The aim of this dissertation is to study the city-region level impacts of urban planning, regeneration and development interventions on neighbourhood deprivation over time, using London as the main case study. Those interventions are often considered by many working in planning and design as instrumental to uplifting the quality of life of the neighbourhoods through better housing, increased economic activity and improved environmental conditions. However, so far, city-region level investigations are rare. Lack of good quality data and effective statistical and econometric tools are shown to be the main barriers to carrying out city-region level analyses of such impacts. To fill the important gap in the field, a novel panel dataset is established at the Census Lower Layer Super Output Area (LSOA) level from 1998 to 2015 through incorporating the Indices of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) with a wide range of neighbourhood level data, including the designations and adoptions of Opportunity Areas (OA) and Regeneration Areas (RA), the completion of housing and other floorspace, house prices, earnings and crime rates in the context of the specific development trends among the London boroughs. To our knowledge, this is the most comprehensive and fine-grained dataset assembled to date.

I then apply a series of interlinked econometric models which include pooled ordinary least squares (OLS), fixed effect (FE) panel with borough-level clustering effects and generalised methods of moments (GMM) regressions to the established dataset. Through exploiting the fact that the pooled OLS and FE models are respectively biased upwards and downwards with the quantification of the autoregressive effects, I was able to check and refine the GMM models which are theoretically expected to be superior. I also take into account a significant extent of spatial spillover effects in this modelling.

The findings from the case study show that, having controlled for a wide range of lagged and simultaneous influences, the strategic planning initiatives that are represented by the OA, RA and housing developments have had a highly significant influence on the deprivation reduction in Greater London. This demonstrates the value of strategic planning through the successive London Plans. The analyses and modelling have also uncovered a number of areas for improved data specification and collection, which have the potential to refine the resolution of the results.