Monday 22 December 2008

Recessions and Regeneration 1

A couple of weeks ago I spoke at the RTPI Successful Regeneration Conference on (get this) Innovative Financial Tools. It was their choice of title not mine! In the context of the current economic crisis such a confident title is misplaced. I therefore decided to ask questions of my audience in the light of this. All are related to one big question - what can we do as regenerators in the face of recession. I will come back to my talk in a number of posts over the next few weeks.

My first point is this: many of the problems we have been solving for the last 18 years have their source in the recessions of the 1970s 1980s and 1990s. The areas featuring badly in the Indices of Multiple Deprivation are often those areas where those recessions hit most - e.g. the coal mining areas and areas which had been the heart of heavy industry. The first question therefore is what areas will be hit this time? The second - what will the regeneration legacy be for us practitioners?

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