The urban 40

MARTIN BRIGGS
East Midlands Development Agency
"To regenerate an area is to breathe new life into it," says Briggs, who developed the Business Link network at the DTI before joining the regional development agency.

One of his favourite success stories is the ex-coalmining village of Shirebrook in Derbyshire, which was transformed in 2001 through the introduction of mixed-tenure housing, giving a more socially mixed community. Briggs adds that Leicester's space science exhibition, built in 1998, "has combined innovation technology with practical regeneration".

When looking for inspiration, Briggs casts his net widely, naming the Netherlands and the US states of West Virginia and California as models of good practice. He is also impressed with developing cities in the Far East, such as Singapore, which has made its mark in enterprise and technology.

"Regeneration is about bringing areas back to life, recreating the infrastructure and looking at how you connect up the physical regeneration with the creation of new skills. You have to give people a sense that they are taking control of their future."

John Edwards
chief executive, advantage west midlands
Edwards joined this RDA in 1999. Previously he was involved with forming partnerships between local communities and the government and, over the past decade, has played a key role in regeneration at the Rural Development Commission.

Michael Shields
chief executive, north-west development agency
Shields has worked in urban regeneration and the public sector for more than 30 years. He was integral in launching Manchester's Salford Quays scheme and the city's first private-sector refurbishment of run-down council housing.

Michael Ward
chief executive, london development agency
Ward launched the industry and employment programme of the former Greater London Council and managed the Centre for Local Economic Strategies, a national policy development body. He started his current job in 2000.

Martin Havenhand
chief executive, yorkshire forward
A leading figure in the regeneration of Sheffield's reclaimed land in the 1980s, Havenhand was also chief executive of Bassetlaw District Council, Nottinghamshire, for six years and was director of environment at Trafford council.

Bill Samual
chief executive, east england development agency
Samual has built this RDA from scratch into one that can deliver the region's 2010 economic strategy. His career spans 30 years, most of it in planning. He was chief executive of Peterborough council.

Anthony Dunnett
chief executive, south-east england rda
A member of the Urban Taskforce, Dunnett was appointed SEEDA's chief executive in 1999. He was previously chief executive of English Partnerships and spent two years as director of the DTI's industrial unit.

The Councils

JOHN FOSTER
chief executive, MIDDLESBROUGH borough council
The spotlight will be on Middlesbrough at the Urban Summit: the council was one of 24 involved in the government's Working with Towns and Cities initiative. This involved taking a systematic look at how the urban renaissance is tackled.

Foster, who is also a member of the urban sounding board, the government's regeneration advisory panel, says: "Local people need to feel good about the place they are living in." This means boosting the cultural aspects of a city as well as improving design and the economy, and Foster is very proud of Middlesbrough's plans for an art gallery.

The council is a key player in Middlesbrough's town centre company, the regeneration agent for the area, launched in 1999. "One of our key projects will be a mixed-use development near the grounds of Middlesbrough football club, and we have a number of New Deal for Communities projects around the city," says Foster. "We're seeing all the strands of government policy coming together successfully."

Foster's top examples of good regeneration practice are something of a surprise: "I'm very impressed with Brighton seafront and the promenade in Bridlington."

sir Albert Bore
leader, birmingham city council
Now entering his third year as council leader, Sir Albert led the city through its turbulent stock transfer defeat in April and is now working with officials to ease the council's debts. In 1996, he was one of the UK representatives on the Committee of Regions.

Trevor Phillips
chair, greater london assembly
Phillips' GLA portfolio is extensive, covering budget, health, education and social exclusion. He is also on the Council of Ethnic Minority Voluntary Organisations and a member of the urban sounding board.

Bob Kerslake
chief executive, sheffield city council
Kerslake has led the council on a number of major projects to regenerate both England's fourth largest city. Before this, he was chief executive of Hounslow council for three years and worked at the Inner London Education Authority.

Ian Stratford
chief executive, newcastle-upon-tyne city council
Stratford has been deputy chief executive at Thurrock council, in Essex, with responsibility for regeneration, executive director of housing at Enfield council and area housing manager at Middlesbrough.

Paul Rogerson
chief executive, leeds city council
Rogerson has been an integral member of the strategic management team at Leeds – one of the most talked-about cities in regeneration – in 1995. He has been chief executive since 1999.

The Academics

MICHAEL PARKINSON
Professor at Liverpool John Moores University
Scousers are not usually quick to praise Mancunians but native Liverpudlian Michael Parkinson, director of the European Institute of Urban Affairs at Liverpool John Moores University, says his city's traditional rival is a shining light: "Manchester is a model of good practice and of good political commitment to regeneration," says Parkinson, a leading government adviser on urban renewal. "I'm proud of what they've achieved in the past 10 years, of their efforts in East Manchester and Hulme, the way they prepared the city for the Commonwealth Games and the way they've integrated transport."

