Memorandum by London School of Economics
and Political Science (UWP 54)
MAKING CITIES WORK
SOCIAL EXCLUSION
IS ALMOST
ENTIRELY AN
URBAN PROBLEM
The 100 most deprived local authority areas
in the country are all urban and the 20 most deprived are all
in major industrial conurbations and inner London. We have to
start from where we are—cities concentrate and intensify
social problems. The Social exclusion agenda is an urban agenda.
NEIGHBOURHOOD PROBLEMS
Social exclusion is about the inability of our
society to keep all groups and individuals within reach of what
we expect as a society. It is about the tendency to push vulnerable
and difficult individuals into the least popular places, furthest
away from our common aspirations. It means that some people feel
excluded from the mainstream, as though they do not belong. For
a long time this has meant that inner city areas, and some large
outlying council estates, increasingly vacated by people who can
find an alternative, became a receptacle for problems.
Cities are made up of neighbourhoods and their
fortunes are locked together. The success of cities depends on
successful neighbourhoods, and therefore the urban agenda—an
attempt to reverse the urban exodus and overcome social exclusion—focuses
on neighbourhoods as well as cities and regions. They are intrinsically
interconnected (Chart 1).
Urban neighbourhoods usually cover around 2,000
homes, 5,000 people, a typical primary school catchment. Neighbourhoods
often have sharp boundaries, either physical or atmospheric, but
the layers of neighbourhood life are like an onion with a tight
core and loose outer skin.
Neighbourhoods have three interlocking aspects:
the home and immediate surroundings; services such as shops and
schools; and the neighbourhood environment, giving an intangible
but powerful signal of who we are and how we should behave. Neighbourhoods
offer a sense of familiarity and security to the people who live
there, which counters fear of the unknown, even where the neighbourhood
is poor, run-down or unpopular.
Neighbourhoods can break down if the three elements—home,
services, environment—are disrupted to a point where security
disintegrates. If decline is very rapid, then even the sense of
familiarity can go. Crime and poor education, key neighbourhood
problems, fuel the movement outwards, creating large rifts in
society and leaving much poorer neighbourhoods behind. Linking
very poor areas to the mainstream has failed in the past precisely
because it is so difficult to solve these polarising trends.
Chart 2 shows the interaction of inherent and
acquired neighbourhood characteristics, making people and place
equally important in the creation of and struggle against social
exclusion. Areas often have a mix of these characteristics. Occasionally
all the characteristics are clustered together.
Areas that were once valuable—our industrial
inner cities—can become redundant, semi-abandoned, ransacked,
a true nightmare for the people stranded within seriously depleted
communities. But these same areas can also regain value, without
losing their "character", if we can change some of the
intrinsic or acquired features. We do not need to abandon or demolish
our inner cities as the case of Islington shows.
POVERTY CONCENTRATIONS
Poor conditions and poor people group together
in poor neighbourhoods. Far more seriously poorer neighbourhoods
also tend to group together, forming large poverty clusters within
cities. Thus we have, not just isolated poor neighbourhoods, but
whole swathes of cities dominated by exclusionary problems.
Taking the five per cent of wards with the highest
levels of workless households and the highest concentrated deprivation,
the concentration of poverty and worklessness within the poorest
areas is double the national average. Chart 3 shows this. Poor
areas are much more deprived on all measures of deprivation than
other more popular areas. [39]
The clustering of poverty areas is so strong
in some cities that large continuous tracts of concentrated poverty
develop. Only 40 of the 284 highest poverty wards in the country
are "lone" wards within a local authority. The other
244 are grouped in 51 "poverty clusters" within cities.
Most areas of the country do not have any high poverty wards,
though most have smaller poorer neighbourhoods.
Poverty clusters are by definitions in cities.
Our work shows that 91 per cent of the people living in poverty
wards are concentrated in inner cities, industrial and ex-industrial
areas, inner London and ex-coal mining areas. Chart 4a underlines
the large numbers of people grouped within poverty clusters, over
quarter of a million in Liverpool. Chart 4b shows the proportion
of some borough populations concentrated in poverty clusters.
In Tower Hamlets it reaches 57 per cent.
THE IMPACT
OF POVERTY
CLUSTERS IN
CITY NEIGHBOURHOODS
Clusters of poverty matter because all the disadvantages
associated with poverty are more concentrated and more extensive,
therefore escape becomes more difficult. They work to limit people's
chances in many ways as Chart 5 shows.
