Urban Policy Processes and the Politics of

Urban Regeneration*

ROB IMRIE AND HUW THOMAS

Introduction
The last ten years have witnessed a heightening of interurban and regional competition in
the context of an intensification of global competitive forces (Amin and Malmberg, 1992;
Amin and Robins, 1991). The interplay between the pursuit of austerity monetarist
policies in the leading international economies, the deregulation of world financial
systems, and the reorientation of international trade in favour of global multinationals?has
been central in intensifying processes of socio-spatial restructuring? with local and
regional economies seemingly at the mercy of forces beyond their control (Amin and
Robins, 1991; Cochrane, 1991). As Amin and Robins (1991) note, the local is
increasingly being tied into wider global networks, into an international division of labour
characteripd by what Graham (1994:4 19) terms ‘the coercive power of dominating
corporate and political regulation’. In turn, a complexity of new institutional,
governmental, or regulatory systems is emerging, partly in response to the new
opportunities for localities to bed themselves into global investment flows, but also as a
result of central states’ seeking to re-regulate welfare programmes.
Urban policy is clearly implicated in underpinning the shift towards the globali8ation
of local and/or regional spaces, and the attendent locali&tion of global transnational
networks (see Geertz, 1983). In most western countries, increasing emphasis in urban
policy has been given to the pursuit of transnational investments, primarily by seeking to
generate a local business climate that is attractive to corporate organi#ations. In the UK,
since the early 1980s, this emphasis has been characterited by a range of measures
encouraging a shift towards local level pro-business policies, with a diminution in
nationally organikd redistributive programmes (for accounts of this, see Cochrane, 1993;
Atkinson and Moon, 1994; Eisenschitz and Gough, 1993). In particular, central
government has increasingly directed urban policy expenditures through the Urban
Development Corporations (UDCs), organitations which, as Keating (1993) notes, are
indicative of a new mode of local governance, that is, the emergence of superimposed,
extralocal, institutional frameworks that are increasingly responsible for duties which
were once the preserve of local government.
As a market-oriented form of regulatory control, the UDCs reflect a wider shift
towards a neo-liberal state, characterited by the development of a system of governance
* This paper came out of a research project which was supported by the Economic and Social Research
Council, grant no. R000233525. We gratefully acknowledge their assistance and also that of Tim Marshall who
conducted many of the interviews on which this research paper is based. We also wish to thank the referees
who provided useful guidance in enabling us to restructure the paper although we alone, except where
acknowledgements are made, are responsible for the finished piece.
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108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 IJF. U K and 238 Main Street, Cambridge. M A 02142, USA
480 Rob Imrie and Huw Thomas

which has systematically concentrated powers in the central state apparatus, while seeking
to fragment the local state by, for example, the creation of quasi-markets for allocating
(welfare) goods and services. As Harloe and Fainstein (1993:250) note, such measures
have primarily been aimed at ‘disorganisingany coherent, large scale political opposition
to the reshaped urban policies’. Indeed, a range of authors note that the UDCs, like the
Training and Enterprise Councils and other extralocal modes of local governance, pose
problems for the localities they operate within (Batley, 1989; Brownill, 1990; Imrie and
Thomas, 1993; Oatley, 1993). This relates to their general lack of accountability to local
electorates and their closure to formal democratic channels which, as Imrie and Thomas
(1993) note, would seem, prima face, to render them impervious to any forms of localiEed
political opinion and/or opposition.
Indeed, the political centralization of policy programmes of the types exemplified by
the UDCs raises a number of significant theoretical and empirical questions about the
changing status of urban politics in a context of global economic restructuring. For
instance, how far are development policies of the type propagated by organiJations like
the UDCs open to influence by local actors and agents and is it possible for locally
determined agendas, conceived independently of the UDCs, to be given prominence in
the face of the overwhelming political and fiscal powers vested in the new institutions of
local governance? In particular, how do the UDCs integrate themselves into and through
the local state apparatus, if at all, and how do their powers contribute to a transformation
in local modes of governance? Indeed, are such political and institutional transformations
a pre-requisite for the UDCs to operate and how far do they represent either localited
forms of political corporatism or, conversely, the authoritarian hand of the central state
apparatus? Moreover, are the UDCs impervious to local political pressures which seek to
contest their strategies of entrapping global investment flows, and if so, how?
Such questions indicate the relative dearth of knowledge about the politics and
practices of the British UDCs, or of the wider institutional state structures which have
emerged over the last ten years (although for exceptions see Batley, 1989; Imrie and
Thomas, 1993). In seeking to specie the determinants of the UDCs’ political behaviour,
strategies and actions, the rest of the paper provides a critical discussion of the Cardiff
Bay Development Corporation (CBDC), one of 13 UDCs in England and Wales. In
particular, our discussion shows how CBDC’s operations are context-dependent, where
the facilitation of its wider development objectives have necessarily involved forms of
political adaptation to the local socio-economic and political circumstances it has found
itself in, yet adaptations which we describe as less to do with the formation of a lozal
corporatist politics and more to do with its exercise of central state powers characteriped
variously by strategies of cooption, coercion and even subjugation of local political actors
and agencies. In the next section we precede this discussion with an overview of some of
the key debates about global-local relations and the politics of urban regeneration.

