CUCR Research Archive Building Bridges

Participating staff

• Professor Michael Keith
• Dr Fran Tonkiss
• Professor Marjorie Mayo
• Dr Alison Rooke
• Heidi Seetzen
• Dr Jean Anastacio
• Dr Ben Gidley

About the project

The Creekside SRB partnership aims to regenerate the Creekside riverfront area of the Thames that straddles the London Boroughs of Lewisham and Greenwich. The Centre for Urban and Community Research is working with Creekside SRB to carry out an evaluation of the impacts of the partnership on the local area.

The evaluation consists of four streams of work broken down as follows:

• Historical evaluation, baseline interrogation and Value For Money analysis
• Evaluating the impact of urban regeneration processes and measurement of impacts against strategic objectives
• Case studies in regeneration
• Evaluating community involvement in urban regeneration in Creekside

Value added through evaluation

Building on models of good practice developed, there are two significant ways in which the evaluation attempts to feed back positively into the successful delivery of urban regeneration schemes.

Feedback, value for money and management information

The evaluation can increase the understanding of the regeneration process within the partnership itself. By evaluating programmes by the standard criteria of appropriateness, effectiveness and efficiency, significant information about value for money and impact of the programme locally can be fed back into the regeneration process. In client/contractor terms integrated evaluation can provide an objective measure of the contractual relationships at the heart of the SRB process.

Strengthening the Partnership

An independent evaluation of the working of the SRB can produce a transparency within the process of urban regeneration that allows all stakeholders to develop a trust in the partnership. The nature of contemporary urban regeneration initiatives is that people come to be involved from very different perspectives: different geographical areas, different institutional interests and different levels of community empowerment. A transparent, accountable evaluation process can provide the capacity for the regeneration agency to develop and strengthen the partnership at its heart.

Methodology

The principal aim of the evaluation follows directly Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions guidance. While SRB partnerships are expected to measure the "outputs" of individual projects the aim of evaluation is to measure their "impacts". CUCR works with a variety of qualitative and quantitative measures to develop an accurate assessment of the impacts of urban regeneration programmes.

Publications

We published regular evaluation reports on the Process of Regeneration in Creekside, on Case Studies in Regeneration in Creekside, and on Community Involvement in Creekside.