Currently, we witness the development of 'twin track' cities, where some urban neighbourhoods either develop at a much slower pace than others or not at all, taking a different path of development altogether. Some neighbourhoods are particular threatened as they begin to lose touch with the city as a whole. Here, the threats of economic and social exclusion loom large.

The massive effects of globalisation, deindustrialisation and increasing cultural diversity in the city as well as downgrading public spending and restructuring of the welfare state are particularly felt; they contribute to the ‘downward spirals‘ of these neighbourhoods. This applies in particular to formerly mixed use inner-city neighbourhoods, but also to large housing estates. In these deprived neighbourhoods, urban regeneration becomes fundamentally a response to the problems of poverty and social exclusion.

New neighbourhood based policies emerged to tackle their problems. They are geared to compensate for both market and state failure, making the best use of civil society/private actors as well as public organisations and instruments of urban regeneration. The term local partnerships becomes the epitome of such a new approach - which is what ENTRUST is about.

ENTRUST (Empowering Neighbourhoods through Recourse and Synergies with Trade) is a European network of over 50 practitioners, policy-makers and researchers in eight European cities - Berlin, Copenhagen, Dublin, Glasgow, Hamburg, Lisbon, Valetta and Vilnius. ENTRUST was launched in 2002. A major focus of the network was to involve partnerships in, and for the betterment of deprived neighbourhoods whilst producing and making use of the transnational knowledge base. Its main aims are raising awareness of, and facilitating new approaches to urban regeneration.

This report presents emerging experience and lessons that are deeply rooted in a variety of different national and local traditions of urban regeneration. At the same time it demonstrates the ways in which the participating cities have come to draw on each other's experiences in devising urban strategies. In doing so, they also attempt to develop new approaches which are more comprehensive, integrated and agency-oriented. These new patterns of regeneration are therefore increasingly informed by cross-national transfers of knowledge and mutual learning.

In ENTRUST, as a network of teamed up practitioners and researchers, we wanted to fully exploit the potential of presence and reciprocity in cross-cultural communication. Our methodology had to enable us to do this in our investigations. Hence ENTRUST employed qualitative, communicative, participatory and iterative practices. We employed these elements of methodology in an emergent rather than predetermined manner, seeking to compose the appropriate investigation design through exploration instead of programming.

The focus is on what can be achieved through urban regeneration initiatives that involve the private sector (commercial enterprises) engaging in collaborative relations with public sector institutions (government bodies) and social economy organisations and other third sector individual volunteers and their associations. Such arrangements are termed public-private partnerships. The key aims of public-private partnerships in urban regeneration are to support local socio-economic development, to improve the built environment, to promote inclusion in the wider economy and society, to encourage community capacity-building, and to enhance knowledge transfer.

In this report we stress three messages in particular:

How can pilot projects encourage private sector involvement?

Urban regeneration policies are diverse and embrace a variety of concerns. That is why the report is directed towards a number of target groups. We want to address professionals and policy-makers, who may be aware of the problem but not necessarily the solutions available.

It is supported by the European Commission under the Fifth Framework RTD Programme/Key Action 4 'City of Tomorrow and Cultural Heritage'. The network of city teams was generated by Byfornyelse Danmark on request of the City of Copenhagen and Integrated Area Planning in Dublin. ENTRUST followed up and extended previous steps of cooperation in INTERREG IIC (Integrated Urban Planning and Management, 1998-2001).

The Danish Center for Forest, Landscape and Planning, Department of Urban and Landscape Studies-Copenhagen University
Denmark
Gertrud Jørgensen, tel. 0045 3528 1828/6130 0293

01/01/2002

case

Urban Policy

Social inclusion & integration