ANNUAL CONGRESS 2025

Social Infrastructures for Repopulation: Learning from ‘School Zones’ in England

Not scheduled

20m

Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul

Oral SS 03 | Repopulating left-behind territories: Policies, Practices, and Emerging Pathway

Speaker

Dr Lucy Natarajan (Bartlett School of Planning, UCL)

Description

Across diverse sized cities in England, School Zones are a new way to plan for districts centred on securing the next generation’s well-being in disadvantaged areas. This paper teases out lessons for repopulation from social infrastructures, which is demonstrated by such zones around public educational facilities in England. The paper builds on a recent study of ‘School Superzones’ in London (Natarajan, 2025) as well as concepts of social infrastructures to generate alternative forms of value for declining places (Tomaney et al., 2024). School Zones step up to the lack of delivery on maintaining long-term community wellbeing (Natarajan et al., 2020), and harnesses community capitals inherent in educational facilities through local partnerships. These offer non-growth dependent value generation and support place attachment, with generation of local social value and place-based liveability. As such, in respect of population-challenged areas of Europe, School Zones have great potential. Drawing on research in targeted districts in Brighton, Birmingham and London, the emerging outcomes of School Zones will be explored, including insights from those involved in partnerships around these initiatives, i.e. stakeholders from civil society, local businesses and government actors. Analysis centres on the question: how might School Zones pre-figure means to long-term thriving communities that do not rely purely on the logics of capital investment or growth?

References

Natarajan, L. (2025). Social Infrastructures for Postgrowth Value Generation: School-based Initiatives in London. Built Environment, 51(1), 84-102 (online shortly).
Natarajan, L., Cho, H. and Ilie, E. (2020) Civil Society Perspectives on Inequality: Focus Group Research Findings Report. UK2070 Commission. Available at: https://uk2070.org.uk/wp-conten t/uploads/2020/02/UK2070-Civil-Society- Perspectives-UCL-2020.pdf.
Tomaney, J., Blackman, M., Natarajan, L., Panayotopoulos-Tsiros, D., Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, F., & Taylor, M. (2024). Social infrastructure and ‘left-behind places’. Regional Studies, 58(6), 1237-1250.