The local and the global and the politics of urban regeneration:
preliminary comments
One of the more highly contested debates in urban and regional studies relates to the
question of geographical specificity (Cox, 1993; 1994; Cox and Jonas, 1993; Cox and
Mair, 1988; 1991). As Cox (1994) has noted, while the literature is replete with spatial
terminology like ‘regional’, ‘local’, ‘global’ and ‘urban’, there is little consensus on their
explanatory or causal significance. The debate ranges widely, from the perennial
concerns of aspects of urban sociology with the city as a theoretically specific object, to
what Marx and Durkheim wrote of, that is, the relevance of the urban question only to the
extent that it might contribute to an understanding of wider socio-political processes.
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Urban policy processes and the politics of urban regeneration 48 1

More recently, a range of authors, in commenting on the possibilities of an autonomous

urban politics, have subscribed to the idea that the city can never be more than a
contingent condition, or as Cox (1994:3) has commented, cities ‘merely [affect] the
outcomes of more global processes’ (Mollenkopf, 1983; Peterson, 1981).
Such views have been widely popularised through what Cox (1993) characterises as
the ‘New Urban Politics’ (NUP), a perspective which seeks to understand the
contemporary nature of political processes in the cities within ‘the context of change in a
more global space economy’ (Cox, 1993:435). Such notions are highlighted, for example,
in the influential work of Peterson (1981) who, in conceptualigng the nature of urban
politics, sees the necessity for urban government to pursue economic growth goals, given
the dependence of the local citizenry and state on global capital and labour flows for their
(economic) welfare. Thus, in Peterson’s view the nature of urban politics simultaneously
requires cities to maintain people who contribute most to the tax base, while minimising
redistributive policies which act, potentially, as disincentives to capital investment. As
Cox (1994) notes, such perspectives suggest that cities are unable to pursue an
autonomous politics and that (urban) political strategy is firmly tied to the wider
imperatives of globalised capital accumulation and of seeking an advantageous position
within the international division of labour.
Within such a Tenario, by actively engaging in the transformation of the built
environment, organigations like the UDCs can be conceived of as facilitators of the
emergent local/global spaces in the cities. Yet the extent to which they and other
extralocal policy instruments involved in the spatial recomposition of the cities remain
impervious to competing (local) political demands is questionable. Indeed, a range of
authors subscribe to the view that urban politics still matter, testifying to the relative
autonomy of local political institutions and structures in influencing the actions of the new
institutions of local governance (Cox, 1994; Cox and Jonas, 1993; Logan and Molotch,
1987). Thus, for example, the possibilities of urban regimes, or coalitions between local
politicians, businesses, and citizens, are held up as signifiers of diversity, difference and
contestation in urban politics. Indeed, there is evidence which suggests significant
variations in the actions and behaviour of organizations like the UDCs, such that local
social relations have the power to modify and influence their approaches towards spatial
development in ways which depart from the types of policy trajectories suggested by
people like Peterson (Burton and O’Toole, 1993; Imrie and Thomas, 1993; Oatley,
1993).
For example, a range of research has recognised the power of a ‘progressive’ local
politics in directing land development processes towards a wider range of distributive and
social or welfare goals, arguing that an (autonomous) urban politics is possible which is
not necessarily reducible to the imperative of seeking global investments. For instance,
Leitner’s (1990) outline of urban regeneration in San Francisco indicates how local
government has attempted to pass on the social costs of downtown development to private
developers, especially by charging development fees. Leitner points to the progressive
base of community politics in the city, especially the activities of the San Francisco
Redevelopment Agency which has campaigned against the social costs of high rise office
constructions and utilized the courts against city hall and business interests to slow-down
development projects. Likewise, the local politics of Sheffield and Liverpool in the early
1980s were, in their different ways, manifestations of an assertive ‘new leftwing’ urban
politics, propagating ideas of local and community control over economic change. Such
examples illustrate levels of relative urban political autonomy and the possibility of (local)
variations in political strategies and responses.
Yet, as Cox (1994:4) indicates, there is still a problem of defining local specificity, or
of identifying the possibilities of place-specific social structures ‘which entail for those
living and working there distinctive causal properties’. While a range of studies have
attempted to define the specificity of place (Cooke, 1989), Cox (1994) notes that they
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remain either highly empiricist or descriptive. Thus, for example, while the Changing
Urban and Regional Systems (CURS), or ‘localities’ initiative, concluded that places
make a difference to the way wider global processes unfold locally, Cox (1994) is surely
correct in noting that such studies were conceptually limited by failing to address what
powers they possess to transform wider global processes (see Cooke, 1989; also see
Massey, 1991 for a critique of CURS). In addition, such studies were characterised more
by descriptive than analytical content, while failing to specify why local variation was, if
at all, a determinant factor in socio-spatial processes (also see Meegan, 1993).
Such debates have been widely aired. Harvey (1989), for instance, notes that the
global is a necessary pre-condition for the local, and that capital generates its own local
specificity. Harvey is particularly instructive in seeking to specify the contingent forms of
local variation by emphasising the role of fixed (place-specific) physical and social
infrastructures and interfirm linkages in the reproduction of global, corporate capital.
Thus, for Harvey, fractions of capital can be immobilised in physical structures like
buildings, while firms (or capital), although tied to wider global networks, are dependent
on place specific and non substitutable social relations for their reproduction. For Cox and
Mair (1988:310) the primary interest of locally dependent firms is in enhancing or
defending the flow of value through a specified territory, or in defending ‘a
geographically circumscribed context of exchange relations critical to their reproduction’.
Indeed, where such investments and operations are threatened, firms may seek to harness
the powers of the local state to defend and propagate their interests in order to secure their
future in the local economy, often at the expensive of other localities.
Thus, the dependence of productive capital and communities on specific
infrastructures, labour markets and the means of reproduction, suggests to Harvey, and
Cox and Mair, that social relations can be in and of the city, and that the possibility of an
indeterminate and (locally) distinctive urban politics exists. To the extent that extra-local
organisations, like the UDCs, operate within specific places, with the remit to transform
their physical bases, then it seems clear that they too must become at the very least
enmeshed in, if not transformed by, the specificity of local (agency-level) political
contestations relating to the conditions of (socialised) reproduction. In this sense, in
inserting themselves into particular places, the UDCs become constituted in and through
the pre-existing, place-based sociopolitical relations, although it is clearly an empirical
question about what types of politics and policies might emerge. We explore the substance
of these themes in the next section.

