Why has working with lifestyles become so important?

The ultimate aim of ReUrbA is to make urbanised areas more appealing. Of course, the question is: appealing for whom? First of all, the groups in place play an important role here. A characteristic difference between urban regeneration and building projects on farmland is that urban regeneration always has to deal with established social structures. Often, the concentration of socio-economic problems among established social groups in a city or a neighbourhood is precisely the reason why investments are made in the existing urban area. The issues that have to be addressed here are: how can get to understand the established social structures, how can we prevent selective migration of people from these groups, and how can we invest the established social structures with significance for the purposes of urban regeneration plans?

Secondly, the wish to establish a more balanced population profile often plays an important role. Towns want to retain groups with substantial incomes and levels of training but it is precisely those groups that have been leaving the towns in recent decades. The question here is what we should provide in order to keep these groups in the towns.

In both cases, the important issues are the reasons why people settle in particular places and wishes relating to patterns of behaviour. In recent decades, those patterns of behaviour have become increasingly detached from the classic demographic and economic indicators.

After World War II, European cities faced such enormous shortages that the emphasis was placed on quantity: the production of housing. People forced to live in attics in their parents' homes wanted homes of their own. The question of what those homes looked like was less important. Once the most urgent quantitative demand for homes had been appeased, there was more demand for quality.

It will be clear that current housing stock and industrial estates fall short in qualitative terms. In the 1970s and 1980s, residential neighbourhoods were rebuilt because of their poor condition. These days, rebuilding is motivated by market considerations: the unbalanced approach to building in the postwar years no longer meets present-day quality demands. We have moved on from 'every man a home' to 'every man his home' .

The 1980s saw the emergence of city marketing in government circles. Although the concept was often confused with simple promotion, it was initially a serious and broad-based attempt from government to focus more deliberately on demand before providing new industrial estates and housing locations. The aim was to switch from the supply to the demand side.

At the end of the 1990s, it began to emerge that it was not enough to work with target groups on the basis of well-established indicators such as income and age. In the meantime, society had become so prosperous that large groups of individuals were in a position to make more individualised choices

based on personal preferences and taste. The increasing prosperity resulted in the rapid erosion of the 'constraints and controls' that used to be such a feature of society in general. The erosion of this 'gentle coercion' resulted in more liberty for individuals to structure their lives in accordance with

their own preferences. (This is, for example, clearly seen in the change in thinking about marriage: relationships before marriage, living as a single person or cohabitation have become socially acceptable.) As a result of this increase in opportunities for the expression of personal preferences, quality requirements have not only become stricter but also much more diverse.

Because taste has acquired a position alongside quantitative demands, a lifestyle approach has also emerged alongside a target-sector approach. Thinking in terms of lifestyles is necessary in a world where a person's origins, religion, profession, address and traditions determine behaviour less, and where individual choices determine behaviour more and more. As such, lifestyles are not new; what is new is that lifestyle as a determinant of behaviour functions much more independently of sociodemographic and socio-economic characteristics than used to be the case.

There are therefore major advantages to an approach using lifestyles:

• it allows policymakers to get to grips with preference differentiation better than if they use targetgroup classifications alone;
• it lays bare new links that are independent of target groups, and patterns of consumer behaviour in various contexts (lifestyle affects residential preferences but also leisure activities, the use of facilities, etc.; it makes possible an integral approach);
• it makes it possible to find a middle way between thinking exclusively in terms of target groups (something which is no longer adequate) and hyper-individualisation (in which every individual has a unique pattern of demands and which can no longer serve as a basis for policy).

The aim of a lifestyle approach is not to create idealised communities but to come to grips with the real patterns of behaviour of groups of clients.

Our hyper-individualised society can no longer be dealt with in terms of target groups alone; an approach using target sectors is no longer adequate to predict somebody's behaviour.

Increasing prosperity has also resulted in greater mobility for many groups of people. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, people have been prepared to structure their lives within 'an hour's journey'. But the distance they can travel in that hour has increased dramatically, with a corresponding dramatic increase in freedom of choice for the populace and business. Home and work have become disentwined. This means that towns have often been confronted, both in the past and the present, with selective migration: people move to the suburbs if they are in a position to do so.

This increase in freedom of choice for the consumer is, in principle, balanced by the freedom of choice of the supplier, the town. If this mechanism is to function properly, the town must have the right products to offer because the competition has increased considerably.

This makes it more necessary for policymakers to take an active approach to devising new combinations of supply and demand that cater to different tastes. At the same time, if they do a good job, they will establish a broader reach, allowing them to cater to new niche markets.

Lifestyles can be used to determine what specific products a town must create (i.e. lifestyles as a way of shaping the substance of the concept). And people can then be convinced to move to the town on the basis of lifestyles (i.e. lifestyles as a tool for selecting a specific look for marketing purposes in order to attract specific groups).