Julian Dobson
intelligence and inspiration
for better living
Profile
Writer and facilitator specialising in regeneration, placemaking and social change
Publishing | Sheffield, United Kingdom, GB
Summary
My aim is to share ideas about improving towns and cities, and to see what grows. I do that by writing, facilitating conversations, speaking and listening, researching and explaining, connecting and encouraging.
I am a writer, editor, facilitator and consultant specialising in regeneration and sustainable communities - in other words, how to make the places we live in better and enable the people who live there to create better lives for themselves.
I was the founding editor of New Start magazine in 1999 and was editorial director until October 2010. I was editor of Inside Housing magazine from 1993 to 1998. I previously specialised in healthcare (the Health Service Journal), social housing and trade unions, having served an apprenticeship on local papers in Kent and South Wales.
Through Urban Pollinators Ltd I help people and organisations share learning and good practice, communicate in language people of all backgrounds can understand, manage editorial and communications projects - and much more!
I am a Fellow of the RSA and a voluntary board member at the Centre for Local Economic Strategies.
You can also find me at http://twitter.com/juliandobson
I am a writer, editor, facilitator and consultant specialising in regeneration and sustainable communities - in other words, how to make the places we live in better and enable the people who live there to create better lives for themselves.
I was the founding editor of New Start magazine in 1999 and was editorial director until October 2010. I was editor of Inside Housing magazine from 1993 to 1998. I previously specialised in healthcare (the Health Service Journal), social housing and trade unions, having served an apprenticeship on local papers in Kent and South Wales.
Through Urban Pollinators Ltd I help people and organisations share learning and good practice, communicate in language people of all backgrounds can understand, manage editorial and communications projects - and much more!
I am a Fellow of the RSA and a voluntary board member at the Centre for Local Economic Strategies.
You can also find me at http://twitter.com/juliandobson
Specialties: Placemaking and urbanism; editing, writing and editorial project management; training and facilitation; bridging the gap between policy, research and practice.
Experience
- 2009 - PresentVoluntary board member / Centre for Local Economic StrategiesAdviser on strategic direction and governance.
- Oct 2006 - PresentDirector / Urban Pollinators LtdUrban Pollinators is a practical think tank. We help people work through complex and challenging issues about placemaking, regeneration and society. We do that through research, writing, facilitation and training.
- Dec 1998 - Presenteditorial director / New Start Publishing LtdNew Start is the magazine for all involved in regeneration, economic development and sustainable communities. I was the founding editor of New Start and continue to work as a director of the company, with oversight of the editorial team and content. I write a regular column for the magazine and contribute occasional features, and am often involved in New Start's events.
- 1993 - PresentEditor, Inside Housing magazine / Inside CommunicationsEdited the national weekly magazine for housing professionals.
Education
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1978 - 1981University of OxfordBA in English
Posts
May 13, 06:46 PM
| Peabody flats, Westminster: what chance of housing low-paid workers there now? |
The other day I was talking to the head of a successful housing association. He’d been a chief executive for many years, starting out as one of the wave of young innovators who were going to change the world back in the late 1960s and early seventies.
‘When I started working in housing we had an expectation that the housing problem would be solved,’ he told me. These were the early days of Shelter, after the screening of Cathy Come Home. There was outrage at the conditions many families had to live in at a time when Britain was booming.
There have been some successes in housing policy since, and a fair few failures. There has been a proliferation of professors, and a merry-go-round of ministers. But the passion and belief are less easy to discover.
What's very easy to find is the glib dismissal of every problem as someone else’s fault. The housing market renewal programme, abandoned in the middle by the current government, is constantly cited as an example of the failure of large-scale regeneration programmes. There is much to be learned, as a recent paper from the Building and Social Housing Foundation makes clear: but there were also some important achievements that are now being rubbished.
The government’s solution, insofar as it has had one, has been to pull the plug, watch the thing unravel and then bung a few million at the worst areas in the hope that it will paper over the cracks.