Transformations in urban governance: the case of Cardiff

The UDCs, as one of the main mechanisms of British urban policy since 1981, represent a
broad partnership between the private sector and central government (Brownill, 1990;
Imrie and Thomas, 1993). They were conceived as ‘trouble-shooting’ organisations
designed to boost economic growth in declining localities by using public grants and
subsidies to lever-in private sector finance to aid policies and programmes for, primarily,
physical regeneration. In particular, the UDCs are indicative of neo-liberal state policies
to supplant local government controls over policy and planning, characterised by the
ethics and policy orientations of the private sector, and charged with reinvigorating the
cities with entrepreneurial vision and market-led (and market-defined) policy
programmes. As various commentators have noted, the UDCs represent a form of
‘centralised-localism’, promoting local economic development as an obstensibly
production-based activity (Bately, 1989; Burton and O’Toole, 1993; Imrie and Thomas,
1993).
The UDCs remain a controversial aspect of British urban policy and criticisms of
their operations are wide-ranging (Burton and O’Toole, 1993; Byrne, 1993; Colenutt and
.
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Tangsley, 1992). A report by the National Audit Office (1988) for instance, has accused
the Merseyside Development Corporation (MDC) of poor management, lack of financial
controls and over-optimism in pursuing high risk projects with public money. This echoes
more general observations about the UDCs spending vast sums of public money on land
acquisitions with little hope of selling it on to the private sector (see Colenutt and
Tangsley, 1992; Imrie and Thomas, 1993). Moreover, in the context of a global property
recession, the market-led approach of the UDCs has proved inadequate at stimulating
local property markets, while they have been castigated for their low levels of expenditure
on social and community programmes (Audit Commission, 1989; Colenutt and Tansley,
1992; National Audit Office, 1988, 1989; Public Accounts Committee, 1989). Others
have also noted the UDCs non-local orientation which, while seeking to attract global
investments, has often ignored the possibilities of pursuing local economic development
by supporting indigenous businesses (see Imrie and Thomas, 1992).
Indeed, a range of literature points towards the UDCs poor integration into their
localised environments and operating more or less in terms of what Byrne (1993)
describes as ‘colonial administrations’ seeking to impose ideas, values and policy
approaches. Others note how the UDCs seem almost impervious to local demands and are
able to deflect, even ignore, local political pressures (Brownill, 1990; Imrie and Thomas,
1992). This, though, seems to be overstating their powers and fails to explain how and
why such organisations might operate more or less as they choose. In particular, a range
of evidence suggests that local variations in actions, outcomes and strategies are a key
characteristic of the UDCs, while there are significant variations in levels of political
integration and communication between them and local political and community
organisations (Colenutt, 1993; Oatley, 1993). For instance, as Burton and O’Toole
(1993) suggest, a number of UDCs have gone ‘native’ in their particular localities,
adopting policies and strategies which seek to work with local political institutions and
opinions (also see Byrne, 1993; Coulson, 1993).
In a range of cases, some of the UDCs have developed policies which are either
adaptations or extensions of existing local authority programmes, while the proliferation
of joint public sector fora between the UDCs and local state agencies provides some
evidence of collaborative networking. However, such interactions vary considerably. For
instance, in Bristol, the UDC has seemed content with an adversarial and hostile
relationship with the City Council, while, in Tyne and Wear and Sheffield, interactions
are generally cooperative (Byrne, 1993; Dabinett and Ramsden, 1993). As Coulson
(1993) notes, with the exception of the London Docklands Development Corporation and
the MDC, local authorities have tended to take a pragmatic approach to the UDCs. In the
context of a shortage of public funds, the UDCs have had some money and one way to get
at it was to work with them (see Coulson, 1993; Imrie and Thomas, 1993). Such scenarios
pose the real challenge, both in terms of describing and explaining aspects of extra-local
and local political interaction, and of exploring how the local situatedness of organisations
like the UDCs necessarily influences aspects of their regeneration agendas.
In the next section we document how one UDC, CBDC, has influenced, and been
influenced by, local state actors and agents in the pursuit of its strategies. As the evidence
indicates, CBDC gained some support at the outset by broadly fitting into pre-existing
development plans for Cardiff Bay which had already been drawn up and partially
implemented by the local authorities (see Thomas and Imrie, 1993). It buttressed its
position by seeking to influence local state agencies through cooption and networking
while being hard-nosed in its dealings with constituents regarded as irredeemibly hostile.
We will argue that the apparent consensus over most of CBDC’s objectives and
programmes does not arise out of a locally grounded corporatism or coalition, so much as
from a realistic acquiescence to the power of a body backed by the central state which, in
any event, is following the general policy trajectory which underpinned the development
policies of the local and central state in South Wales in the postwar period. Yet, this has
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not precluded the emergence of particular forms of local contestation which have
influenced the UDC. Therefore, in a further section we consider how a range of
distributive issues have underpinned forms of political contestation over who gains and
who loses from CBDC’s approach to urban regeneration, contestations which the UDC
has been forced to confront.
In doing this, we utilise a range of interview material drawn from a two-year
Economic and Research Council funded project which investigated the economic and
physical development policies and programmes of CBDC and its links with local
institutional networks. Over this period we conducted four rounds of interviews with all
the leading institutions and actors involved in Cardiff‘s local economic development,
while monitoring the processes underpinning one of CBDC’s main programmes: the
relocation of over 300 indigenous firms from prime development sites. In total 50
institutional/actor interviews were conducted over the course of the research, while
nearly 100 firm interviews were conducted in four separate rounds. Documentary and
other evidence was collected from committee minutes, local authority files, property
market newsletters, files from Companies House and so on. In what follows, we use a
small amount of the collected material, with emphasis primarily on the evidence gathered
from the institutional interviews with organisations like CBDC.