The larger and longer running the area problems,
the stronger the cumulative impact becomes, leading to the flight
of those more able to go and gradual loss of control resulting
from chronic instability. Tipping into chaotic decline becomes
more likely as the backbone of a neighbourhood weakens. This makes
some areas subject to eventual abandonment. [40]
Area depletion leads to inadequate political
representation and reduced competition for responsible jobs. This
is now a serious problem in the poorest city authorities including
inner London. Many conventional forms of involvement do not operate.
It can lead to a collapse in the housing market at the bottom.
Chart 6 shows how this cumulative process can lead to a collapse
in viability if nothing is done to prevent the spiral or reverse
the process.
A new phenomenon, the complete disintegration
of inner city neighbourhoods within some of the biggest poverty
clusters is gathering pace across our major cities. It is driven
by six interlocking factors:
— The long run movement away from conurbations,
although slowing in the 1980s and 1990s, is still continuing.
It creates serious pressures on green fields all over the country.
The migration outwards is selective.
— We build at incredibly low densities
as Chart 8 shows—on average 23 dwellings per hectare, 55
people. This is too low to support shops, buses, local schools
or health services. It hugely increases car traffic, commuting
and congestion. As a result, only four per cent of seven year
olds still walk to school.
— Cities have double the proportion
of council housing and half the proportion of owner occupation
compared with the national average. Demolition of large, unpopular,
under-occupied council estates has accelerated in the 1990s, including
in London.
— Many people are unwilling to risk
ownership in the most acutely declining areas. In the areas where
owner occupation is most needed to hold onto and attract aspiring
households, there is too little real opportunity to buy.
— The collapse of major industries
and the outward flow of new investment to the greener and more
spacious city hinterland has devastated city job markets. Up to
three-quarters of manual jobs have gone. Hackney has one of the
highest unemployment rates in the country. Better off people leapfrog
the city and commute in, rather than live within declining neighbourhoods.
Neighbourhood polarisation then becomes extreme.
— The loss of traditional patterns
of work, family and neighbourhood has fuelled the breakdown of
social infrastructure. Educational performance in only one fifth
the national average, while crime, and particularly violence can
be four times higher. [41]
Truancy, disorder and youth disaffection undermine security. Most
forms of guarding such as caretaking have been cut or withdrawn.
Within declining inner neighbourhoods we now
experience accelerating turnover of occupants and growing empty
property; private withdrawal and growing empty spaces; trouble
in the vacuum of collapsing demand. The instability can become
unmanageable as Chart 7 suggests.
Once abandonment gathers pace it affects all
tenures. Owner occupied homes are also being demolished alongside
rented properties. Chart 8 shows the accelerating pace of abandonment
over two years in four council estates in Newcastle and Manchester
and the extraordinary high levels of abandonment among private
landlords and housing associations in the same neighbourhoods.
THE LAND
PROBLEM
The breakdown of inner city neighbourhoods is
creating demand for a different type of housing in different types
of neighbourhood, fuelling planning pressures, building pressures
and market supply. As a result land is now being released ahead
of demand, anticipating and helping accelerate the urban exodus
while creating the ugly problem of sprawl. Nowhere except London
are we hitting the 60 per cent brown field target.
There is an unsustainable triple process that
results from acute inner area decline:
— thinning out the poorest inner city
neighbourhoods which have lost their original purpose;
— depleting larger cities and conurbations;
— building outwards on green land at
even higher environmental cost to all.
The large double conurbation of Greater Manchester
and Merseyside, is building houses faster than the disputed household
projections require. It has homes and green land supply in the
pipeline around ten times the level of projected demand. Yet little
account is taken of the large stock of empty but sound property
and the disproportionate supply of inner city brownfield land.
This over supply is compounded by the failure to adjust to shrinking
households, less and less children, more and more single people
and elderly. We need different types, density and location to
meet changed demand. Chart 9 illustrates the scale of the oversupply
of land matched by the extraordinary levels of empty property.
Our planning system is wedded to mechanistic
household projections, low density and the over-release of land,
trapped between the powerful lobbying forces of builders, aspiring
families, housing providers, rural protectionist and urbanites.
Therefore urban problems lock into the land problem. As long as
people with choice can move out relatively cheaply to safe havens
of low density houses, we are unlikely to seek the avant-garde
solutions we need to our urban problems or to attract sufficient
urban pioneers back into the collapsing inner neighbourhoods.
