Beneficial urban redevelopment: a Cape Town-Liverpool comparison

This paper discusses the effects of urban regeneration projects in inner-city areas which, in the past, have had a pronounced multi-cultural character, in the face of the larger dominant (in this discussion, 'White') institutional and residential character of the central city. Drawing on case studies of District Six in Cape Town (South Africa) and Toxteth in Liverpool (England), it questions whether the current forms of urban regeneration benefit local populations who have remained in these inner-city areas largely because of existing cultural and socio-economic structures. This highlights the problematic nature of market driven inner-city regeneration and also, by showing the clear differences between the two districts, the city-specific nature of regeneration. The paper also discusses barriers to the development of socially integrated urban neighbourhoods that retain local less well-off populations and integrate them with new, more affluent groups, rather than creating segregated "regenerated" areas for newcomers, leaving long-standing residents in unregenerated areas. The paper concludes by discussing other planning models which could be beneficial to a wider cross-section of today's culturally diverse inner-city populations.