First Steps: Urban Initiatives and Urban Problems in Early 1970s Britain

Abstract

The first urban initiatives emerged in Britain in the late 1960s. The programmes initiated at that time, the Urban Programme and the Community Development Projects were firmly in tune with the prevailing social pathology approach and operated through area-based measures. Notwithstanding these initiatives, many urban problems continued to be addressed by physical approaches. This chapter covers:

• The experiences of the early urban initiatives and their successors in the period up to the mid-1970s. We will reflect on the lessons they suggested for future urban initiatives and show how the assumptions that underlay them, notably the social pathology approach, were undermined by the experience of the urban initiatives themselves.

• The demise of the remaining physical measures associated with problems of housing, urban growth and industrial change, and discuss the themes of counterurbanisation and deindustrialisation; issues central to the emerging views on the structural base of urban policy.

• An assessment of the theoretical basis and policy coherence of the approaches pursued during the period.

• The ideological and politicoeconomic context in which urban policy found itself in the mid-1970s. This context was to play a crucial role in determining the parameters within which urban policy would both operate and develop in subsequent years.