Practice review: social mix and disadvantaged communities: policy, practice, and the evidence base

Over the next decades, hundreds of millions of dollars of public and private funds will be spent on regenerating disadvantaged Australian public housing neighbourhoods. If regeneration is not conducted well, as the Americans and British have often found, the exercise may have to be repeated in another decade or so, meaning a substantial waste of precious resources. Contemporary Australian urban regeneration policies, aimed at disadvantaged public housing neighbourhoods, are generally concerned with the issue of balancing social mix to create more socioeconomically diverse communities. The major strategy to achieve a more balanced social mix is through diversifying housing tenure, to lower concentrations of public housing and increase owner-occupied housing on estates. Two recent research articles in Urban Policy and Research are concerned with the outcomes of social mix strategies in contemporary Australian regeneration policy (Arthurson Vol. 20, No 3, 2002; Wood Vol. 21, No 1, 2003). The major issues raised by these articles consist of the problematic nature of the objectives set for tenure diversification and the gaps and ambiguities in the knowledge base for the benefits or otherwise of social mix (Arthurson 2002; Wood 2003). Taken together, the research articles demonstrate that there is insufficient linking between the underlying assumptions made for social mix in contemporary regeneration policy and the empirical evidence-base.