2007). At a time when cost conscious regeneration projects often continue to be favoured in a post-crisis risk averse investment environment, the time has come for a serious re-think of the role of place management as a symbiotic element of strategic significance in the impact and sustainability of large urban regeneration projects