Or take housing benefit. Ministers no longer talk about housing benefit as a social good that helps to keep low-paid people in decent conditions: instead they throw up their hands in horror and hope that by restricting the number of bedrooms people can use and capping the rents eligible for benefit payments, incentives will be created to bring down costs and end ‘under-occupation’.
For the first time since Shelter was formed in 1966, a government is actively reducing the quality of homes available to the people on the lowest incomes. Where once politicians set out minimum space standards for social housing, they now consider it a scandal if poor people have spare bedrooms.
Access to work and community networks are no longer considered important by many decision-makers. A century ago, Peabody was building homes for poor workers right on the doorstep of Westminster, in estates like Old Pye Street, Abbey Orchard and Horseferry; today, London boroughs like Westminster, Newham and Hammersmith and Fulham are looking to ship the poor or homeless out of the capital.
There may be a few who really believe poor people should be made to suffer for being poor (as if they don’t already). More probable is that faced with systems of byzantine complexity, they plump for easy propositions that go down well with voters. Is there a shortage of social housing? Make people live in fewer rooms. Are private landlords milking the housing benefit system? Curb the amount we pay (even if the tenant ends up having to plug the gap, or move hundreds of miles away). Are there too many empty homes? Find someone who’s recently presented a TV programme and hand him the job of sorting it out.
The real difficulty is the refusal to acknowledge difficulty. In 1942, when Beveridge identified his five giants of want, ignorance, disease, squalor and idleness, he had no idea how long it would take to defeat them or how hard the journey would be.
Yet the period of post-war reconstruction saw progress on a massive scale in the most unpromising of circumstances. Before rationing had been lifted, we had a national health service, the first national parks had been created and a string of new towns had been announced to replace the ruined homes of our bombed cities.
Now many of the houses built during that period and since need to be replaced; property speculation has widened the gap between the haves and the have-nots; and governments in the UK and across Europe are balancing the books at the expense of those who most require support.
As Rebecca Tunstall explained in her inaugural lecture as professor of housing policy at York University, the inequalities persist and are complex. The problems that so outraged and spurred on the founders of Shelter have not been solved, but manifest themselves in different ways.
We have to stop running away from complexity. At the same time we cannot afford to shy away from simplicity.
Housing, like so many other ‘wicked issues’ facing policymakers, is not an easy problem to solve. The market has failed on numerous counts; the state, too, has abandoned much that it did well and stuck with too much that it did badly.
It is unlikely that this government or the next will get it right. But what all governments can do is determine to do better: to learn from the past and adapt to new situations. The simplicity is about being clear about the objectives. For a while, in the 1940s and 1950s, governments of all political shades managed this.
The housing campaigners of the 1960s, like those before them from Ebenezer Howard to Joseph and Seebohm Rowntree, had clear objectives: better homes for people who were living in unacceptable conditions. It was both a visceral and an ethical response to a complex problem. They believed things could and should be different, and began to take action. Not every action was successful, but the objectives were clear enough: acceptable space standards, affordable accommodation, and comfortable homes that kept their occupants warm and healthy.
What policymakers tend to lack today is the simplicity to make the ethical judgement, clarity about the objectives, and the patience to deal with the complexities of putting that judgement into practice. Many of the survivors of the 1960s still think the battle against poor housing is worth fighting. Will a new generation have the passion and persistence to join them?
April 29, 11:42 AM
Speaking at a conference on ‘streetscapes’ last week, I issued a tongue-in-cheek manifesto: Just Say No to Benches and Bollards.
My grouse wasn’t with street furniture in itself, but the thoughtless spending of public money on ill-considered public realm improvements as a substitute for thinking through what would really bring people back to our high streets and town centres.
| Sheffield: a haven for traffic-watchers |
But I was (quite rightly) challenged about the Say No to Benches bit. Places to sit are especially important for parents, kids and older people: in an ageing society, we need to think about how people can stop and rest on their way to and from the shops, park, post office or wherever. Recent government work on Lifetime Neighbourhoods offers food for thought (and action).
