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Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, urban policy was dominated by property-led regeneration. Behind this regeneration lay the diagnosis of our cities’ problems as a shortfall of physical infrastructure to support the activities of global corporate investors. The removal of supply-side constraints to investment in cities, including the minimisation of local government and community involvement in planning for regeneration and its implementation, was the mantra of Margaret Thatcher and her governments (see Thornley, 1993). Regeneration, Thatcher-style, was characterised by the use of public subsidies, tax breaks, and the reduction in planning and other regulatory controls, as mechanisms to create a context to encourage corporate capital to invest in cities. Cities were, in the words of Michael Heseltine, Minister of the Environment in the early 1980s, to be “incentivised”. This, the government argued, would generate …