The Regional Review West Yorkshire 12 Made in Kirklees: Culture within an Urban Regeneration Strategy

One of the most significant events of 1996 in Yorkshire and Humberside may have been the creation of a Regional Assembly by its local authorities. While the potential of this initiative to develop a coherent regional voice is considerable, the larger issue of devolution is unlikely to move forward until after the 1997 General Election. In this issue of The Regional Review we welcome the birth of the Assembly, and take this as a cue to revisit the issue of the strategic development of the region, recently the subject of a number of reports and studies. A second major potential development in the region announced late in 1996, and one which attracted rather larger headlines than the Assembly, is the proposed move of Yorkshire County Cricket Club from Headingley in Leeds to a new purpose-built stadium close to the motorway in Wakefield. No doubt this momentous project for the sporting life of the region will be the subject of further evaluation in a future issue of The Regional Review, but it does serve to remind us of the significance that sporting venues and events may have for local and regional economic development. In this issue the impact of the Euro ‘96 soccer tournament on one of the host cities, Sheffield, is the subject of a detailed evaluation, while we also pick up the broader theme of the role of cultural industries in economic regeneration in one of our sub-regional commentaries. The experience of Kirklees featured prominently at the Regional Studies Association’s recent conference held at the West Yorkshire Playhouse on the ‘Role of Art and Sport in Local and Regional Economic Development’. Two articles in this issue focus on the problems of crime, a growing preoccupation of policy-makers and pundits at all levels in our society. Joanna Shapland’s article draws attention to the growing problems of crime against business, while Norman Davidson shows how urban regeneration strategies in one of the region’s cities, Kingston upon Hull, are successfully incorporating measures to diminish the incidence of domestic burglary. The latest Regional Intelligence Bulletin also takes up the theme of patterns of crime in the region, as part of an editorial policy of attempting to provide some complementarity between the two publications. Regular readers of The Regional Review will note that we are maintaining two other traditional features of the publication. Kenneth Dyson provides his regular commentary on European issues, while we continue the series of articles with an environmental flavour with an account of the Humber Wetlands Project – an archaeological and palaeoenvironmental survey of one of England’s largest remaining wetland areas. THE STRATEGY JIGSAW 2 – 4 Kevin Thomas