But there are benches and benches. So – either as an act of contrition or provocation – let me offer you a small celebration of street furniture.
We’ll start in my home city of Sheffield. I imagine many were awestruck last year at the amount of care and attention given to the improvement of the roundabout at the junction of Eyre Street and Arundel Gate. The planting is a joy to behold, and it looks as if no expense has been spared on the paving and the benches.
Ah yes, the benches. Glossy and sensuous, with funky blue lighting beneath them. Who wouldn’t want to sit there? Possibly people who don’t get a buzz out of watching traffic go round roundabouts, or the few people who aren’t aficionados of Sheffield’s impressive range of bus services. Oddly, despite all the care that’s gone into this seating, I’ve never seen anyone using it.
| Glasgow: urban design for Nowhere Man |
Unfortunately there’s only room for four. And there’s nothing else to entice you to this little patch of nothing in particular, unless you happen to work there. A nice idea, but perhaps intended to be more symbolic of an idea of public space than something to be used.
At the other end of the country, the complete opposite: in parsimonious Portsmouth, bog standard benches and a couple of bins around a patch of unadorned paving will do. It reminds me of a piece I recently heard by performance poet Gav Roberts, ‘perfunctory parks for the oppressed’.
| Portsmouth: Here's a bench, now stop moaning |
Finally, let’s whizz over to Manchester, where an impressive new community park has just been opened in the east of the city, changing a run-down construction yard into a green space with artworks and places to sit. Could this be how to get it right?
It’s certainly an improvement. But the places to sit are… well, different. They are walls with angled coping that tip you into the grass behind, and odd little perches that, it seems, are intended to be leant on rather than sat on. Why create a space and then go out of your way to make it difficult to use?
| Manchester: we'd love you to sit here, but not for long |
So there you have it: you can have parks for the people, as long as they aren’t encouraged to sit on the seating. And you can have public space, but public use of it is another thing altogether.
April 23, 03:30 AM
| Farewell funky visions: now it's time to start small |
If your town centre is struggling, how should you think about the future? You can go for the sweeping, visionary redevelopment or you can work incrementally, with a series of small but significant actions.
Either way, you may be taking a leap in the dark. There’s remarkably little evidenceout there of what really works in reviving town centres, but a whole lot of experience of what doesn’t.
Sometimes the big visions involve the least amount of thinking. These are dreams handed down from on high, with promises of jobs and trade and shopping experiences to rival other towns and cities which have been slightly quicker off the mark in providing identical shopping experiences.
When the timing or the market is wrong, as in Bradford, you end up with a hole in the urban fabric that continues for years. Bradford put its eggs in Westfield's basket, and must now wait for Westfield to deliver its unique brand of retail salvation.
Or you could take Barnsley's approach. Barnsley is another Yorkshire town that fell on hard times in the last decades of the 20th century: more than 45,000 jobs were lost in the coal and steel industries.
Barnsley, like Bradford, bought into the big visions inspired by architect Will Alsop, the star urbanist of the Blair era, and huge amounts of public money were invested in 'iconic' buildings. But it took a different approach to its town centre. Crucially, it saw the value of its market as the hub of a twenty-first century market town and created opportunities for local entrepreneurs and traders to test their ideas through cheap and easy access to market stalls.
And just sticking with towns beginning with ‘B’ for the sake of neatness, you could also look at Brentford. Another town promised a big regeneration scheme; another town kept waiting. Here traders took the high street’s future into their own hands and started to develop their own vision.
This faith in local talent – whether promoted by the local council or generated from the ground up - has proved more visionary and effective than waiting for the proceeds of Big Development to trickle down to the masses.
