Given the neighbourhood focus of much regeneration policy, we need to know more about the functional roles that neighbourhoods play in the way that households move within the housing market and hence about the different functional types of neighbourhood amongst deprived areas. Such knowledge would help both to guide the priorities of policy and to interpret the probability of policy interventions being successful. This exploratory study draws on an evaluation of the British government's National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal, part of which entails an interpretation of household mobility data from the 2001 Census. It suggests four categories of neighbourhood—transit, escalator, isolate, and improver areas—based on the relationship between where households move to and move from, focused on the 20% most deprived lower super output areas in England. Evidence on the ground suggests the plausibility of the different functional roles played by the four neighbourhood types. Some continuing conundrums—the robustness of the categorisation, the need to take account of the spatial context of deprived areas, and the difference between movers and stayers—are discussed as a prelude to further continuing research.

There is now a sustained interest in measuring geographical variation in social and economic circumstances in order to guide urban policy resource allocation decisions. The most recent attempt to measure local area deprivation in England has come through the government's Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD). The authors aim to consider the degree to which the IMD provides a reliable mechanism for doing so and to suggest the ways in which its successors might best be refined. They argue that although the IMD, in many respects, represents a commendable advance in terms of the development of techniques to quantify deprivation, there remain significant limitations that future approaches could profitably address.

Recent years have seen the establishment of numerous spatially bounded regeneration agencies in the United Kingdom, prominent amongst which have been urban development corporations (yDCs).Attempts to evaluate such agencies have so far focused almost exclusively upon the impacts within formally delimited areas and have neglected to consider the effects on surrounding nondesignated areas. In this paper, an attempt is made to address this by devising a technique for assessing the wider effects of spatially bounded regeneration agencies and programmes. Drawing from a government-commissioned evaluation of UDCs at Leeds, Bristol, and Central Manchester, we explore the extent to which government intervention in delimited areas has generated a net beneficial impact on the wider local economies of the three cities. By use of data on the nature of vacancy chains for commercial properties in the three UDCs and in their respective surrounding areas, an attempt is made to measure the degree of displacement or additionality engendered by UDC activities.

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The authors examine the use of census data to construct an urban deprivation index for the United Kingdom, with special attention given to the need for flexibility. "A single index is rejected in favour of a matrix of results which captures the complex geography of deprivation. The matrix of districts includes measures of the degree of deprivation, its spatial extent, its intensity, and the spatial distribution of deprivation at the enumeration district scale. The profiles of various districts are discussed to illustrate the use of the matrix."