Urban regeneration in Manchester

Urban regeneration in Manchester - see your lecture notes.There is now longstanding interest in measuring geographical variation in social and economic circumstances to guide policy decision-making. The Standard Spending Assessment provides one of many examples of the attempt to quantify local area circumstances as a means of determining objectively, if not un-contentiously, allocations of central government resource. A variety of indices of aggregate need or local circumstances across geographical areas have been used to channel flows of funding in relation to health, in particular, and for education and other areas of public policy (Mackenzie et al, 1998; Smith et al, 2001).

Interest in quantifying spatial variation in need has been particularly prominent in the field of urban regeneration, as governments since the early 1980s have sought to develop formal statistical indices to distribute funding in line with geographic...