Now, with the shiny promises of the developers reserved for the prime locations, and with public funding harder than ever to come by, the future of our high streets depends on smarter thinking rather than bigger thinking.
The outcome of last year's Portas Review helps to show us why. On the one hand, it has reflected and amplified a wave of creative approaches. No fewer than 363 localities applied for a share of a £1m funding pot, with only 12 likely to benefit (plus another dozen next year).
This creative energy needs to be channelled into action. But the government's offer of help will only scratch the surface, and indicates just how much national policymakers have been caught on the hop by the decline of our high streets.
On top of the money for the lucky two dozen Portas pilots, the government suddenly found another £10m last month for its 'high street innovation fund'. Those in the know say it was only discovered down the back of Eric Pickles' metaphorical sofa a week before the announcement.
The process of allocating the money to local authorities indicates why we need smarter thinking. The government picked the 100 local authorities with the highest numbers of 'non-domestic rate vacancies', which means that offices and factories were considered as well as high street shops. The result was that thriving Reading got money while Rochdale, where even McDonalds is leaving the town centre, didn't. Middlesbrough got money while neighbouring Stockton, which is in a worse state, didn't. Some councils have no idea what they are supposed to do with the funds.
In contrast, the applicants for the Portas Pilot funds have put together a wealth of ideas on a shoestring. These deserve to be developed in ways that link into wider local aspirations. But for most, the reality is that the support they need is unlikely to come from government. They will need to find ways of initiating the changes they want themselves.
This is where we need to think smarter, not bigger. Instead of waiting for the big developer or big funder to ride to the rescue, we need to start with the most valuable assets we have: ourselves, and our ability to rethink and reshape the places we live in. Sharing, encouraging and working up ideas for 'urban acupuncture' - targeted actions that show we mean business - has to be at the heart of that process.
That's why the team who produced the '21st century agora' paper that influenced the Portas Review are now running High Street Camp - an 'unconference' to bring together people who are already taking action to improve their town centres, and people who want to, but aren't sure where to start.
The idea is to focus on the practical, and on working together rather than listening to presentations from experts. It's about getting to grips with the reality that in most places and for most people, the difference we make will be down to us, and that whatever our limitations, it’s better to act than to wait for an imaginary rescuer. If that sounds good to you, excites you or even if it scares you, come and join us.
April 07, 07:40 PM
You’d need to be a prize curmudgeon not to be impressed by Titanic Belfast. As a building it's a worthy addition to a city that seeks to celebrate its skills and achievements.
| Titanic Belfast, seen from across the river |
As a visitor attraction it strikes the right note, avoiding the mawkishness that tends to accompany the Titanic story and providing plenty of information and context (though as this review by Jenny Muir points out, not everything).
But can it change the city that hosts it and help broadcast the message of a restored and revived Belfast to the world? I was there last week for a 'state of the city' debate organised by Belfast City Council and, inevitably, there were mixed views.
To understand Titanic Belfast you have to see it in context. There's the obvious historical context, 100 years after Titanic's launch and demise. It's a story that's recognised globally and Belfast deserves to benefit from that interest.
There's an emotional context too: drama, the family connections of the people who built the ship, travelled on her, died or survived. There’s the sense of pride and attachment: 100,000 people turned out to watch Titanic's launch in 1912 and four times that number are expected to buy tickets to Titanic Belfast every year.
The physical context is one many visitors may miss. Titanic Belfast is part of the Titanic Quarter (Belfast, neatly, has four quarters, though some ambitious ones accumulate more – Sheffield stopped at 11). It's a major redevelopment project on the site of the Harland and Wolff shipyard, an attempt to create an extension of the city centre on a 185-acre derelict site.
| In context: Titanic Quarter apartments |
There are already 400-plus apartments on site, the new home of Belfast metropolitan college, the Odyssey arena, the Paint Hall studios where Game of Thrones was filmed, and the offices of Citibank. Mike Smith, chief executive of Titanic Quarter Ltd, reckons the quarter has already brought an extra 2,000 jobs to the city (much needed at a time when the construction industry is struggling, tourism has slipped from its peak years in the mid-2000s and banks have stopped lending). Predictions for the number of jobs expected ultimately range from 25,000 to 35,000 to a highly speculative 60,000.
