Regenerating Run-Down Public Housing Estates: A Review of the Operation of the Remedial Works Scheme

The development of the housing systems of western European countries can be divided into two broad periods. The first, which stretched from the end of World War I to the beginning of the 1970s, was characterised by a decline in the number of privately rented dwellings and a parallel growth in the proportion of the population living in owner-occupied and social-rented housing. In many countries this occurrence can be attributed to the demolition of dwellings in the private-rented tenure as part of state-sponsored slum clearance programmes and their replacement with social housing. The second period coincided with the crisis in the funding of state welfare provision in the 1970s, which marked the end of the expansion of the social-rented tenure in most European countries. By the early 1980s, policy makers were beginning to take notice of the growth of social problems in this sector and of the poor standard of many social-rented dwellings especially those constructed using the industrialised building techniques that were popular in the 1950s and 1960s (Harloe, 1995). By the mid-1980s, building of social housing in many European countries had declined and new policy initiatives in this area increasingly focused on the regeneration of existing stock. For many politicians and policy commentators of this time, largescale public housing estates had come to be seen as the cause of poor housing conditions rather than the solution to them (Power, 1997).