Who invests in change in poor or rundown neighbourhoods?

The Nehom Project, concerning the evaluation of housing and neighbourhood initiatives to improve the quality of life of deprived urban neighbourhoods and assessing their transferability across Europe, is aimed to build a database of innovative and effective housing initiatives and neighbourhood practices, to develop guidelines for transferring effective housing initiatives and neighbourhood practices between countries and localities and to identify a tool kit of principles, and quantitative and qualitative measures for assessing the relationships between housing initiatives and the quality of life in urban neighbourhoods. The chapter deals with the relationship between State, Market and Third Sector in urban regeneration programmes. A large gap between socially oriented pilot experiences and a prevalently market oriented context was identified, especially in some of the new EU member states in Central and Eastern Europe. This distance between such diverse backgrounds led the Authors of this book to select common key subjects: private actors, involved in local regeneration programs, and non-profit organisations, seen as a new subject playing a relevant role within the social arena. The research project offers an overview of the past decade: - the implementation of integrated policies in most countries following a long tradition of spatially oriented initiatives; - new projects in those countries that consider the real estate market as the only solution to regenerate deprived neighbourhoods. The question: can the development of local urban scenarios benefit from a comparative study of national cases?