Meeting the challenge of distressed urban areas

The emergence of distressed urban areas in the 1990s was unexpected. Govern ments have reacted with a series of policy initiatives which have increasin gly 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 tot al population may live in distressed urban areas-and the complexity of caus es are two factors which have complicated the design and implementation of policy, Better indicators are needed, especially to check the tendency towa rds a rhetoric of polarisation which makes the problems appear impossible t o solve. A recent OECD study and a study of partnerships undertaken by the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (E FILWC) call attention to the importance of local participation and of busin ess 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 th e role of the media in shaping public opinion on regeneration issues; anoth er concerns the need for preventive strategies and policies; and a third co ncerns the linkages between regeneration, education and job training and em ployment. There is a need for policy-makers and academic researchers to wor k towards a common agenda and a shared discourse, In the final analysis, th e study of distressed areas can reveal much about the nature of larger urba n economic and social processes. But the responsibility of government to ac t means making some informed judgement about how to intervene, and why inte rvention is necessary, even on the basis of imperfect information.