An understanding of the real constraints on Policy in this field is an essential precondition of its success. Armed with the understanding, it becomes possible to say some positive, perspective things.

The dilemmas are three folds: cognitive, operational and political, more plainly expressed. What is the nature of the problem? How can it be tackled? And why should it command political attention?

These three perspectives can be linked within the concept of the political agenda. Government can be cope with all conceivable public issues. At one time, it focuses its attention on a limited number of issues that get onto the political agenda. They may rise to the top or fall towards the bottom of that agenda. The movement is related to both the objective nature of the real world circumstances underlying the issue, and the ways in which these circumstances are subjectively perceived and valued. In the later perspective, the possibilities and means of tackling issues play a part-politics that finds a way of suppressing or transforming issues that are intractable.

At one time an issue either gets addressed through policy responses or disappears from the agenda, as more powerful new issues claim their place. In this whole process knowledge or cognitive, action or operational and political dilemmas are entwined.

Cognitive Dilemma

What is known about the nature of the inner city Problem? The inner city is itself as much a metaphorical as a locational concepts. It refers to parts of some urban areas, sometimes in suburban rather than inner locations, that exhibit multiple deprivation, such areas are characterized by:

* Families with low income, low education, educational achievements and skill, and high rates of unemployment.

* Housing still with many dwellings below standard, overcrowded to a ominishing degree, but with a high proportion of the stock rented from local authorities and private landlords;

*Economies that has experienced very severe decline in traditional manufacturing and service employment without compensating growth in new jobs.

* Crime exhibiting higher incidence and lower clear-up rates than elsewhere;

* Land and buildings with much vacant or derelict and low apparent demand.

* Infrastructure in an increasing state of despair;

* Populations reducing very sharply through out- migration.
However, the real main spring for policy is in the interpretation of such facts, in perceptions of the nature of the inner city problem. There are rival perceptions, of course, which extend for many commentators into rival prescriptions or for some, derive from rival prescriptions. Facts end values are, here as elsewhere in public policy interactive. The cities can be distinguished as machine, communities, market and battlegrounds.

The ‘machine’ focuses attention on the infrastructure of the city its factories, dwellings, sewers and transport routes, even its water and its air.

The quality of infrastructure is very poor. The condition of industrial premises, roads, water and sewerage systems, housing in urban areas is sometimes argued to adversely affect their productivity. And land shortage and land prices can inhibit improvements. This stress on physical factors has been or consistent thread in inner-city thinking.

It is prominent in the comprehensive redevelopment drive including the massive investment in new housing commercial centres, roads and public transport systems. It has surfaced regarding the adequacy of investment in infrastructure. The key discipline of this perspective is engineering from municipal to system varieties.

The concept of the city as a ‘community’ is probably the most hallowed of the four a truism rather than a metaphor, some might argue. The loss of community thesis for inner city woes therefore has a deep appeal. The emphasis’s on individual or social inadequacies on mutual aid, on the relation between government and the governed on social mix on community action and on the informal economy.

Many cities originated and grew as ‘market’ places or serving the needs of trading economics. The city may trade its woods and services with other localities. But it will also have internal markets in which its producers do business with each other. And the urban economy will itself be sustained by local job markets, property markets and, perhaps, financial markets. In understanding, such processes the key disciplines are geography and economics.

The argument that inner city can best be understood in market terms it comparatively recent. That the inner cities were losing out through national even international, structural economic changes was the thesis that emerged from community development projects, but they saw them as innocent victims of wider capitalist forces, which must be controlled. More recently these has been an alternative focus on the inadequacies of markets internal to the city as a contributory factor to their poor performance in national market place. The concern here is with risk capital, labor skills, entrepreneurs, and premises with particular emphasis/on the price and terms of their availability.

The cities as machine as communities as market places provide rival perceptions. The cities as battle rounds are different and could be paired with any of them. The focus here is on distributional questions.

Who gets what? They battles within inner cities are typically between landlords and tenants, indigenous and immigrant communities, property developers and occupiers, employers and workers, providers and clients of services, communities and their local authorities, local authorities and state governments, state government and central government and between lawbreakers and the police. This diversity and divergence of interests and underlies the operational dilemmas of inner-city policy.

It is, the slums and poverty were caused by sin and remedy Was in the settlement movement that would communicate middle class modes of behaviour slum dweller. It was viewed that the surroundings of home and workplace were responsible for physical and moral health of the laboring class better housing and civic amenities were the answer. But there yet a third explanation the plight of the urban poor arose simple from their poverty. The new trades and industries are springing up, urban population is growing the markets they provided for consumer goods and services are expanding and city government is slowly responding in promoting civil improvements. Such energies and opportunities are generally not now characteristic of the inner cities.

