p5 Flashcards
Local plans:
There is competition between local authorities to create attractive business environments for investors and workers who are highly skilled and paid and who can choose where to work more easily.
They develop local plans which designate specific areas for development; Science parks are a good example, since knowledge-based industries underpin the UK’s current economic growth.
Cambridge Science Park:
- The purpose of science parks is to represent areas as being attractive for inward investment.
- These private or public areas provide attractive environments, purpose-built buildings and infrastructure, and advice and networking groups.
- The first was built at Stanford University in the USA in the 1950s.
- In the UK, there were more than 100, employing around 42,000 people in 2015.
- One of the first and largest is the Cambridge Science Park, closely linked to the university.
- Built in the 1970s on a redundant defence site, it grew rapidly in the 1990s when life sciences began to flourish globally.
- Expansion in the early 2000s has attracted many foreign TNCs, such as AstraZeneca.
- Life science is now the third largest UK growth sector economically.
- In the future, the Regeneration and Investment Organisation aims to consolidate the ‘Golden Triangle of Life Sciences’ between Oxford, Cambridge and central London by 2018.
- The existing campus of the Institute of Cancer Research and the Royal Marsden Hospital, already in the top five global cancer research and treatment facilities, will be the focus of the Sutton Drug Discovery Complex.
Local interest groups
Chambers of Commerce, local preservation societies, trade unions
tensions between groups that wish to preserve environments and those that seek change
Tensions created by the 2012 Olympic Games:
Tensions created by the 2012 Olympic Games:
- Clays Lane Estate was a housing co-operative development built in 1977, creating a community for vulnerable single people in Newham, London.
- Unfortunately the site was designated for the Olympic athletes’ village and the 430 residents were forced to move.
- There was huge public opposition and even a public inquiry.
- Several small businesses were also evicted from the Olympic site, such as Forman’s salmon smokery.
There are often tensions between groups that wish to preserve places and those that seek change. They may be categorised by their viewpoint or stance:
- socio-economic, for example city and town Chambers of Commerce, addiction treatment centres, youth and retirement groups, and trade unions
- environmental, for example local conservation or preservation societies in rural and urban places.
- Areas with affluent retirees tend to have more vociferous and mobilised local interest groups: in Winchester the local council was taken on by a quickly formed pressure group called Winchester Deserves Better, delaying the Silver Hill mixed development scheme in the city centre
Local Decision Making:
- Major regeneration projects need the cooperation of many local interest groups.
- It is normally the job of the local council, such as a county council or a district council, to take the lead in ensuring that projects are successful.
- They must reconcile the many different interests and stakeholder groups.
- For example, local businesses, sometimes represented by local chambers of commerce, want economic growth even if this means demolishing old buildings, while local people often have a nostalgic attachment to historic buildings and campaign to save them.
- a Parliamentary Select Committee in 2004 concluded that many successful regeneration schemes should use historic buildings as a foundation for projects because they reinforce a sense of community, make an important contribution to the local economy and act as a catalyst for improvements to the wider area.
Urban and rural regeneration strategies include
- retail-led plans
- tourism
- leisure and sport ( London Olympics 2012)
- public/private rural diversification ( Powys Regeneration Partnership).
Retail-led plans:
- National and local governments are heavily involved in retail planning
- Local authorities decide on changes of use to buildings and can influence shop types and locations of malls, pedestrianised areas and alcohol-free zones.
- The 2014 Portas Review highlighted the two main challenges to the high street as:
competition from out-of-town centres
the rapid growth of internet shopping. - It led to government support of £1 billion to ensure growth in high street jobs.
- The University of Southampton’s Retail Research Group shows that ‘convenience’ shopping has fundamentally changed from the late twentieth century one-stop shop, to a greater ‘topping up’ of goods in local stores.
- An increased interest in specialist retailers and an increased demand for leisure means that high streets offering a mixture of bars, restaurants and cafes, beauty services and gyms are more likely to prosper.
- Government actions in 2015 included allowing more click-and-collect locations, pop-up shops and gyms, encouraging street markets, changes to business rates to help smaller ones compete with chains, competitions such as Britain’s Best High Street od the Future High Streets Forum.