So is this an old-fashioned bit of civic boosterism, pumping public money into big ticket projects in the hope that the benefits will eventually trickle down to the locals? Clearly some think so: as several remarked at last week's debate, you can see Titanic Belfast from many parts of the city but that doesn't mean those parts of the city feel connected to it.
To some extent this is the 'what have the Romans ever done for us?' argument you often hear from a city's taxi drivers (though less so in Belfast - in a bit of smart footwork, the Titanic Quarter's operators gave taxi drivers a sneak preview of the new attraction). It's an argument that deserves a response, especially when you look at the poverty and deprivation that persist in many parts of the city.
| Parkside: still waiting |
Take Parkside, for instance. These terraced streets, near Alexandra Park in the north of the city, are like the worst of the housing you'll find in parts of Liverpool or east Lancashire's mill towns: a few hardy residents hanging on to their homes while those around are abandoned and boarded up, roofs gaping as they await a regeneration project that never seems to happen.
Alexandra Park itself is also a poignant symbol of a past the city is trying to put behind it. A gorgeous Victorian park, it's bisected by an 'interface' that prevents residents from one community crossing to the other. Despite recent efforts to open the fence at certain times, it is a depressing reminder than some communities only feel safe when others are kept away.
In such a context, what use is the Titanic Quarter? A better question, perhaps, is how useful can it become?
| Just a few streets away from the Parkside terraces |
By itself it certainly won't regenerate the city. Trickle down economics involves a double bind. The benefits of success are received disproportionately by the better off, and hardly at all by those at the margins of society. The consequence of failure is that the whole city is poorer, and the impact is felt most by those who have least.
This is why we need 'trickle up' as much as the headline-grabbing schemes: investment in actions at local level that enable people to build their own economic capacity and quality of life. But just as the big investments can't be isolated from their context, neither can action at a neighbourhood level be divorced from the city as a whole.
Belfast council has tried to bridge this gap in its draft investment strategy for the next few years. Its first underpinning principle is 'good relations and equality' - a phrase that might be public relations flannel in some cities but has many layers of meaning in Belfast.
As the investment strategy acknowledges, ‘many of our citizens continue to live parallel lives, with some communities still separated by physical barriers’. It goes on: ‘It is no coincidence that the poorest neighbourhoods in Belfast continue to be those located in and around interfaces and flashpoint areas.’
Joining all this up is no easy task. It doesn't happen by itself, or by writing strategies. Those with resources, whether political, financial or cultural, have to be intentional in their actions, deliberately seeking ways to build bridges and create opportunities.
| Alexandra Park: parallel lives |
In a city like Belfast (but not only there – think of Liverpool, Luton, parts of London) it's also particularly important to create spaces of shared experience and identity. Titanic Quarter offers an opportunity to do this, building a place that feels connected to the city centre as a place for everyone, and not just one that is open to all but where everyone is encouraged to and express and develop themselves, create and make new stories.
Mike Smith described Titanic Quarter as a 'neutral place' where people could gather and mix without cultural or political baggage; taking issue with that, local councillor Christopher Stalford said it had to benefit the local community in East Belfast. It does need to provide local benefits, but not only for East Belfast: all communities need to feel they have access to it and can gain from it. In that sense neutrality is not just an absence of conflict: it’s a positive move towards building commonality.
| New Lodge mural |
Cities are complex and contested places and politics is not something you can or should massage away. But neither should it stand in the way of people using and enjoying civic space as they would in any other city - being grown-up enough to have . Creating connectedness, as Belfast Interface Project has shown, is a long haul. If public investment can make new spaces that enable people to connect and celebrate together, that is a benefit of at least as great a value as the spending power of the tourists who come to enjoy Belfast's hospitality.