The analysis emphasizes the duality of urban economic problems in both the poor performance of most urban economies and the lack of employment opportunities for their residents, particularly the young, unskilled, minorities those without informal qualifications or with low educational attainment. An improvement in the performance of urban economy may be necessary condition for bettering the prospects of the disadvantaged, but will it be a sufficient condition? And moreover, are greater opportunities for the disadvantaged even a necessary let alone a sufficient condition for growth in the urban economy?

Operational Dilemma

The dilemma embraces the constraints that limit the effectiveness of the powers, agencies, resources and procedures avail able to effect policy. The issue is how those constraints might be weakened or overcome. The starting point must be recognition of multi agency nature of inner city policy. Our business, community and government institutions are predominantly single purpose. They tend to meet demands for one class or service, be it housing or groceries, or they allocate one kind of resource, be it capital land or labor. The geographical focus of inner city policy means that, by definition. Its success turn as on the performance of not one but a variety of such agents who each have their own different modus operandi.
And not only that. Not with standing apparent policy shifts-favoring public or private sector, current or capital spending the formal or informal economy-the reality has been that now inner city policy has been pursued through what can be called mixed strategies, which seek to deploy the variety of agents in concert within one another. The mixed strategies are the hardest forms of policy to implement. The policies that require multiple decisions to implement them have an inevitably low success rate. More particularly mixed strategies face two basic operational constraints, the capacity of individual component agencies and the strength of the systems that bind them to the common purpose.

The dominance of national institutions in the financial sector is also a constraint. Some of the major house builders have discovered a profitable new market in low cost housing or self-financing housing for sale. It is interesting that urban development grant or loan which encourages private investment in property has been less successful in bring the major developments into inner cities than in diverting local capital into this sector. Most of the local agencies are subject to increasing investment and expenditure constraints and, in some cases, to curtailment of their discretionary powers. Big operational necessity is to work effectively.

It is important to recognize that so long as such agencies remain separately constituted, separately accountable, separately funded and separately staffed and managed the forces of individual self interest will be strongly entrenched. Even legislatively imposed obligations, will not by themselves get them working together.

Political Dilemma

However, all this will count for nothing if political will to address public policy to inner city problems is not there. Politicians of all parties, locally and centrally frequently reaffirm their commitment. But what does this imply? Electoral arithmetic is an obvious starting point. The changes in any country, which underlie the condition of the inner cities, have had political consequences. The identification of the beneficiaries of a policy so strongly with a particular political grouping is possibly the most problematic dilemma of inner city policy. But there are political considerations beyond voter appeal. In essence the polities of inner cities is bound up with the continuing tension between growth and welfare objectives between allocative and distributional concerns in policy. Both present, but the balance is struck differently from time to time. Politically the case for the inner cities can be in either term.

From a welfare perspective the concern is with social justice equality, racial disadvantage and the maintenance of minimum standards. The deprivation of inner city residents is itself considered reason enough for public policy, never minds its a causes or consequences. If they are believed to be the innocent victims of structural changes, then the justice seems all the stranger.

From growth or developmental perspective the concern in inner cities is essentially with wasted resources vacant land, unemployed people under-utilized infrastructure. Utilizing such idle assets should seemingly add to national, output in net as well as gross terms especially if there by the call our other substitute resources in other places is minimized and or any new urban activity is not merely a displacement from other localities.

In comparison, the balance between welfare and growth objectives in inner city policy is still more open to debate. There is also in this case, unlike regional policy, another relevant political objective. At least since the mid-1980s the fear public disorder has been an under current in obviously reinforced this concern. No review of the present politics of inner city policy could complete without reference to central government, state government/local government relations. This particular struggle rages fiercely on many fronts, both functional and geographical. But it has reached intensity in inner city areas. This is partly a consequence of conflict over priorities and politics.
All these arguments-about welfare, economic development public order, centre-state relations, state local government relations are political air currents which blow inner city policy, this way or that and, through convergence and convection, keep it afloat, like most politics they are matters of this year and next.

But there is another political perspective, which is longer term. Historically many towns and cities have experienced reversals of fortune prospering then declining and sometimes prospering again. Many middle-sized towns are in their third expansion; first for domestic manufacture in the middle Ages, then as market town in a time of agricultural property, now as residential or tourist centers. Some parts of cities are in their second flush, often through the recent immigration into them of new social groups bringing fresh vitality to higher to rundown neighborhood. The 19th century urban economy has bypassed the inner cities for suburban and rural areas.