CASE STUDY - RETAIL LED REGENERATION - CABOT CIRCUS
- 120 leading shops
- It cost £500 million to build
- 250 apartments and houses were built
- 2500 car parking spaces
Tourism and leisure-led regeneration:
- There are few rural or urban areas in the UK which do not use this growth sector to help or lead regeneration.
- There is great diversity in types, ranging from informal individual households offering B&B, custom-built private centres such as Center Parcs, purpose-built leisure complexes in towns and cities, to whole settlements devoted to tourism such as seaside resorts.
- It is a volatile industry, however, dependent on the weather, its image and fast changes in preference which may reflect developments in technology, social forums and websites such as TripAdvisor and terrorist attacks.
Tourism and leisure-led regeneration:
Declining coastal communities:p1
- These receive special attention from the government because often they have higher than average deprivation levels.
- There are various reasons for their economic decline: many are seaside resorts with a tourism legacy, but which largely fell into a spiral of deprivation by the 1970s when more holidays abroad and jet travel became commonplace.
- Large numbers of retirees, unemployment, transient students, immigrants and poor quality health and housing are all contributory factors.
- Some resorts, such as Bournemouth in Dorset, have managed to reinvent themselves by diversifying into a business and conference hub while holding on to its family holiday image.
- It has also developed into a stag/ hen and clubbing hotspot.
- Adjacent resort Boscombe was innovative in creating an artificial surf reef to try to re-image the town, funded by the sale of a car park to Barratt Homes, which built exclusive flats called Honeycombe Chine
- In the 1990s central government schemes such as the Single Regeneration Budget, used in Boscombe’s town centre, were important in tackling deprivation, but the problems have remained and even increased.
Tourism and leisure-led regeneration:
Declining coastal communities:p2
- In 2008 Current policies were overseen by the government’s Big Lottery Fund with a focus on fostering economic growth.
- By 201.5 it had spent £1.19 million and attracted £200 million in inward investment, creating an estimated 12,000 jobs.
- Projects include Europe’s first National Coastal Academy in Bournemouth, In 2015, following the localism policy, Coastal Community Teams were set up whereby partnerships can apply for funding, to develop plans and bid for capital funding for local projects.
- The Coastal Revival Fund started with an initial £3 million to help coastal heritage or community assets to have new economic uses.
Sport-led regeneration:
- Many areas have used sport-led regeneration, not only for the spinoff from the construction and running stages of a major sporting event and associated jobs, infrastructure and buildings, but as a catalyst for longer-term regeneration.
- This may be by one-off or regular events, such as World Cups, the Olympic Games and Commonwealth Games, or the building of long-running facilities like stadiums.
- One of the reasons London won the bid for the Olympics in 2012 was because it had a ‘legacy’ plan in place, even if it had not all materialised.
- It is a model that Rio de Janeiro adapted for its Games in 2016.
- London also hopes to win the 2026 Commonwealth Games.
- The media coverage before and during such events helps put the place on an international stage, and inward investment is a critical spinoff.
- Chapter 18 weighs up the impacts of such regeneration.
Strategies to make the original Olympic park attractive for investment were centred on flagship developments:
- The International Quarter is a 37,000 sq m new office area, a new business ‘frontier’, next to Europe’s largest shopping centre, Westfield Stratford City.
- This extends the axis from the City of London and the older regeneration projects of Canary Wharf and the Docklands.
- ‘Here East’ is a new digital and creative industry hub on the former Olympic media site.
- By 2019 a new cultural and education centre, Olympicopolis, will help expand the V&A Museum, Sadler’s Wells, and possibly the first UK branch of the Smithsonian Institution.
- The main stadium with be home to West Ham United by the 2016-17 season.
- The Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park has 560 acres of attractions and has had 4 million visits since it opened.
- Permanent sports venues still in use include the Aquatics Centre, Velodrome and multipurpose Copper Box Arena.
- 10,000 new homes, two primary schools, a secondary school, nine nurseries, three health centres, plus multipurpose community, leisure and cultural spaces.