The Financialisation of Urban Policy in the UK: From Area-Based Initiatives to Area-Based Value-Capture

The chapter examines the post-war evolution of urban policy in the UK. It focuses on a series of periodic changes that reflect broader political projects and ways of thinking about cities and places. The first sections outline historical characterisations of urban policy, reflecting on where forms of intervention, usually called urban policy, have been developed and how these initiatives have worked in specific places. Continuities and discontinuities in urban policy are considered, looking at: early and more socially oriented programmes developed in the 1960s/70s and focused on inner cities, such as the Urban Programme or Community Development Projects; the shift towards an economically oriented approach operated by the Thatcher government through property-led regeneration in the late 1970s and during the 1980s; and the more nuanced socio-economic approaches of the Major and Blair eras of the 1990s and 2000s incorporating City Challenge and the Single Regeneration Budget. The last two sections are dedicated to recent shifts towards financialisation and growth-oriented development that have marked the period since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 and propose some reflections on the future of urban policy.