A senior council officer told me his hope was for a city that is shared, not just shared out. That view should strike a chord in many cities whose divisions have been less public, but are no less real.
April 17, 09:11 AM
Suddenly there are pots of money to transform high streets all over the place. The government has announced its long-awaited response to the Portas Review, and you can't accuse them of sitting on their thumbs.
There will be £10m split between 100 towns for 'high street innovation', with a call to local authorities and landlords to top up the fund to encourage business start-ups and bring empty properties back into use.
There's another £1m for the excruciatingly named Future High Street X-Fund, which is a competition to encourage towns to revive their high streets. And, in an announcement which will warm the cockles of Mary Portas's heart, there's be a National Markets Day. Half a million for business improvement districts will help develop new approaches to town centre management.
What's more, there will be more 'Portas pilots' testing out new ideas, after the initial £1m scheme was hugely oversubscribed and criticised for its tiny budget in the face of a growing problem.
But the real announcement on the future of high streets came earlier this week with the publication of the National Planning Policy Framework. In all the qualified whooping from the likes of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, which saw it as a defeat for proposals originally described as a developers' charter, much of the content on town centres was overlooked.
The framework is better news for town centres than the original draft, and to that extent Mary Portas should be happy. There is a clear recognition of the important roles town centres play, and that they have a wide variety of functions as well as shopping. Development should be on previously-developed 'brownfield' sites wherever possible, which is positive; and there is a clear sequential test which states that councils 'should require applications for main town centre uses to be located in town centres, then in edge of centre locations and only if suitable sites are not available should out of centre sites be considered'.
This is helpful compared with the original proposals, but Mary Portas doesn't feel it goes far enough. She is right to be cautious: a decade and a half of 'town centre first' policies has not stopped people flocking to out of town centres. The horse has bolted, and taken its shopping bags with it.
The real problem is that neither today's announcement nor the NPPF address the underlying issue, which is that the high street is on a long term trajectory of change. The Genecon report, Understanding High Street Performance, [pdf] made that crystal clear. If you don't have time to read it, watch the news instead: a record number of vacant shops, and retailers continuing to struggle.
Remember too that online shopping will only exacerbate this trend, irrespective of the performance of the economy or of government. One sign to watch is what happens when leases come up for renewal (and half of all high street and shopping centre leases will expire in the next three years). There is a steady trend among big-name retailers to reduce the number of stores and focus on prime locations, and no logic that says this will change. Add in new waves of bank branch closures (Lloyds and Santander, just for starters) and you can see that change in our high streets is only going to accelerate.
So the key question to ask is what kind of change do we want, and how are we going to use the limited resources on offer to help achieve it? Last year, in a submission to the Portas Review, I brought together a range of thinkers and doers to rethink what our high streets could be like. You can download it here, or view presentations on Slideshare that sum up some of the main points.
The core of our argument was that we need to begin by thinking of the high street as the social heart of a town or suburb, not just the commercial heart. We need to reclaim town centres for community activity, learning, leisure and living. Viable retail and economic uses can then cluster around activities that people want to engage in, and in places they want to go to. Our main shopping spend went out of town years ago, and is now going online.
If the government money helps us do some radical rethinking about what our high streets are for, that's excellent. If it just tries to subsidise activities that are declining it will be wasted.
The good news is the rethinking doesn't have to be done within parameters set by government, local authorities, landlords or the retail industry. All are important but none should have a right of veto over what happens in our towns. We also need to encourage and support 'just do it' solutions, such as the work of the Empty Shops Network, the local planning of Chatsworth Road, Hackney, or the town centre greening of Incredible Edible Todmorden. And we need government, landlords, local authorities and retailers to engage with these movements, because this is where the innovation and energy is.