It is an irony of wealthy societies that spreading
out from cities destroys the two objectives that lower density
aims to achieve.
We have no choice but to tackle the land problem
and increase density as it affects city neighbourhoods and country
villages alike.
Our poor neighbourhoods are now often too empty,
leaving them prey to insecurity, illegal activity and acute depletion
of basic services. If we raise our density to a moderate 50 houses
per hectare, from our current average of less than 25, we will
halve at a stroke our use of green field land, and begin to recreate
a critical mass of people in urban areas that will reinvigorate
public transport, education and other services. Georgian streets
with around 100-200 homes per hectare are lastingly popular as
property values show.
Higher densities work with sensitive, skilled
creative urban design. Lower densities often fail through lack
of connection. Physical and social dynamics of areas go hand in
hand.
SOLUTIONS
Given that households are much smaller than
a generation ago, we have to fit in many more households, simply
to keep enough people for neighbourhoods to work—its shops,
buses, doctors, schools, police depend on a critical mass of people
and do not survive sprawl. The ways forward require change in
how we do things, energy and commitment rather than vast cash.
— Planning permission to build ever
more outside cities dries the problem of abandonment and demolition.
We should halt land releases in areas of housing surplus and abandonment,
and should create stronger incentives to renovate cities.
— There is demand for high quality,
carefully secured homes in city centres. We can apply this approach
to inner neighbourhoods, attracting urban pioneers who currently
chose commuting.
— We must prevent ghettoisation of
council housing? Maximising choice, attracting broader income
groups, encouraging family and social ties, increasing security
and maintenance, creating more mixed areas, preventing racial
concentrations in the worse estates, are all possible if we change
the way council housing is owned, managed and let. [42]
— The future of cities depends on supporting
and integrating minority communities within more vibrant, more
popular neighbourhoods, alongside the often collapsing white areas.
[43]
— Holding onto people, developing management
in neighbourhoods is surely a more realistic vision than the large-scale
demolition of past and often current urban regeneration programmes.
[44]
Clean sweep demolition based solutions are immensely damaging
to community ties, hugely costly and therefore impossible to implement
in the several thousand acutely declining neighbourhoods.
— The Social Exclusion Unit's "strategy
for neighbourhood renewal" should include neighbourhood "supremos"
to trouble-shoot and sort problems out from a local base. They
need to be backed by neighbourhood wardens and supercaretakers
to secure and sustain improved conditions. [45]
New Deal for Communities, the Government's neighbourhood flagship,
will help about 50 neighbourhoods—renewal programmes only
ever target a tiny number at a time. We need practicable fundable
local management and security across every town and city in Britain.
Chart 11 summaries some five key main themes
and measure based on my work with the Urban Task Force. Will the
Government be brave enough to adopt and implement them?
Professor Anne Power
10 January 2000
Chart 1
THE TOP 20 LOCAL AUTHORITIES ON THE GOVERNMENT'S
NEW INDEX OF DEPRIVATION IN RANK ORDER
| 1. Liverpool |
11. Greenwich |
| 2. Newham | 12. Lambeth
|
| 3. Manchester | 13. Haringey
|
| 4. Hackney | 14. Lewisham
|
| 5. Birmingham | 15. Barking and Dagenham
|
| 6. Tower Hamlets | 16. Nottingham
|
| 7. Sandwell | 17. Camden
|
| 8. Southwark | 18. Hammersmith and Fulham
|
| 9. Knowsley | 19. Newcastle upon Tyne
|
| 10. Islington | 20. Brent
|
| |
Source: DETR, 1998
Chart 2
INTRINSIC AND ACQUIRED CHARACTERISTICS OF POOR AREAS
| Intrinsic area characteristics | Condition
| Outcomes |
| Location and transport links | Poor access
| Low status |
| Physical style and ownership | Segregated community
| Low value |
| Environment | Unattractive, poor quality
| Low desirability |
| Economy | Low Investment |
Low mix |
| | |
| Acquired area characteristics | Condition
| Outcomes |
| Population mix | Low status deters more ambitious
| Concentrated poverty |
| Reputation and history | Image activates fear
| Rejection and isolation |
| Standards and services | Performance is poor
| Deteriorating conditions |
| Poor supervision | Low morale reduces incentives
| Negative behaviour |
| Weak informal controls | Intimidation prevents action
| Withdrawal |
| | |
Source: DETR, 1998.
