Research
CUPS' research focuses on three principal themes:
1. Evaluating the impacts of area-based urban policy initiatives
CUPS has a wide range of experience of evaluating area-based regeneration initiatives, including work for central and local government departments, national agencies, and local regeneration partnerships. Examples of work for central government include projects for DCLG (and its predecessors – DoE, DETR, DTLG, ODPM) assessing the impacts of government’s Action for Cities programme (1991-94), the effectiveness of Urban Development Corporations (1994-7), reviewing progress in the first round of Urban Regeneration Companies (2000), evaluating the New Deal for Communities Partnerships in Manchester, Oldham and Salford (2001-05), and evaluating the National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal (2005-08). This work has been closely tied to national policy; for example, the CUPS report on the state of English cities was published alongside the government’s 2000 Urban White Paper; and Professor Robson was a member of the government’s Urban Sounding Board.
2. Territorial spatial planning
This theme encompasses a range of policy-related work, linked to underlying ideas about the search for approaches to different planning problems at a variety of spatial scales. It includes, for example, research assessing recent changes to, and future prospects for, the housing and land-use planning system in Britain, including spatial plans in practice, sub-regional planning arrangements and the potential for a national spatial planning framework. Other examples include a major international study of east-west economic linkages across northern Europe; the government's National Framework for City Regions; universities and regional economic development.
3. Analysis of neighbourhood dynamics
The Centre's research also focuses at a more detailed scale on how cities and their neighbourhoods work and change over time, and on how best that can be measured. Part of this involves a long-established interest in developing quantitative indicators to measure the changing nature of urban areas through the development of indices of deprivation for central government, the Greater London Authority, the Welsh Assembly, the Northern Ireland Office and other funders. It is currently exploring the relationship between people- and place-based perspectives of deprivation and the implications for policy initiatives (for the DCLG evaluation of the National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal); and also conducting research on the everyday resilience of cities (ESRC New Security Challenges programme, 2005-7). This is also linked to research on the application of geographical information techniques to urban planning and policy problems at the neighbourhood scale. Work on planning support systems (Micro-MaPPAS) and on modelling future urban forms and using digital communications to enhance citizen participation and provide support systems for decision-making.
CUPS Newsletter
The annual newsletter of CUPS summarises the main achievements of the Centre for Urban Policy Studies between August 2010 and July 2011 by summarising the collective activity of staff members.
The Newsletter can be viewed in PDF format by following this link: CUPS Newsletter 2011