Area-based initiatives – engines of innovation in planning and policy?

Area-based initiatives addressing issues of physical degradation, social exclusion, economic deprivation and lack of cohesion in urban regeneration areas have been promoted widely across Europe in the past two or three decades. Following this many evaluation studies have been completed. Nevertheless, there is still considerable uncertainty as to the most important outcomes of place-based initiatives. Evaluations have mostly focussed on direct quantitative socio-economic indicators. These have often been quite insignificant, while other effects have been largely neglected. This paper proposes a broader perspective on the achievements and outcomes of place-based initiatives. Many of these have functioned as important experimental seedbeds in which innovations in urban policy and organization of public decision-making have been tested. The papers seeks to clarify whether, in the long run, change and development in planning culture turns out to be a more substantial result than the reduction of social exclusion and economic deprivation. The paper analyses all available official evaluation studies of Danish place-based urban policy initiatives from mid-1990s through 2010. In addition to this, recent studies of local planning culture change are discussed. Main findings are that during the past two decades a general change in planning culture has developed gradually, triggered by urban regeneration full scale experimentation with place-based approaches. Second, planners as well as public administrators attitude towards the involvement of local citizens and stakeholders is significantly transformed. While earlier, public participation in planning was mostly restricted to what was lawfully mandatory, the new turn in planning culture demonstrates a practice that goes much further in involving citizens in planning processes more and earlier. A renewed view of place-based urban regeneration policies shows that while linear effects following directly from policy programmes and instruments may be moderate, feed-back effects into planning culture produces significant process innovations.