"A leading Labour policy thinker has re-made the case for demolishing and rebuilding council-owned housing estates. But has he underplayed the drawbacks?"
 |
| Link to web site |
"In general, people would prefer not to have their homes knocked down. You wouldn’t and neither would I. They would sooner not to be told to pack their bags and move out to make way for the wrecking ball, perhaps to some unfamiliar and quite distant neighbourhood where everyone’s a stranger. Often, they’d rather stay put even if their home is leaky, cold and overcrowded on a council estate that outsiders casually despise and they might not be all that keen on themselves.
"They might feel that way even if very sincere politicians have promised them a better, brand new replacement home in the same place as the one to be demolished, along with better streets, improved transport and new schools. The thing is, change can be a very risky thing. Who can be sure that it will turn out for the best?
"That is item number one on a long, forbidding list of problems with what is variously, sometimes euphemistically, called estate regeneration, rebuilding or renewal. This has now been reframed in the neat coinage of Labour policy thinker Andrew Adonis as the creation of 'city villages'.
"Adonis, a senior policy chief and minister under prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, has co-edited a collection of essays on the theme for the Institute for Public Policy Research. He wants building city villages to be 'a new urban movement', which he contends could go a long way to solving the housing shortage, especially in London."
No comments:
Post a Comment