Duncan Tanner Essay Prize 2015

Abstract

The enterprise zone is arguably the neoliberal city’s purest policy expression. Beginning in Britain in 1981 and spreading to the USA and mainland Europe, the policy designates small, economically depressed neighbourhoods and makes them exempt from elements of state regulation and certain taxes with the aim of attracting capital for regeneration. A handful of strategically located enterprise zones created in the 1980s have provided the microeconomic framework for set-piece regeneration projects in the London Docklands, Salford and Gateshead among other places. This policy has a long and curious history, however, that goes back to a cluster of left-of-centre artists, urban planners and sociologists in the late 1960s who coined the idea of ‘non-plan areas’, large county-sized regions of the UK that would cultivate economic and architectural freedom in the absence of state regulation. The non-plan proponents included famed urbanist Peter Hall who would later develop the enterprise zone policy with the help of Thatcher’s ministers. An attention to the history of the British built environment and particularly to the complex roots of the enterprise zone idea disrupts a whiggish reading of Thatcherism that sees her election in 1979 as a fault line that cleft the political and economic history of the post-war period in two. Meanwhile this story has important implications for the recent historiography of British urban planning, and is a call for urban policy to be put at the centre of histories of the new right in Britain.

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