Urban development corporations: Parliamentary pointers towards assessment

Recent issues of Local Economy have provided two assessments of Urban Development Corporations (UDCs); one by Michael Parkinson, the director of the Centre of Urban Studies at Liverpool University, the other by Mike Shields, the Chief Executive of the Trafford Park Development Corporation (TPDC). Parkinson, the academic, is essentially critical of UDCs in general and of the Merseyside
Development Corporation (MDC) in particular; Shields, the practitioner, is supportive of the UDC concept generally and of the TPDC specifically. Both deal with "regeneration" and the UDC model. Yet the very term "regeneration" separates and differentiates their analyses. What urban "regeneration" is, or should be, starts them off on different tracks.