Acceso usuarios
Heike Doering
This article engages with recent debates which assert that community participation andempowerment are place-contingent. The particular nature of localities has regularlybeen taken to account for success or failure in processes of participation andregeneration. In contrast, this article exposes the failings based in the nature of theprocess of regeneration in the complex intersection of national agendas of communityparticipation, regional objectives of economic growth and local aspirations of socialcohesion and improved amenities. These agendas meet in the seemingly mutual pursuitof the ‘active community’. They become manifest in the micro-politics of negotiating andenacting different constructions of community by the different actors ‘empowered’ in theregeneration process: regional development agencies, local government and local civilsociety. The article is based on ethnographic research in the Kent coalfield. Thecoalfields as distinct places have commanded a lasting place in the academic and policyliterature: romanticized as the epitome of ‘communityness’ but demonized as the site ofproblem groups. This otherness has outlasted the industry the communities were built on.The analysis here shows that the social organization of regeneration in an arguably‘different’ place is less driven by local specificities than by a failure to makevisible conflicting constructions of community; therefore both the pathologizing ofdisadvantaged social groups and calls for more ‘community’ in policy delivery ratherthan policy reform are called into question.
