It's not just clothing fashions and home furnishings which seem to come round again every 20 years or so.
We do the same in government, but don't have the massed ranks of fashionistas and design gurus to remind us of how this time differs from last time.
Take Total Place, for example. We have been here before. In the 1970s, three major action research projects were funded by the Government in Lambeth, Small Heath in Birmingham, and in Liverpool 8.
Collectively known as the Inner Area Studies, they examined in great detail the effects on inner-city deprivation of housing, unemployment, sickness and the – then only just emerging – issues of racial tension and discrimination.
Of particular relevance to the current interest in Total Place was the pioneering attempt to measure all the public resources going into the Liverpool 8 area, and then to see if better deployment of those resources could have a more positive impact on the problems of inner-city deprivation.