Defining the local agenda or the struggle for local control

After a prolonged period of both fiscal retrenchment and loss of power in the 1980s,
British local authorities began to acquiesce to the UDCs, accepting them as a fuit accompli
handed down by central government. It was clear that they were not going to disappear
and, increasingly, local authorities in the designated areas began to develop strategies
designed to influence UDC programmes (Coulson, 1993). Such political realities
underpinned the initial behaviour of South Glamorgan County Council (SGCC) which,
with a written submission to the Welsh Office in September 1986, proposed that a UDC
be established to ‘have charge of the regeneration of South Cardiff‘ (SGCC, 1986:6).
While the County Council claimed to have the necessary expertise to take on the job itself,
it recognised that ‘a local authority-led initiative may not be universally acceptable’ (ibid),
a referral to the widespread knowledge of leading councillors and officers that the Welsh
Office was intent on introducing a UDC. In pre-empting the Welsh Office’s move, SGCC
proposed that local authority representatives be given places on the corporation’s board,
with control of development and building and strategic planning to remain in local
authority hands.
By December 1986, the Secretary of State ordered the designation of a UDC which
reflected some of the County Council’s proposals (Edwards, 1986). There were fewer
local authority members than the County had suggested but, uniquely, the new
development corporation was not granted planning powers. Local and strategic planning
and development control remained with the local authority. This was a clear departure
from the established principles of the wider UDC programme and was willingly seized on
by the Secretary of State as evidence of ‘a genuine partnership and mutuality of interests
in the city’. Such (apparent) mutuality was reinforced by the broad development proposals
of the UDC which were expressed as the desire ‘to establish Cardiff internationally as a
superlative maritime city, which will stand comparison with any similar city in the world
enhancing the image and well being of Cardiff and Wales as a whole’ (CBDC, 1988:2).
Indeed, from the outset CBDC’s strategy represented an insertion into a specific
development trajectory already well defined by the local authorites: a long term project to
modernize Cardiff as a major city in a modernising region (Thomas and Imrie, 1993).
Throughout the postwar period, the spatial development of Cardiff was underpinned
by a modernizing theme. This was reflected in periods of significant renewal wich the
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Urban policy processes and the politics of urban regeneration 485

