Urban Policy Processes and the Politics of Urban Regeneration* zyx 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 z * 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. zyxw 0 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd zyxwvutsr 1995. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 IJF. UK and 238 Main Street, Cambridge. MA 02142, USA