One could hardly expect an organisation that spent over £22m on marketing to leave the scene without a self-congratulatory history; and exhibiting precious little originality to the end, Cardiff Bay Development Corporation (CBDC) duly obliged a few weeks before its demise with the publication of Renaissance, The Story of Cardiff Bay 1987-2000. To be fair, the document is one of the better examples of its genre, but its virtues simply highlight inadequacies in the scrutiny of, and debate about, urban policy in Wales over the last twenty years. It reminds us that the CBDC's history point up some major challenges for the Welsh Assembly and the new, inclusive way of conducting public life which it hopes to foster…

…Renaissance peddles the tendentious narrative which is the stock in trade of Cardiff's boosterists: by the 1980s "the docklands [which had] given the city its wealth... had been disinherited" (p. 23) (by mechanisms which are never analysed) and the CBDC emerged as the area's saviour, providing the only hope of salvation where all else had failed and, in so doing, helping to turn Cardiff into a world-class maritime city…

…Here's a sketch of an alternative narrative of Cardiff Bay: for fifty years the political priorities of business and the labour movement in Cardiff were on developing suburban housing (for sale and rent) and on securing the future of city centre businesses (especially retailing) and a few big industrial employers. The port was perceived as largely irrelevant to the city's economy and its politics; the Docks' resident population was a nuisance - seen alternatively as threatening or pitiful. To many, the area was a world of its own, largely irredeemable. Of course, these views once translated into the practices of employers, of councils, of schools, of sports clubs and the other institutions of everyday social life helped ensure that the Docks was out of the social, economic and political mainstream of the city. But times change; when the physical limits of the suburban expansion are in sight, when there are fewer sites for office development in the city centre, and when even the Trades Council admits that attracting large-scale manufacturing employment to Cardiff is unrealistic, then a number of powerful interests - developers, construction companies, even the organised labour movement - might see a need for at least exploring the redevelopment prospects (i.e., the chance for profitable development) in the long-forgotten Docks. It wouldn't take much examination to conclude that property development couldn't be profitable in the Docks without being underpinned by public sector action on three fronts: first, investment in basic infrastructure; second, a clear governmental commitment to the area to underpin investors confidence (i.e., redevelopment would not be allowed to fail); third, some strategy for changing the area's image - i.e., for burying the demons which those outside the area had conjured up in the first place. There was no great concern for social justice or for local people - except to the extent that gross injustice might inflame social tension and threaten investor confidence. Enter the Cardiff Bay Development Corporation with a remit easily interpreted as largely about creating profits for big business while pacifying and rendering invisible local people. Unfortunately, nothing it has done - least of all its memoirs - will undermine the cynicism of those who know anything of Butetown, its residents or its place in the history of Cardiff.