Meeting the challenge of distressed urban areas

The emergence of distressed urban areas in the 1990s was unexpected. Governments have reacted with a series of policy initiatives which have increasingly focused on area-based strategies, partnerships and the formulation of a metropolitan vision. The scale of the problem-up to 20 per cent of the total population may live in distressed urban areas-and the complexity of causes are two factors which have complicated the design and implementation of policy, Better indicators are needed, especially to check the tendency towards a rhetoric of polarisation which makes the problems appear impossible to solve. A recent OECD study and a study of partnerships undertaken by the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (EFILWC) call attention to the importance of local participation and of business and labour in local strategies for regeneration. To compare experiences and analyses their policy implications, the OECD and the EFILWC organised a conference in Dublin in 1998, of which this paper is an analytical report. One of the findings of the conference deserving further study concerns the role of the media in shaping public opinion on regeneration issues; another concerns the need for preventive strategies and policies; and a third concerns the linkages between regeneration, education and job training and employment. There is a need for policy-makers and academic researchers to work towards a common agenda and a shared discourse, In the final analysis, the study of distressed areas can reveal much about the nature of larger urban economic and social processes. But the responsibility of government to act means making some informed judgement about how to intervene, and why intervention is necessary, even on the basis of imperfect information.