state, centrally and locally, seeking to devise plans for the restructuring of the city to
reflect its capital status. Moreover, a broad political consensus, a form of local
corporatism, or what Rees and Lambert (1984) refer to as a regional consensus, has
existed for decades amongst the major political parties at central and local tiers of
government and in business circles, propagating as one of its key ideas the view that the
South Wales economy, in order to be modernized, needed to shed its dependence on
declining heavy industry. CBDC, with its rhetoric about creating a superlative maritime
city and sweeping away alleged redundant and/or underused industrial spaces,
represented a restatement of the modernizing ethos, yet it was clear that the UDC was
promoting a distinctively centralist agenda with a local flavour. This flavour was being
determined by what CBDC perceived as the need to, in one of their official’s terms,
‘deliver what the local people really want’.
This delivery, then, seems to have been one of the pre-conditions which underpinned
the emergence of a political consensus over the broader strategic objectives of the
regeneration strategy. Indeed, the idea of re-shaping the docks as primarily a locus of
consumption rather than production was one which was promoted by the local authorities,
particularly the county council, in the years leading up to CBDC’s designation. From the
outset CBDC both adopted, and/or integrated its own policies with key aspects of the local
authorities’ economic development strategies. As a result, key policies promoted by the
local authorities have remained in place, notably the peripheral distributor road (PDR), a
motorway link between the docks and the M4, and the programmes to conserve and
rehabilitate Mount Stuart Square, the late nineteenth-century commercial heart of the
docks. Moreover, as a leading county councillor stated, ‘with the UDC coopting a role
really defined by us they were playing it safe and apart from the resentment we felt about
them being given tasks we’d previously done well it’s been difficult for us to disagree with
their modernizing strategy for the docks’.
Yet, as Thomas and Imrie (1993) have argued, CBDC’s cooption of the modernizing
theme is partly ideological in that the new development processes being unleashed by the
UDC run counter to many of the institutional linkages, and the political and community
goals which held together the regional coalition. The principles underpinning CBDC are,
in part, contrary to key elements of the modernization ethos in the city: the utilization of
the market as the primary mechanism of economic development; the reduction in welfare
and social programmes; and the primacy of the private sector over the public in social and
cultural provision. In contrast, previous periods of restructuring in the city had been
underpinned by ideals of creating a new civic order, an expression of the power of the
local polity, and the ideals of a collective state apparatus in underpinning the spatial
reorganization of the city. CBDC, while holding to the broader political consensus
concerning the development trajectories for the city, was asserting a new agenda premised
on the restructuring of the local state, with the emergence of what Peck and Tickell (1993)
refer to as an ‘elite localism’, or a non representational form of local politics driven by
local business leaders.
Indeed, the differences between the rhetoric and reality of CBDC’s claims to abroad-
based local consensus are evident more generally in the Bay redevelopment. For instance,
(labour) city and county councillors tend to characterize CBDC’s approach as ‘provoking
disputes with local authorities’ because ‘it resents the fact that it has no planning powers’.
As one officer noted, ‘we back down consistently and we’ll only make a stand against
them when essential’. Moreover, the County Council acknowledges the absence of debate
in the city on key elements of CBDC’s policy framework. In particular, the proposed
building of a barrage has never been debated in the County, while as one county officer
argued, ‘the Board of CBDC comprises non-local members who are powerful, but are
invisible, and who shoot down from London and dominate local members’. While this
provokes an image of a hesitant, even parochial, local political base, it more accurately
reflects the absence of a wider participatory system in the local economic regeneration
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486 Rob Imrie and Huw Thomas
of Cardiff Bay, or a politics without representation.
The power of the local authority representatives on CBDC’s board is circumscribed
and limited and, as one local authority ex-board member has commented, ‘to begin with I
was useful to them as I knew the patch but gradually we were relegated and I felt there
was a two-tier board’. In particular, the councillor representatives on the board began to
resent CBDC’s style of operation when it became clear that significant inward investment
negotiations were occurring without SGCC being involved or even being told about
investor interest in the Bay. As the local authority interviewee noted, ‘much of CBDC is
about inward investment and SGCC have always excelled at this . . . most of their
discussions with potential investors are more at a PR level than a significant exchange of
information’. Moreover, by the end of 1988 it was clear that the levels of accessibility of
board members to the officers and daily operations of CBDC were reflecting the ‘two-
tier’ structure with, as one local authority ex-board member noted, ‘the private sector
board members [being] much more evident around the Development Corporations
officers than we ever were . . .’.
This, then, seems to reflect a dualistic system of power, where particular patterns of
political inclusion and exclusion are in play. The exclusion of the democratic polity, the
local authority members, seems to occur in a number of ways. For instance, most of
CBDC’s board meetings tend to take place in London, not Cardiff, and, as one of the local
authority members noted, ‘it’s just more difficult for us to attend when they hold the
meetings up there’. Moreover, the decision by the UDC to make all of its board meetings
and minutes closed to the public has cast it at variance with other UDCs where a greater
level of public inclusion is evident (see Imrie and Thomas, 1993). Also, as one local
authority board member noted, ‘the discussions at the meetings are all about getting
investment here . . . we rarely talk about the real issues, about the local communities and
what they’re getting from it all’. There is no sense, then, in which CBDC can be
characterized as seeking to open itself up to the influence of the local authorities or to
those members of the local polity who fail to share its general ethos of property-led
regeneration.
This reflects the wider context in which there are few episodes where CBDC has
clearly responded to the influence of local agencies. Consultation exercises in relation to
planning briefs are extensive, yet have always resulted in minor changes. The general
opinion among officers in the local authorities is that the planning control powers retained
by the City are only regarded as an irritant by CBDC and there are no instances where
they have been used to overturn the UDC’s policies. Indeed, in interviews, senior local
authority officials have admitted that CBDC has had its way on every major planning
issue, although there are some examples where schemes have been modified. In
particular, the limited means for the local authorities to influence some of the details of
the UDC’s plans have been highlighted by city planning officers who note that the only
real weapon they possess in trying to change the details of CBDC’s plans, is to delay the
UDC’s submitted planning applications. For example, an application by CBDC to tip
waste on salt marshes was delayed for 7 months by the City Council, which, in turn,
provided time for opposition residents groups, the Countryside Council for Wales and the
Area Health Authority, to force a modification, if not abandonment, of the proposals.’
Yet, the existing strengths of SGCC in economic development, coupled with the
pragmatic responses of the local authorities as a whole towards the setting up of CBDC,
have led to some local authority influence within the new partnership arrangements,
1 It is possible to identify development corporation policies which seem to have been framed with an eye on
local sensitivities. Notably, there is a commitment that 25% of all new housing in the development area
will be social housing. It is plausible to suggest that when this policy was framed in 1988, it was a response
to widespread local fears of a London docklands-style ‘yuppie’ invasion of Cardiff Bay. In reality, such a
scenario was always unlikely and a 25% quota is hardly a major concession, particularly as the sites
allocated have generally been marginal ones (close to existing working class communities, and with less

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Urban policy processes and the politics of urban regeneration 487

though hardly to the extent of challenging the power base of the UDC. Indeed, the
influence of the local authorities is channelled and confined to specific committees with
few executive powers, while there is little evidence to suggest that the interactions which
do occur make any difference to the trajectories of development policy. As a planning
officer of a joint County-CBDC committee has noted, ‘it’s just a waste of time really as no
one really important ever turns up . . . we can’t really achieve that much’. In fact much of
the interaction is ‘low level’ and revolves around technical details rather than strategy.
While some officers have claimed they can exercise some influence over the UDC, the
evidence is limited, and as the deputy chief planner in the city has commented about
housing schemes involving the UDC, ‘we’ve been able to get CBDC to change some of
the details concerning lay-out and design and they’ve been receptive to our ideas . . . but
its all at a very technical level and we never really substantially change their policies’.
However, the local authorities do use more proactive channels to influence the UDC,
with limited success. For example in 1989, while CBDC produced a planning brief for the
site of the redundant East Moors steelworks, the City shadowed this with a detailed plan
seeking to integrate CBDC’s strategy within the larger residential area of Splott. In
particular, the City suggested modifications to detailed land use allocations which were
aimed at creating a new 1.5 acre housing site for the Moors Housing Association, and the
simultaneous upgrading of Moorland and Splott parks with CBDC contributing to a new
leisure centre. Such shadowing provides some evidence of adversarialism in local
authority-UDC relations, especially over the UDC’s area planning briefs where it
appears, as a city planning officer put it, ‘that CBDC never changes anything’. Similar
sentiments have been reflected in a planning brief for the redevelopment of the East
Moors steel site, a plan which suggested the demolition of workshops in order to create a
buffer zone between the industrial estate of Ocean Park and a residential area. When the
County Council objected to the dismantling of part of the area’s industrial infrastructure,
however, it was ignored by CBDC and the content of the brief remained unchanged.
Since CBDC’s introduction to the city, the development of institutional networking
and the forging of partnerships seems to have done little to challenge the autonomy of the
UDC and, as an officer of SGCC’s economic development department concluded, ‘all of
these joint committees with the UDC are a waste of time, pure talking shops . . . we can’t
even hope to influence their strategies . . . it seems hopeless’. Yet, as another officer in
SCGG conceded, ‘we really see the committees as part of our overall tactics in trying to
influence the UDC . . . we obviously can’t really change the overall strategy, we’re not
even trying to do this as we agree with a lot of it, but we can try to get resources from the
UDC and use them to the advantage of the communities’. While partnerships have
(seemingly) proliferated, their vaguely defined roles and responsibilities are crucial in
maintaining CBDC’s power base, or, as a city planning officer noted in relation to ajoint
CBDC-City planning committee ‘we really don’t know how we’re supposed to influence
strategy and it’s made very clear to us that we’re not allowed to discuss many of the
broader issues . . . we’re in a situation of do more or less%nothing’.
The evidence concerning CBDC then, is of an organigation which, to use the neo-
liberal critique of local government, is lacking in flexibility and responsiveness to local
constituencies, one which is entangled in a web of (business-based) patronage and which
remains firmly wedded to the central state. In particular, the extent to which locally
determined agendas, generated independently of the UDC, have come to fruition is
clearly related to how far they reflect the broader development objectives being pursued
by CBDC. Indeed, most of the evidence suggests that the levels of influence by local
actors and agents is highly circumscribed, while the propagation of an elite localism,
reflected in the composition of CBDC’s board, is a necessary part of the restructuring

