Resident participation: framing the vision for community regeneration

Public housing estate regeneration and the active involvement of residents are the topics of this paper. The author explains that without active involvement of residents in regeneration, policy measures are likely to fail and in doing so reinforce any existing sense of political powerlessness in disadvantaged communities. She examines some of the courses of action that aim to increase residents' access to decision making processes in two Australian regeneration projects, at Manoora in far North Queensland and The Parks in metropolitan South Australia. The processes around the development of the community action plans are compared and contrasted, to ascertain what is working well and not so well, and to identify some of the major challenges and tensions arising in the two projects.