A Critical History of Urban Regeneration in British Architecture and Planning, 1968-1980s

Keywords: planning, non-plan, urban regeneration, urban triumphalism, urban entrepreneurialism, Milton Keynes, London Docklands
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

This paper re-excavates the origins of urban regeneration, both in practice and thought. As a paradigm of development, urban regeneration is a somewhat provincial term, specific to the European Union and particularly important to planning policy in the United Kingdom in recent decades. Nonetheless, it has relevance to understanding contemporary planning and development practices globally, to the emergence of urban entrepreneurialism as a theory of urban governance strategy, and to what Brenner & Schmid (2015) describe as the global ideology of urban triumphalism.

Building on recent scholarship on the history of the critique of planning (Fontenot 2021) this paper examines the planning and ideation underlying two case studies. Milton Keynes was the last (and largest) successful New Town in Britain, and was substantially planned and established as a Development Corporation in 1968. The London Docklands Development Corporation was the first and most significant Urban Development Corporation, and was established in 1980/1. Party-political antagonism and 1979-centric historiography has meant that the commonalities between these classic cases and types of Development Corporation have been understated (Brownill and O’Hara 2015). Through focus on the continuities as well as discontinuities between these key cases of national-scale development approaches, the paper argues that a common critique of inherited conceptions of planning paved the way for urban regeneration and urban entrepreneurialism.