We will not be silenced

This is the main message I remember from reading about the PPP regeneration project in Dublin, which has acquired great interest of citizens. They went out to the streets and demonstrated. They demonstrated surprisingly in support of the regeneration deal saying” They hope we will go away and stay in our long forgotten ghettos across Dublin City. We will return to our homes not to forget our dreams of a decent place to live but to organise our fight against Dublin City Council. We are asking people to come out and support us, to wear black and bring pots and pans to make plenty of noise. We will not be silenced. We want our 14 acres site developed as agreed.” This shows unprecedented support the community of citizens provided for the redevelopment of brownfield ghettos. This kind of PPP is much closer to hearths of all citizens living in a city under regeneration and every success as well as failure is immediately recognized.

Ireland had its own troubles with regeneration PPPs as well as other courtiers pioneering regeneration projects experienced, and this negative experience has turned some professionals against this concept. Regeneration projects are indeed quite complex going across state and municipal budgets, across number of financial public facilities and government departments. Complexity is also multiplied by large number of stakeholders with often contradictory interest. Stakeholder’s consultations regarding urban regeneration are therefore difficult and lengthy. But this industry has also a lot of successes in for example in US, Canada, Germany and UK.

UK has established special agency English Partnerships (EP) to deal with brownfield regeneration and in 2008 merged EP with Academy for Sustainable Communities creating “The Homes and Comunities Agency (HCA)”. HCA has become the largest regeneration Agency in Europe with annual investment budget over £5 billion.

It is great when you have funds, strategy and institution to deal with brownfield regeneration – this makes much easier dealing with large municipal areas of development and regeneration. It also helps to solve slams and ghettos providing friendly living environment, jobs and housing rather as opposed to poisonous, crime concentrating brownfields on the borders of large industrial cities.

This has also been recently strategy of government in Thailand supporting the bailout of ghettos, which often are located on a valuable development sites and then use the money to pay for the new housing development for the people from ghetto. Example of this is Bang Bua Canal in Bangkok, which has been redeveloped based on 30 years land lease, developing great network out of communities alongside the canal, which in past have been just slumps. Thai PPPs delivering public transport do also help in fighting poverty and regeneration of urban areas. If this becomes government strategy and as such it is successfully applied, people will not have to go to streets and shout “we will not be silenced”.