marketable potential for luxury homes). Moreover, in the property slump of the 1990s, the social housing
sector has kept development ticking over in the Bay, allowing CBDC to point to continuing activity.
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488 Rob Imrie and Huw oms
of the local state in facilitating strategies of market-led regeneration. Yet, how far does
this preclude distributive strategies in the emergent politics of urban regeneration, an
issue we now turn to.

Local mediations, distributive issues and the politics of growth

An important aspect of the politics of local economic development relates to contestations
over who gets what from the pursuit of urban regeneration policies (Logan and Molotch,
1987; Peterson, 1981; Swanstrom, 1993). While CBDC’s general approach seems to
reflect the neo-liberal rhetoric of economic growth as the panacea for urban decay, part of
its strategy supports Turner’s (1992) proposition that the pursuit of economic growth need
not necessarily preclude distributive measures; indeed, that such measures may feature as
an integral and defining element of the politics of urban regeneration. This, in part, is
reflected in Cardiff where CBDC has had to confront locally dependent firms who have
felt ‘cut out’ of the strategy and who, in recent times, have challenged the substance of the
regeneration plans. Such confrontations, by a locally-based, small business community,
provides one of the key illustrations of the possibilities of a territorial, locally-based
politics in the context of contemporary urban regeneration, a politics which has the
potential to challenge aspects of the (apparent) autonomy of the UDCs.
Indeed, as Cox and Jonas (1993) note, compromises may be necessary with local
communities if the aims of economic growth are to be attained, a reflection, in part, of
tensions between the politics of consumption and accumulation. Some research indicates
how productive investments, large scale infrastructure projects, building programmes and
business relocations, have significant distributive or consumption effects which require
some resolution. As Cox and Jonas argue:
there has to be a politics of consumption and accumulation. Moreover, while they may be
confined to their respective institutional arenas, the contradictory unity of the two means that
there also have to be links between these arenas. But how the contestationand resolution of these
different issues relate to the levels in the state at which are located different powers and
instrumentalities is a contingent matter (1993:12).
The contingencies in Cardiff Bay are, in part, expressed in its historical legacy of
dependence on manufacturing firms, and of their dependence on cheap rents, well
developed local linkages and markets which were (and still are) a defining and crucial
operating feature of the docks environment (see Imrie and Thomas, 1992). Yet, in 1987,
CBDC’s vision of the future was contrary to the maintenance of such traditions and their
plans envisaged sweeping away the manufacturing base, what the UDC characterized as
‘the dirty industries’, and replacing them with high-value added developments. All of this
was counter to local authority economic development policy which had supported the Bay
business community throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, and, by 1988, when plans to
relocate over 300 firms had been announced, processes of representation and resistance,
linked to particular patterns of local dependence, began to emerge.
Such resistance was, in part, facilitated by a softening of CBDC’s attitude towards the
indigenous business community because, as a CBDC official noted, ‘of the difficulty in
levering international investment at this time it makes it imperative that we at least foster
what business potential there is . . . and at the moment most of it is here in the Bay’. Thus,
the post-1989 collapse in the local property market, reflecting both a national and
international recession, coupled with the sober assessment that CBDC’s pursuit of localist
place-marketing strategies was increasingly failing to compete for whatever mobile
investment was available, began to ‘open-up’ the UDC to a range of local influences, like
the City Council and the Enterprise Agency, which had persisted in calling for indigenous
economic development from the outset. In this sense, CBDC’s localist strategy, of
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Urban policy processes and the politics of urban regeneration 489

