Rising East Online

Captain Nemesis Calling

by Captain Nemesis

Regeneration is much in vogue. But who is regeneration for…?

Who is the vision, the aim, the objective, the target, the outcome of all this effort? When all the outputs are counted, when the match funding is piled so high an unforeseen eclipse of the sun occurs, when the National Audit Committee declares that every pound of grant aid has been spent with wisdom exceeding Solomon’s, and when the private sector has gilded every lily growing out of the public sector pond, what is supposed to have happened?

An answer, of course, is contained in innumerable and collectively incomprehensible policies and strategies, to wit: ‘the community’ will have so self-improved that 3,201 columnists can be put out to grass because no further outrage at its defectiveness and poverty is required. ‘Business’ will be so competitive that the DTI will be sold on e-bay to a small third world country. Motherhood and apple pie will be ubiquitous and sustainable. And so forth.

While obviously desirable, however, large-scale improvement in the life of community and the success of business is in practice a long-term agenda. Ask the question: why is regeneration necessary? Because community and business graze their knees and need a sticking plaster applied by kindly Nurse Government? Obviously not. Regeneration is necessary where the means of sustainable life has fallen apart.

Where, for example, 50,000 jobs based in Newham disappeared in the 30 years from the 1960s to the 1990s because the local rationale for whole industries broke apart. Where an entire fundamental industry such as coal mining disappears from an area. Where agriculture requires such a small number of people that ‘rural life’ is more viable as a commuting concept than a productive one. The roots of such decline are decades deep. Regeneration is about the absence of quick fix.

And then there is change occurring irrespective of regeneration. Not only did said London Borough of Newham experience the impact of an economic meteorite, it changed demographically and occupationally. In the early 1980s, under 20 per cent of the population was black/ethnic minority. Two decades later, that figure was over 60 per cent.

Newham may still be ‘working class’, but it isn’t any longer industrial, blue-collar, mono-cultural. It could be argued that its challenges are now not about an ageing stability which decayed in part by antipathy to new thinking, but an excessive mobility which obstructs the embedding of innovation to create a sustainable future.

If it takes decades to fall over, then getting up is unlikely to be a matter of a couple of years or of this or that government’s pet scheme. And while the communities and businesses of today are unarguably real starting points, they aren’t the finishing points because they will be different in all manner of ways at the point where something akin to ‘regeneration’ can be said to have occurred.

We know from the postwar reconstruction effort that putting up tens of thousands of new properties wasn’t ‘regeneration’ (unless regeneration is defined as filling up land with property), because as the housing was going up, the industries were coming down. Regeneration is a holistic concept. It’s an odd notion that housing regeneration is successful while economic development isn’t.

A generation on, notwithstanding design defects, it became clear that 1960s stock did not adjust well to the challenges of new housing demands - which is why we’re knocking a lot of it down. It’s also why ‘Thames Gateway regeneration’ isn’t advocacy of 60,000 or 90,000 new dwellings when there is no clarity that today’s need for two-bedroom flats translates easily into meeting the housing needs of 2035.

So either we build housing with an economic lifespan of less than 30 years or we start thinking a bit more about evolution, adaptability and flexibility. We don’t know what 2035 will be like, but we can hazard a guess - net of apocalypse. It will be as close to us as 1975. Hence, recognisably the same place, but very different culturally and technologically, say.

So regeneration today, which isn’t premised on cardinal principles of flexibility, adaptability and sheer bloody persistence traipsing through the forest of government projects and schemes, won’t reach tomorrow, let alone be regeneration.

Conclusion? Nemesis says that anything claiming to be regeneration which hasn’t at least got some idea of how it rolls forward to 2035 and beyond may indeed turn out all right, but there’s a good chance that it won’t. There’s also a good chance that a peak at its alleged ‘vision’ will reveal something entirely about reaction to today’s historic problems and about as future-proofed as a chocolate teapot.

Captain Nemesis is Rising East Online’s man in the know.

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