Social exclusion and inner city Europe. Regulating urban regeneration

Abstract:

This work looks at the broad regeneration agenda that has been evolving in five inner cities of the largest EU states - Barcelona, Genoa, Hamburg, Liverpool and Marseilles. All are major ports and were selected for their common economic heritage and transformation challenges.

The book is organised over three parts. Part one looks at ‘Mapping the Inner City’. Chapter one by way of introduction presents a range of problems found in inner city environments and sets the stage on which the respective policy responses of the final quarter of the last century were played out in the five largest EU states. Chapter two examines the city within the city and offers profiles of the socio-economic characteristics found in the case study cities. It also introduces discussion of regeneration policy regimes, as a precursor to later detailed analysis.

Part two explores inner city regeneration strategies and opens with a chapter dealing with the regeneration of the physical environment in the case cities. Chapter four moves on to discuss the regeneration strategies employing socio-economic intervention. Chapter five assesses the impact of regeneration by examination of the principle vehicles for delivering it in relation to key input, process and output factors.

Discussion then moves on to the EU level in part three, ‘Evolving Regeneration Regimes’. Chapter six opens with an exploration of the contribution made by EU-level interventions to regeneration regimes. Chapter seven concludes the work with some broad reflections on the regeneration agenda in inner city Europe and the chosen styles of governance, with commentary on the changing role of the professions, public institutions, markets and communities in emerging regeneration regimes. It closes with some thoughts about the convergence tendencies within the EU.

The work will interest scholars, students, researchers, policy makers engaged in social sciences, economics, urban regeneration and EU integration.

S.P. Mangen convenes courses in European Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science.