El perihelio de Mercurio

The origins of modern urban policy can be traced back to the 1930s and the designation of slum clearance areas; and to the Comprehensive Development Areas designed under the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act (Roberts, 2000: 29). Urban responses from the government in the period 1945 to 1965 focused on physical housing conditions and unrestricted urban

113 growth ( Jones and Evans, 2008). The housing problems comprised of a lack of housing, poor quality of the remaining stock as well as damaged or destroyed houses during the war (Mullins and Murie, 2006). According to Tallon (2010) the urban problems were mainly tackled through physical solutions, that is housing and town planning rather than urban policy.

The 1965- 1979 witnessed a move from the physical approach adopted in the post war period to social pathology, which ascribed the cause of residual poverty to the pathological behaviour of the people or communities who remained in poverty (Tallon, 2010: 37).

Therefore urban experiments introduced in the late 1960s to 1979 were designed to: (a) explore specific problems of city life particularly in areas of „special needs‟ (that is, poverty, education, housing, health and welfare) and (b) develop policies important to them (Lawless, 1989; Cochrane, 2007). These areas were defined as

―…localised districts which bear the marks of multiple deprivation, which may show itself, for example, by way of notable deficiencies in the physical environment, particularly housing; overcrowding of houses; family sizes above the average; persistent unemployment; a high proportion of children in trouble or in need of care; or a combination of these‖ (Cochrane, 2007:26).

For instance, the Educational Priority Areas (EPA) concept emerged from the Plowden Report of 1967. EPAs were set up as action-research projects in five deprived areas, with the expectation that lessons could be learned which would help to bring underprivileged children more productively into education (Cochrane, 2007). The EPA mandate included the development of community schools, training for teachers, attached social workers backed up by researchers (based at Oxford University) whose task it was to draw out the lessons for

114 further policy development „…to discover which of the developments in educational priority areas have the most constructive effects, so as to assist in planning the longer term programme to follow‟ (Cochrane, 2007: 26). There was also a series of relatively small-scale locally based schemes (often described as community initiatives), in partnership with local authorities (Edwards and Batley, 1978, Higgins et al., 1983:47-85).

Edwards and Batley (1978:225) called this approach a „traditional‟ urban programme, separating it from the development in 1977. According to these authors, this urban programme was:

―Modest in scale and intent and has in practice proved to be a small scale social and educational welfare program [and] while it talks of poverty and unemployment it spends money on projects that, however worthwhile, are not directly aimed at these issues‖.

The headquarters of this urban programme was initially based in the Home Office, (with responsibility only transferring to the Department of the Environment in 1977), rather than any Department directly involved in the funding or management of welfare services. This was itself significant, because it showed that the concerns were about the integration of the

„immigrant‟ populations, the need to overcome threats to social order in the cities, as well as an orientation which stressed self-help rather than the provision of universal services, or even services to the disadvantaged communities (Cochrane, 2007).

115 3.2.2. The Urban Experiments and the Challenge to the Culture of Poverty Thesis

“The setting up of the community development Projects (CDPs) and the Inner Area Studies (IAS) set in motion the demise of the culture of poverty thesis‖

(Maggin, 2004:16).

Behind government urban policy in the 1960s and early 1970s was an explicit support or acceptance of the culture of poverty thesis. This thesis, which was developed in America through the work of writers such as Banfield (1970), assumed that anti-social behaviour is transmitted from generation to generation in families concentrated in some parts of cities (Lawless, 1989). For instance, in 1968, James Callaghan - the Labour Home Secretary - argued that:

―…there remain areas of severe social deprivation in a number of our cities and towns - often scattered in relatively small pockets and that urban aid was

‗intended to arrest, in so far as it is possible by financial means, and reverse the downward spiral which affects so many. There is a deadly quagmire of need and apathy‖ (cited in Lawless, 1989:8).

Analogously, in the early 1970s, these sentiments were further reiterated by other politicians and policy makers. For example, Sir Keith Joseph, former Secretary of State for Social Services, argued that a culture of deprivation characterised by early marriage, early child-rearing, poor educational attainment, vandalism and petty crime, could be identified in parts of Britain (Lawless, 1989:8). Policy makers argued that inadequate parents produced inadequate children, and it was assumed that the cycle of poverty had to be overcome by improved preparation for parenthood, by better educational facilities, health visiting and education (see Lawless, 1989). Based on this prevailing orthodoxy, some of the early urban experiments - notably the Community Development projects - were evaluated according to

116 the degree to which they helped moderate social ills such as desertion, divorce and child abuse (Home Office, 1970).

