Urban Experiments Limited Revisited: Urban Policy Comes Full Circle?

This article assesses the role of urban policy as a testing-ground for various policy experiments. In particular, it considers how the failure and controversy stemming from the property-led regeneration experiments of the 1980s have recently led to a major re-organisation of urban policy which appears to return to many of the principles embodied in the 1977 White Paper on the Inner Cities, itself a response to the failed experiments of the 1970s. This apparent circularity of policy is explained with reference to tensions which exist within and between the material, political and ideological contexts in which policy initiatives operate. As a result, urban policy is highly unstable, resulting in an alternation between periods of experimentation and periods of managerialist re-organisation.