place-marketing the locale to international investors, was being, in part, turned around to
reflect the emergent material realities, or as a CBDC official said, ‘to many would-be
investors Cardiff really isn’t on the map . . . we’ve got a job on our hands to compete’.
Thus, a strategy for small business retention and growth was not so much an option as an
imperative.
Yet, in 1988, this had seemed unlikely given the UDC’s dismissive attitude towards
local business potential. As one firm put it, ‘we’re businesses that have had our day. They
just want big finance in here, and redeveloping this side of the tracks (the railway line) is
where big money can be made . . . unfortunately, we’re the wrong side of the tracks’
(quoted in Imrie and Thomas, 1992:223). At this time, the UDC appeared to be oblivious
to, or at least playing down, the potential financial hardships caused to small firms by
compensation offers which took no account of the significance of moves from low cost
premises in unfashionable industrial areas to inevitably higher cost premises on newer
industrial estates. Time and again in the late 1980s the City Council tabled resolutions
drawing CBDC’s attention to these facts, as did the local MP. This local pressure,
combined with lobbying by organizations of local small businesses and the transforming
materiality of local property markets, combined to change CBDC’s perception of local
firms. Indeed, in a recent document CBDC commented that:
the vitality, talent, and determination of local businesses and communities is an essential
ingredient for successful regeneration . . . the involvement of local businesses in the process of
regeneration is essential (1993:2).
Thus, as a county planning officer has noted, ‘manufacturing seems to have a role in
the Bay area that it didn’t have a few years ago . . . it represents a real victory for common
sense and everybody is now sharing in the benefits’. Yet, while this officer seemed to
equate ‘common sense’ with the production of a more equitable pattern of benefits from
the renewal, CBDC seemed to be more concerned with shoring-up an increasingly
redundant strategy which was failing to bring in the international investors it had
envisaged. Clearly, then, what we see here is the UDC acknowledging the need for a
package of measures which, while coinciding with the concerns of local actors for more
equitable benefits from growth, are, in essence, a core part of its emergent growth
policies in the post-property crash period.
This has led to what the deputy chief planning officer in the City has termed ‘an
enlightened approach’ by the UDC, with, for instance, the CBDC devising financial
packages which act as a ‘top-up’ subsidy over and above the compensation available to
relocatees under the normal compensation legislation. As CBDC has noted, ‘we recognize
that the normal (statutory) compensation terms are inadequate and don’t recognize the real
human costs of relocations nor the significant difficulties in what often amounts to having
to start up again’. In view of this, CBDC offer a top-up grant equivalent to two-times the
yearly rental paid out to enable firms to afford the higher rents faced as a result of moving
to higher cost locations. The grant scheme is selective and firms need to demonstrate
‘viability’, yet the rationale of the system is to reflect the increased costs faced by firms
due to CBDC’s presence and its consequential effect on the business community. There
are also examples of where CBDC over-compensate firms and/or fail to collect overdue
rent from companies leasing their property.
Indeed, the local enterprise agency has noted that ‘CBDC are very generous with
grants and good at negotiations and conducting themselves’. Yet, a range of company
interviewees rationalized this in cynical terms as ‘the price CBDC have to pay to facilitate
an orderly withdrawal of firms from some of their strategic sites’. One engineering
company, for instance, received &20,000more than the statutory provisions allowed for,
while a quality joinery company, which had not paid rent on its CBDC-leased site for five
months, had its debt written off by the UDC while receiving full payment of its surveyors
fees. An important part of this turnaround has also been the active involvement of the
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490 Rob Imrie and Huw nomas

local Enterprise Agency, Cardiff and Vale (CAVE), which has sought to keep CBDC in
touch with the concerns of indigenous small firms and their desires to benefit from the
regeneration of the Bay. Indeed, it was after pressure from the local authorities that in
1990 CAVE were contracted by CBDC to advise local businesses on its plans, and to
provide them with legal and financial assistance to help them to relocate and to take
advantage of various compensation packages being made available by the development
corporation.
Moreover, CBDC has also been shifting its stance on whether it should or could
produce a timetable of business relocations, which is perhaps the greatest source of unrest
and blight in the UDA. Indeed, the combination of political pressures from local MPs,
councillors and especially CAVE has led to the drafting of a relocation charter entitled
‘Relocation: A Helping Hand’ which states how CBDC will facilitate orderly and
coherent relocations. As a CBDC officer has noted, ‘we tried to devise a timetable in 1990
telling firms when we were going to shift them but the crash in the property market set all
our plans back . . . there was little certainty about anything at that time’. Thus, the
relocation charter is aimed at specifying standards of service delivery by CBDC to the
community, while providing some certainty of the timescale of operations through a
schematic outline of the dates relocatees will be shifted from their premises. A local
labour councillor suggested that the charter is a palliative because it is unenforceable and
contains no punitive measures if CBDC fail to achieve the stated targets. In short, ‘it’sjust
another PR exercise by an organization that’s really failed to deliver anything’. As it was
only brought into operation in early 1993, it is too early to pass a definite judgement.
However, in recasting its strategy CBDC has come into conflict with its paymaster,
the Welsh Office (WO), by pursuing a programme of giving subsidies to local firms. This
in turn, provides insight into some of the tensions underpinning the broader pursuit of
market policies where clear distributive demands exist (and require some form of
resolution). As CBDC have argued, a base level of expenditure is required to support the
indigenous business community, and the UDC has utilized a provision in the 1980 Local
Government, Planning and Land Act which states that if a business wishes to stay in the
UDA then the UDC can sell property to it at subsidized rates. Yet, in using what amounts
to a loop-hole in the legislation, CBDC has come into conflict with its original remit and
the WO has told it not to use the provision because of the possible expense to the
exchequer (a directive which CBDC has largely ignored). Indeed, CBDC has been
reminded by the WO of its obligation to get ‘the best possible price’ while being exhorted
to use the minimum assistance to achieve development. It is clear from all of this that the
UDC is caught between the local situation of facilitating firm relocations without
destroying the fabric of the local economy, and the wider, centralist imperative of
pursuing economic growth by recourse to market principles.
Such situations intensify the dilemma of the UDC as it attempts to cope with local
firms fighting back against what they perceive to be their side-lining from the benefits of
economic growth which CBDC claims its renewal plans will generate. Since 1992, a
business association, the Cardiff Bay Business Forum (CBBF), has operated in the docks
because in the chairman’s view, ‘many businesses in the area did not feel their voice was
being heard’. Indeed, unlike the larger firms, like Allied Steel and Wire which has
developed excellent contacts with the UDC, many smaller firms were critical about the
abSence of dialogue and poor communications between them and CBDC, complaining
*at the UDC was ‘a poor organisation’ and that, in one firms view, ‘our only
representative, the Chamber of Commerce, doesn’t do anything for us’. As the chair of
*e CBBF has noted, ‘we grew up against the background of the siege mentality of CBDC
. we’re for the barrage and for the strategy in principle . . . but we want some of the
benefits for Our mmbers’. In this sense the CBBF, and its 300 firm membership, is
COncerned With distributional politics, yet it has been careful to cultivate a pro-growth,
pro-CBDC stance. In return it has received cross-party support and it sits on a range of
.
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Urban policy processes and the politics of urban regeneration 49 1