According to Lawless (1989), to any government investigating questions of urban deprivation, there were obvious advantages in pursuing the idea that anti-social behaviour engendered by community or individual malaise in certain inner-city areas, was the root cause of disadvantage and poverty. Sinfield (1973) pointed out that during the 1960s and early 1970s, an all out attack on a number of specific areas was much more administratively attractive and certainly cheaper and potentially quicker, than the careful re-examination of the basic fabric of society (cited in Lawless, 1989:25). Those advocating the culture of poverty thesis tended to emphasise the apparent weakness of individuals and inner-city communities, whilst the wider questions about, say, the role of disadvantaged in the economy, or issues of wealth and power, or even class domination were largely ignored (see Lawless, 1989).

However, the prevailing orthodoxy was substantially weakened, if not destroyed, as a credible explanation for deprivation in the mid-1970s emerged through the reports mentioned below.

The significance of the urban experiments lay in the fact that they were prepared to address problems in the inner-city urban areas. However, some of the reports that came out from this investigation challenged and rejected attitudes towards urban poverty held by central governments in the late 1960s and early 1970s (see Lawless, 1989). These reports helped to move the debate from overly-simple models of deprivation, towards more profound and far-reaching attitudes regarding urban problems.

117 For instance, the Coventry CDP (Community Development Project) was instrumental and influential in evaluating the culture of poverty thesis. For instance, the area selected for analysis, Hillfields, did not appear to the project team to be different from other parts of inner Coventry, hence the team did not uncover facts to suggest that local inhabitants were in some way inadequate. They argued that poverty certainly existed, but it was clearly associated with variations in employment capacity in the local vehicle-manufacturing industry (Lawless, 1989:9). These conclusions were also echoed by other CDPs (Community Development Projects) and IASs (Inner Area Studies). Collectively, these studies were unable to identify pockets or areas of poverty within cities where especially deprived and inadequate communities existed (Lawless, 1989). Similarly, the Census Indicators of Urban Deprivations and associated publications examined the spatial manifestations of disadvantage as revealed by the 1971 census. This research identified the widespread nature of deprivation and the very limited spatial coincidence between different indicators of poverty (Lawless, 1989). The study discovered that bad housing, for example, tended to be concentrated in older, often privately-rented accommodation. However, the highest rates of unemployment were frequently encountered on the newer, public-sector estates. Hence, the 1971 Census did not highlight convenient small areas to which additional resources could be directed (Lawless, 1989).

The idea that poverty was a much more widespread and complicated phenomenon than the culture of poverty thesis would suggest, was reinforced in 1976 by the publications of Rutter and Madge‟s Cycle of Disadvantage. This work was commissioned by Sir Keith Joseph in the early 1970s, and it was intended that it should highlight the extent of intergenerational continuities in a range of aspects of deprivations. However, far from concluding that intergenerational continuities characterised poverty, the research team indicated that,

118 certainly in the economic field, there was a surprising degree of mobility both upwards and downwards between generations (see Lawless, 1989).

Therefore, the collective conclusions of the CDPs, the Census Indicators of Urban Deprivation and Cycles of Disadvantage were important in undermining the culture of poverty idea. Due to this, blaming individuals and communities for their poverty, became more difficult. However, two final points could be generated from the conclusions of these different reports. First, it was apparent that intergenerational continuities in poverty do exist, particularly in certain urban areas and this raises broader questions of why such poverty is initiated and sustained. Second, although the culture of poverty thesis received little credence in the urban debate after the mid-1970s, similar thinking continued to dominate public and social policies of the Conservative government in the 1980s, largely due to the influence of the underclass thesis of Charles Murray and New Right ideology (Lawless, 1989). For example, the restructuring of the welfare benefits system in 1988 was based on the idea that a deserving poor should be supported to the detriment of an undeserving poor (see Lawless, 1989). There are clear parallels here with the culture of poverty‟s assumption that the urban poor had only themselves to blame for their conditions (Lawless, 1989). The negative stereotyping and stigmatisation of inner cities, which started during the 1980s, continued into the late 20^th Century, as will be examined below.

3.3. De-industrialisation and Polarisation of Cities in the mid and late 20^th Century