Conceptualising Regeneration: New Deal for Communities in Newcastle upon Tyne Dr. Lorna Dargan, School of Architecture Planning and Landscape, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU. Email:
[email protected]. This paper forms the basis for a presentation at the “Planning Research 2003” conference, Oxford Brookes University, 8-10th April 2003. This paper is a work in progress, and is not to be quoted without the author’s permission. 1.0 Abstract The New Deal for Communities (NDC), is New Labour’s flagship area-based regeneration initiative. It has been hailed by the Government as a distinctively ‘new’ approach to tackling deprivation, which allows local actors the freedom to set their own agenda for regeneration. The paper examines the ways in which local actors involved in an NDC partnership formulate their understandings of regeneration. It finds that ‘regeneration’ is a term that has been taken up and used by local actors who have not considered its meaning in any substantive depth, which calls into question the extent to which New Labour’s approach to regeneration can be genuinely community-led. 1.1 Introduction When the Government came to power in 1997, it did so with the intention of radically reworking the state’s approach to regeneration. The Government’s approach to regeneration has three components. First, it is informed by the broad political priorities of the party, including devolution, joined-up government, welfare reform and ‘community’. Second, the policy discourse surrounding regeneration defines deprivation as structural in origin, but portrays the consequences as affecting only very localised areas.