committees, while regularly meeting with senior officers in the UDC (for an extended
discussion of the CBBF, see Imrie et al., 1995).
CBDC recognizes that the CBBF, in growing out of the concerns of locally-
dependent firms, ‘could be potentially awkward . . . they are insistent and occupy a
strategic part of Cardiff Bay’ (quoted in Imrie et al., 1995). Their members’ occupation
of some of the key sites in the renewal area has been, in the chair’s words, ‘a useful lever
to pull against CBDC’, while they have persuaded the UDC to be responsive to a number
of requests for more car parking, additional resources for environmental improvements
and guarantees on supporting relocatees. As Imrie et al. (1995) have argued, although
CBDC acknowledges that the CBBF could be ‘forced’ to comply, the UDC is also aware
that the CBBF’s power base - its members - is also the raw material underpinning part
of its renewal plans. This, then, as Birnbaum (1982) argues, seems to have generated
‘power-dependent’ relations between the organisations, while the CBBF, far from being
part of a new local corporatism, remains partisan and wedded to market-based boosterist
policies aimed at a more inclusive grouping of local capital than was apparent in the
earlier days of the UDC.
This episode, with indigenous businesses being repositioned in CBDC’s overall
strategy, coupled with the emergence of vociferous local business demands for a ‘slice of
the cake’, has done little to challenge the UDC’s centralist power base, while its re-
direction of resources into the local business community (like subsidising relocatees - a
clear attempt to spread the pattern of benefits from renewal) is structurally linked to, in
distinction to challenging, its wider growth agenda. In its relationship to the CBBF,
CBDC can be characterised as a state agency, intent on fostering the spatial restructuring
needed to underpin investment and accumulation by globally-mobile capital , while having
to accommodate local capital whose active opposition has endangered or at least delayed
the processes of spatial restructuring and place marketing. The accommodation reached
involves more explicit and tangible gains for some local businesses although even these
are contingent upon the fiscal circumstances of the state. The general development
trajectory proferred by the UDC, then, remains largely in place.

Conclusion
CBDC, like all UDCs, exhibits the institutional and political features of the emergent neo-
liberal local state, propagating an elite localism linked to central state powers, while
seeking to restructure the nature of policy programmes in and through the market. In
seeking to restructure the nature of the local state, the UDCs have been presented with
direct challenges, especially from those elements resistant to them. Over the course of the
1980s, however, the diminishing power base of local government, coupled with the
worsening economic plight of many localities, generated a degree of local political
quiescence with many local authorities more than willing to work with the new centralist
institutions of local governance. From the Cardiff case, while it is clear that the
institutions of the central state have the capacity to resist, deflect, or incorporate local
political opinions, they themselves were increasingly seeking to work with (in) the
remnants of the local social-welfare state, or at least to use the pre-existing modes of local
governance (see Coulson, 1993). In part, this reflects the desire of the UDCs, and of the
local authorities, to try and generate a coherent geopolitical presence in the wider context
of internationalizing the locality through the competitive pursuit of global investments.
Although some of the documented evidence suggests that the UDCs have the power
bases to pursue development strategies more or less independently of local political
pressures or forms of resistance, Harvey (1989) suggests that localised political
fragmentation, of the types that have been evident in western cities, tends to counter the
possibility of pursuing coherent urban regeneration policies. While the UDCs were
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492 Rob Imrie and Huw Thomas

originally mooted as a mechanism for overriding local political dissension and

fragmentation, often by just ignoring it, the case of CBDC, and other UDCs, indicates
that particular contingent conditions may make it difficult to do so. In the case of Cardiff,
for instance, the threat to the UDC’s financial and economic leverage with the crash of
property markets and it being left with landbanks unsold, exposed the wider
contradictions of its position, of being left with little or no (global) market to lever. In this
context, localized sources of economic development became more important, so too did
the local state agencies, yet this in no way pre-figured anything that could be remotely
described as the emergence of local corporatist structures. Indeed, it is clear that CBDC,
while networking through joint fora and committee structures, retains its power base and
there is little evidence of locally determined agendas, generated independently of the
UDC, coming to prominance in the regeneration of Cardiff Bay.
However, at a wider, theoretical level the analysis demonstrates that spatiality is
important, that the range of localized sociopolitical structures and the particular historical
trajectory of spatial development, in places like Cardiff, do underpin key elements of the
UDCs’ approach to urban renewal. The cooption by CBDC of the modernization thesis,
for instance, was utilised as an ideological prop to support its wider agenda while the
emergence of a political consensus was, in part, bought by the Welsh Office by leaving,
what were presented as, key powers with the local authorities. In addition, the locally
dependent condition of the business relocatees precipitated an urban politics based in and
around the twin objectives of defending existing use and exchange values while seeking to
lock indigenous firms into the expected development windfalls that the UDC has claimed
will be generated by their proposals. Such instances suggest that contextual local variation
is implicated in the diverse development strategies being pursued by the British UDCs,
which, in part, reaffirms Harvey’s (1989) wider point that the real context of conditions is
important in underpinning the (political) activism of individuals, groups and classes.

Rob Imrie, Department of Geography, Royal Holloway University of London, Egham, Surrey
TW20 OEX and Huw Thomas, Department of City and Regional Planning, University of Wales
College of Cardiff, PO Box 906, Colum Road, Cardiff CF1 3YN

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