Urban regeneration and sustainable communites

In the last two decades, the concept of sustainable development has emerged as a new policy orthodoxy in the fields of urban development and planning. The sustainability agenda promises the delivery of new forms of economic development that can be balanced with social justice and environmental sustainability. However, despite its appeal to policy-makers and businesses, the term has been increasingly problematised by academics and critics. In fact, the deliberate haziness of this term has left space for its continuous redefinition by different groups and with different aims with the result that sustainability seems taking on meaning only when it is adapted and re-contextualised in different local, regional and national environments. It is from this specific understanding of sustainability - as an extremely challenging policy goal - that the authors in this book explore some recent experiences of urban policy in the UK and the connections between these policy programmes and the wider sustainability agendas. The chapters focus on the period since 1997 when the Blair administration was elected. Since then, it has embraced the sustainability concept and gradually introduced it in its urban agenda with the production of relevant policy documents and plans: from the Urban Renaissance theory to the more recent Sustainable Communities Plan. The book provides a contribution to this specific understanding, investigating the relationship between community, diversity and sustainability in the context of urban regeneration in Britain through the concepts of mix and balance.