Anne Power
Professor of Social Policy and Deputy Director of the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, LSE
Since 1965 Anne has been involved in European and American housing and urban problems. In 1966 she worked with Martin Luther King's 'End Slums' campaign in Chicago, and on her return to Britain organised community-based projects in Islington, Hackney and Tower Hamlets. From 1979 to 1989 she worked for the Department of the Environment and Welsh Office, setting up Priority Estates Projects to rescue run-down estates all over the country. In 1991 she became founding director of the National Tenants Resource Centre at Trafford Hall in Chester (now the National Communities Resource Centre), which provides residential training and pump priming support for people living and working in low-income communities.
She became a Professor of Social Policy at the London School of Economics in 1996 and is Deputy Director of the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at the LSE. She is responsible for ESRC sponsored longitudinal research into the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods in Britain’s cities. She is author of many books, reports and articles on housing, cities and low-income communities and is currently writing up findings from a long-run study of 200 families living in low-income communities in East London and the North.
In 1999 she became a member of the Government’s Sustainable Development Commission. She was directly involved in the report on “Mainstreaming Sustainable Regeneration” which collected 70 live case studies on which to base its findings. She reviewed the Sustainable Communities Plan for the SDC and is currently involved in work funded by the ODPM to develop resource efficiency through renovation of existing stock. She is also involved in the Climate Change Steering Group because buildings are the single biggest contributors to climate change and cities use energy and create waste vastly more intensively than is sustainable in the future.
She was awarded an MBE in 1983 for work in Brixton, and a CBE in June 2000 for services to regeneration and promotion of resident participation. Anne Power was a member of the Urban Task Force in 1998-1999 and the Government's Urban and Housing Sounding Boards in 1997-2002. In 2003 she chaired the Independent Commission on Housing in Birmingham. Professor Power leads a team from LSE on a new study to produce a housing framework for the London Thames Gateway. She is a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution in the United States of America, and with Bruce Katz is developing a Europe-wide and American network of Weak Market Cities, aiming to help regenerate urban communities in a more sustainable way.
Her books and publications include: City Survivors (2007); Jigsaw Cities (2007) with John Houghton; Sustainable Communities and Sustainable Development: a review of the Sustainable Communities Plan (2004); East Enders (2003) with Katharine Mumford; Boom or Abandonment with Katharine Mumford (2003); Cities for a Small Country with Richard Rogers (2000); Estates on the Edge (1999); The Slow Death of Great Cities? Urban abandonment or urban renaissance (1999) with Katharine Mumford; Dangerous Disorder (1997) with Rebecca Tunstall; Swimming Against the Tide (1995) with Rebecca Tunstall; Hovels to High Rise (1993); Housing Management: a guide to quality and creativity (1991); and Property Before People (1987).