Parkinson says Barcelona has captured hearts and minds when it comes to innovative urban regeneration. He believes the Spanish authorities have thought about the strategic needs of the community over a period of time and this has led to good development projects. He says: "The issue of the long-term needs of the city have been addressed and the quality of the developments are good. The communities have also been consulted on what is happening and so the ideas are community-led."

Parkinson also has high praise for the Dutch: "They are able to see the bigger picture in their strategic planning regimes, by implementing good transport systems, pedestrian areas and a good standard of living. Their general welfare state system and investment in education means that they have addressed social exclusion more successfully overall."

Anne Power
professor of social policy, lSE
Power is a key ministerial adviser on housing and urban matters. She started her career at North Islington Housing Rights Project in 1972, was an advisor to the Welsh Office for 10 years and is now director of the LSE's MSc in housing.

Brian Robson
director, centre for urban studies
Based at Manchester University, Professor Robson has done extensive research in urban policy and regeneration, social exclusion, deprivation and regional development. He is also a member of the Housing Corporation's urban sounding board.

David Begg
professor of transport, robert gordon university
An adviser to the deputy prime minister, Begg is chair of the Commission for Integrated Transport. From 1994 to 1999 he was also the transport spokesperson for the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities.

The Urban regeneration companies

ALISON NIMMO
Sheffield One
"Regeneration is a complicated business," says Alison Nimmo, chief executive of urban regeneration company Sheffield One. "Regeneration isn't just about one thing, it's about the cultural life of a city, housing, economy and how it's governed. It's about how these different aspects fit together.

"In the past we might have looked at regeneration in terms of individual buildings, not how everything fits together. But it's not just about the quality of the buildings and how they look, it's how they work together in the public realm. Neither is it a static thing – I don't believe anyone in regeneration who says 'and now we've finished'."

Nimmo won accolades as the project director of Manchester Millennium, the organisation which led the redevelopment of the city centre after the IRA bomb in 1996. The partnership was praised by the Urban Taskforce report and was the forerunner of urban regeneration companies.

"I've always been a city person," she says. "Regeneration to me is very urban, very city-based. It's about what makes a city attractive in an economic sense as well as a physical sense. What makes it buzz?"

Nimmo says the Urban Taskforce and Lord Rogers are "fabulous pioneers" and Barcelona and Paris are her "great cities".

She says: "Part of the challenge in regeneration has been years of under-investment in infrastructure. Now, from Sheffield One's point of view, we've got the key people together, the community, the council, the private partners."

Tom Russell
chief executive, new east manchester urc
Russell was previously chief executive at the city council. Before that, he was responsible for Manchester's City Pride Initiative and its SRB and European funding proposals.

Sir Joe Dwyer
chairman, liverpool vision
Sir Joe is chair of a company at the forefront of the regeneration resurgence of the North-west. He is a former group chairman of contractor Wimpey and is a former president of the Institution of Civil Engineers.

Bob Lane
chief executive, catalyst corby
Lane has worked in the sector for 20 years and was part of the team that ran the economic and physical regeneration of south Liverpool in the 1990s and helped attract £230m of private investment.

Tom Macartney
chief executive, sunderland Urc
Macartney was director of the Crown Street regeneration project in the Gorbals, Glasgow, which attracted almost £160m of development. At Sunderland, he leads a team in regenerating key sites along the River Wear.

David Taylor
chair, hull citybuild
Taylor helped to establish English Partnerships in the 1990s. He was integral in setting up regeneration funds with the private sector. Nowadays he has his own organisation that structures development projects for URCs.

Joe Docherty
chief executive, tees valley urc
Docherty leads the company in one of the most important projects in the North-east: Middlehaven. It demonstrates close partnership between public and private sectors.

The Policymakers

DAVID LUNTS
director, urban policy unit, odpm
"In some ways," muses Lunts, "there's nothing particularly clever about regeneration." The country's top urban renaissance mandarin doesn't mean to downplay the issue; rather, his statement reflects his straightforward approach. "Regeneration should be a permanent state," he continues, "because the most successful communities are often the ones that regenerate themselves without people noticing. Harley Street and Wimpole Street, for example, are populated by doctors and private health practices and dentists but were built as a Georgian residential estate. They've slowly and comfortably changed use and never fallen out of favour."

Lunts took the helm at the urban policy unit in June. He was previously chief executive of Prince Charles' charitable trust the Prince's Foundation. Before that, he was chair of housing at Manchester council in the late 1980s – where he was involved in the rebirth of the Hulme area – so he understands how closely councils, and in particular their housing and planning departments, must work with other agencies in renewing town centres.

