Regeneration

Abstract

Gabriel Chanan is Director of Dissemination at the Community Development Foundation Is "regeneration" the plugging of a gap in an otherwise flourishing society, or a frontier of innovation for a society in trouble? The rationale of regeneration policy is about the plugging of gaps. But the experience of grass-roots innovation suggests something more fundamental. Areas to be "regenerated" are identified by concentrations of disadvantage, and funding is dedicated to improvements in the relevant indicators. European funding is about areas that are "lagging behind" or "suffering industrial decline". The word "regeneration" suggests at first sight a repair job, and presumably a successfully regenerated area is known by the fact that its incidence of disadvantage moves nearer to the norm. But the struggle that people in disadvantaged areas engage in to make life bearable and meaningful does not feel simply like a struggle to achieve the sort of life that is already lived in an "advanced" area. It feels more like a struggle to change the way we live. Certainly it is a struggle to achieve better material security. But it is also a struggle to achieve a better relationship between all parts of society, and all parts of the world, because it is somehow that overall relationship which points toward either healing or disintegration for all of us. The basic building block of participatory democracy, the community group, is a wheel that does have to be invented again and again, because only those who have created it for themselves have really got it. When parents get together to start a voluntary youth club, or pensioners get together to save a sub-post office, or people get together to discuss how to cope with health problems, much more happens than would be supposed from the immediate objective. An emerging sense of common purpose and joint action changes the way we see the larger systems and forces in which we are embedded. My baptism into community activity was through a residents' campaign to get a disused police station turned into a local arts centre. I thought I knew a fair amount about public issues, but the first lesson of the experience was that none of my privileged education had given me the slightest inkling as to how local amenities came into existence or were destroyed. The Byzantine ways of local