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Community-Led Housing and Regeneration in Liverpool - MSc UDP video outputs launched
31 May 2022
In May 2022, following five months of desk-based research, students and staff from the MSc Urban Development Planning programme travelled to Liverpool for a nine-day immersion into the world of community-led housing and regeneration.
Coordinated in partnership with Breaking Ground, a community-led housing hub that provides advocacy and technical assistance to community-led initiatives across the City Region, this practice engagement project brought together diverse stakeholders to discuss the past, present and future(s) of Liverpool’s community-led housing and regeneration sector. What is the added value of community-led housing and neighbourhood regeneration processes and how might it be scaled-up and out across the Liverpool City Region? These are the questions that most centrally animated the collaboration.
In a moment when community-led housing is being talked-up by politicians as a potential salve to those inequalities being revealed and amplified by an ongoing overconcentration of investment into Liverpool city-centre, the project aimed to both amplify this call and, critically, draw attention to those potential enabling measures capable of unleashing this potential. Liverpool City Region, it seems, could be on the edge of something transformative.
Entering the topic through the living experience of three community-led initiatives routed in historically marginalised districts – Homebaked CLT in Anfield, Granby Four Streets CLT in Toxteth and SAFE Regeneration in Bootle – the project was able to map out the critical junctures which had either enabled or inhibited their progress to-date. This mapping was then used to pinpoint areas where enabling interventions might be developed in order to help move the process of community-led housing and neighbourhood regeneration away from the realm of torturously negotiated exceptionality, towards becoming a recognised and supported feature of everyday city-making.
As well as three detailed research reports (forthcoming), our time in Liverpool produced a series of short-films highlighting the existing and potential value of community-led housing and neighbourhood regeneration for the city region. Shared below, these films add their voice to those advocating for greater community control in processes of urban development.
Videos
Community-led Housing in the Liverpool City Region: The Case of Granby Four Streets CLT
Community-led Housing in the Liverpool City Region: The Case of Homebaked CLT
Community-led Housing in the Liverpool City Region: The Case of SAFE Regeneration