Chart 5
PROBLEMS OF POVERTY CLUSTERS
Less obvious routes out
Depression and low moral
High levels of frustration, aggression and other negative
behaviour
Parenting difficult
Low school expectations
Lower employment prospects
More disruptive behaviour
Higher pupil turnover
Intense competition for a shrinking pool of low-skill
jobs
Lower wages
Withdrawal from the labour markets
High levels of early retirement, disability and economic
activity
Low case incomes
Low ability to support shops, facilities, extra activities.
Chart 10a
ESTIMATED DENSITIES AT DIFFERENT TIMES
| Date | No of dwellings per hectare
| No of dwellings per acre | No of people
per acre
|
1900
(bye-law housing) | 250
| 100 | 400 |
1950
(new towns) | 35 |
14 | 45 |
1970
(inner city estate) | 100
| 40 | 135 |
1990
(inner city renovated streets
—Islington)
| 70-100 | 30-40 | 75-100
|
1999
(national average planning requirement)
| 23 | 11 | 25
|
| | |
|
Ratio of dwellings
1900-99 | 8:1
|
Ratio of people
1900-99 | 16:1
|
| |
Source: Urban Task Force, 1999
Chart 10b
CONTRAST BETWEEN AIMS AND OUTCOMES OF LOW DENSITY
| Aims | Reality
|
| — more manageable cities | — impoverished city neighbourhoods
|
| — lower crowding | — urban decay
|
| — easier access to the countryside
| — low density housing development in green fields
|
| |
Chart 11
WILL THE GOVERNMENT DELIVER AN URBAN RENAISSANCE?—FIVE
KEY THEMES AND MEASURES FROM THE URBAN TASK FORCE
1. Protecting land
Government will miss its 60 per cent brownfield building target unless we change how we design and recycle buildings, neighbourhoods and open spaces.
| —Limit greenfield land releases—stop greenfield development in low demand regions and cities.
—Increase density to retain population with smaller households.
—Co-ordinate land releases within regions to prevent over supply and city depopulation.
|
2. Recycling land and buildings
Derelict, underused, contaminated land and empty, underoccupied buildings create hollow cities. Insecure, neglected environments fuel the urban exodus. Higher density around existing open spaces makes urban areas more lively, attractive, secure and affordable.
| —Design at moderate density to recycle more land and buildings and attract more people to cities—50 units per hectare.
—Increase incentives for recycling—equalise VAT on new build and renovation.
—Clean up all contaminated land by 2030.
—Expand urban design skills.
|
3. Public and pedestrian transport
Cities are difficult to move around and live in. A huge increase in cars and plummeting journeys on foot, by cycle or bus have made urban neighbourhoods less safe for families, young and elderly households. Commuting may create gridlock.
| —Target 65 per cent of transport spending on public, pedestrian and cycle journeys.
—Introduce 20 mph speed limits in residential neighbourhoods.
—Create Home Zones to give pedestrians full right of way and make streets safer for children.
—Integrate environmental and transport plans with development plans.
|
4. Managing social and neighbourhood conditions
Our cities are insecure, dirty, poor. Bad schools and inadequate policing drive people out. The bureaucratic and fragmented role of local authorities weakens urban management and regeneration. It makes joined up action to improve towns and cities difficult. Council estates dominate the poorer urban areas and need special measures.
| —Strengthen the strategic and enforcement roles of local authorities.
—Open up council housing to a broader band of the population.
—Encourage mixed income, mixed use, integrated areas—attract private alongside public investment.
—Create neighbourhood management for inner areas, backed by wardens and supercaretakers.
—Invent new local approaches to schools, police and other social problems.
|
5. Environment
Land is scarce in our crowded island. Many find cities and towns decayed, unattractive, congested. Special protections are vital. People want green and safe environments.
| —Protect green and open spaces with special measures.
—Introduce environmental impact fees to minimise damage.
—Mandate energy and environmental ratings for all homes.
—Change the real cost of new development.
|
39
DETR (1999) Index of Deprivation. Back
40
CASE (1998) Persistent Poverty and Lifetime Inequality: The
Evidence. Proceedings from a workshop held at HM Treasury,
chaired by Professor John Hills. London: CASE, HM Treasury. Back
41
Power, A & Tunstall, R (1995) Swimming Against the Tide
York: JRF. Back
42
Power, A (1999) Estates on the Edge. London: Routledge. Back
43
Newcastle NDC proposal. Back
44
Trafford Hall (1999) Review. Back
45
SEU 2000-Strategy for Neighbourhood. Back
|
