Time for geography: Resituating neighbourhood regeneration through longitudinal qualitative research

With Julie MacLeavy, University of Bristol.

This is an online seminar and all are welcome. Please contact sue.davis@nottingham.ac.uk for the link.

Part of the Economic Worlds Seminar Series.

Abstract

In this paper, I explore the lived experience of neighbourhood change using a longitudinal qualitative approach. Returning to Barton Hill, the site of the New Deal for Communities programme in Bristol, UK, I consider if and how - after twenty years - the neighbourhood has been altered. This allows for an assessment of the lasting impacts of time-limited regeneration programmes. The aim is not simply to evaluate whether the NDC achieved its intended goals, but to also reflect on the extent to which past policy interventions can be traced within the urban present.

Community perceptions of continuity and change are used as a basis for consideration of how time can reconfigure and resituate understandings of policy actions and outcomes - and how regeneration is a fragile and dynamic process, not a predetermined or linear progression.

In closing the paper reflects on the value of moving beyond single period, snapshot enquiries through a longitudinal approach that takes us beyond the more immediate and visible outcomes of policy to view spaces of intervention in their emergent becoming.