Lunts says the biggest barriers to regeneration include a lack of initiative from the agencies involved in the process, lack of cash and the fact that market conditions aren't always right – and sometimes, he says, it's because the many initiatives don't coordinate as well as they should. Lunts cites the millennium community project in East Manchester, funded partly through state funding but largely through the private sector, as an example of the way forward in terms of funding and adds that funding programmes are being rationalised.

Genie Turton
director general, oDPM
Before becoming ODPM director general in 2000, Turton had worked in government since 1970. She was responsible for the establishment of the government offices for the regions and the development of the SRB.

Mike Gahagan
director of housing, odpm
Gagahan was behind the housing policy statement The Way Forward for Housing, in December 2000, that set proposals for policy in England. He chaired the DETR's review of the Housing Corporation and a number of housing committees.

Wendy Thompson
Head, office of public services reform
The prime minister's adviser on public services reform is also a member of the Urban Taskforce and urban sounding board, a former chief executive of Newham council and a former Audit Commission director of inspections.

Jane Todd
regional director, government office of the east midlands
Todd has headed a number of high-profile town-centre regeneration projects for Nottingham City Council and was instrumental in developing the Greater Nottingham Partnership and other public/private partnerships.

Jon Rouse
chief executive, cabe
The Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment's leader is a member of the Urban Taskforce; he's credited with writing its 300-page paper on UK construction practices. His role now is to put the recommendations into practice.

Jonathon Porritt
Chairman, sustainable development commission
One of the most influential advocates on environmental issues, Porrit helped set up Forum for the Future in 1996 to focus on environmental problems and help develop strategic partnerships across different sectors.

Lord Richard Best
director, joseph rowntree foundation
Lord Richard is a prominent member of the commission planning the future of Birmingham's council housing, has held a number of directorships on government panels and served on the social exclusion unit's policy action team.

Max Steinberg
director of investment and regeneration in the north, housing corporation
Steinberg is leading the corporation's £500m regeneration programme following the announcement of nine pathfinder organisations for market renewal.

The architects and developers

LORD RICHARD ROJERS
chairman, urban taskforce
Forget Whitehall policymakers and ministers – it is elected mayors who will be key to the rejuvenation of Britain's and cities, says Lord Rogers. "All successful cities are driven by brilliant people in those cities," he said last week in an interview with Housing Today's sister magazine Building. "I don't think ministers can possibly address the state of our streets, the crap paving, the dog shit, the appalling urban furniture, the ghastly road fatalities. They can only look at national policy, and cities don't respond to national policy."

Lord Rogers of Riverside, to give him his full title, is arguably the most influential exponent of the UK's regeneration agenda. Without him, terms like high-density living, brownfield development and integrated transport would not be common parlance. He is expected to use the Urban Summit to call for the government to devolve more power to towns and cities to speed up regeneration.

Lord Rogers believes ministers have failed to grasp the link between urban and social degradation. He bemoans the lack of planning and brief-writing skills in councils and despairs of the Treasury's refusal to boost brownfield development with fiscal incentives. Rogers, who also works as architectural adviser to London mayor Ken Livingstone, has headed the urban taskforce since 1998 when it was set up by the government to rejuvenate Britain's cities, which Rogers has described as "the worst in Europe".

His 1999 report, Towards an Urban Renaissance, suggested 105 ways of improving cities and informed the government's urban white paper the following year.

Robin Nicholson
senior member, edward cullinan architects
Nicolson, who is also a member of the urban sounding board, is a commissioner for CABE, a former chairman of the Construction Industry Council and former vice-president of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

Lord Norman Foster
Founder, Foster & Partners
The internationally renowned architect who created the new home for the London mayor, the London Millennium Bridge and Canary Wharf Tube station.

Bernard Hunt
founding partner, hta
Architect HTA specialises in regeneration and residential design and describes its objective as "sustainable placemaking". Its projects include reintroducing streets and squares into a Castle Vale Housing Trust estate in Birmingham and leading the design team for the Greenwich Millennium Village in south-east London.

Kwasi Boateng
architect, knak design ltd
Boateng is a member of the urban sounding board, a mentor for the voluntary sector and has taught architecture at South Bank University, London.

Tom Bloxham
chairman, urban splash
Award-winning developer Urban Splash is known for its for its mixed-use developments in northwestern cities, Bloxham sits on the government's property advisory group and the urban sounding board, is a director of Liverpool's City of Culture bid and was given his MBE for services to architecture and urban regeneration.

Chris Brown
development manager, igloo
Igloo Urban Regeneration Fund is a limited partnership investing in urban regeneration projects. Brown also sits on the urban sounding board.