To encourage and share this 'just do it' approach, the people behind last year's submission to the Portas Review are putting on High Street Camp, an 'unconference' which will bring together people who are making stuff happen now, or want to learn from and share ideas with others who are doing so. The venue will be in Willesden Green, north London, and we'll have fuller details very soon. Keep Friday 25 May free if you'd like to be part of it.
March 23, 05:38 AM
The conundrum of community action is that it doesn't fit comfortably into anyone's system or narrative. We're dealing with the continuous struggle to make a messy world better for all of us, and we don't have a theory of mess that is really up to the job.
This is not for want of effort among generations of community development practitioners, psychologists, systems thinkers, communitarians and, more recently, apologists for the big society. There is a consensus that community empowerment is a Good Thing. The consensus drifts apart when you start to probe what it might be good for.
This is why the 'cover for cuts' narrative is so powerful. Government talks the talk of community. At the same time, and very visibly, it removes some of the supports communities have relied on. QED. But beware simple narratives.
The Department for Communities and Local Government (which some might consider an oxymoron in itself) appears to genuinely want to devolve power. It has been having a series of conversations about how to, in its words, 'mobilise neighbourhoods'. It recognises that the new community rights set out in the Localism Act won't mean a thing if nobody takes advantage of them.
I was involved in one of these conversations this week, and while it was clear that civil servants want to encourage neighbourhood action, it was less clear what they wanted neighbourhood action for. This is important because one of the critiques of the government's community organising programme is that it encourages local residents to see their local councils as the root of their problems.
For me, what is missing from the conversations is clarity about what neighbourhood mobilising is for, a full appreciation of the context, and an understanding of the consequences. All these issues are far too complex and rich in detail to cover adequately in a blog post, so this is just a sketch of the territory we need to explore.
First, clarity. Why do we want to neighbourhoods to 'mobilise' anyway? I've seen neighbourhoods mobilising against mobile phone masts, planning applications, and Gypsies. Presumably this isn't what government has in mind. I've also seen people get together to plant vegetables, fight crime, and organise celebrations. Read what Eric Pickles has to say and you could conclude this is the government's agenda.
I am always impressed and often inspired by the latter form of community action. But I'm perplexed at the notion that central government has much of a role at this micro level. If there is one, I'd argue - as others did - that it should be to facilitate networking and the sharing of learning, a role that's vital but not hugely burdensome for a government department.
There's a more important agenda, though, that hasn't been clearly articulated. This is about resilience and enhancing people's ability to take control of their own lives and environment.
The fear is always that this will be done at the expense of outsiders; however, I'm encouraged when I see evidence that ordinary people are often far more generous and welcoming than politicians expect them to be. Projects like Sheffield's City of Sanctuary would never have come out of central government policy, irrespective of the party in power.
The reason we need to encourage community action for resilience and mutual benefit is to do with the context. An ageing population, continued economic stagnation (at best) and the likely consequences of climate change will all put growing pressures on state finances. And in the immediate future, the spending choices of this government are ratcheting up the pressure on the most deprived neighbourhoods.
The announcement in Wednesday's Budget that another £10bn would be cut from welfare spending went largely unremarked, but if will do real damage to the lives of people who are already at the bottom of the heap. Many who do have jobs are also struggling (see this case study, for example). What's more, the services they rely on are being reduced and these reductions will continue, as this article by Tony Travers makes clear.
So part of the context is that we have to mobilise communities just to get by. I heard this week that three new food banks are due to open in Sheffield, helping people in crisis who can't put bread on the table. The Trussell Trust now has a network of 170 food banks across the country. In a nation that pioneered free healthcare and decent pensions, a growing number are finding times when they struggle to feed their families.
And this is why we need to think about the consequences of mobilising communities. The benefits of encouraging people to look after each other and build mutual reliance are obvious. The benefits of community control and ownership are more contentious, given that physical assets often turn out to be liabilities, but there is still a lot to be said for giving local people the right to occupy and use assets that others are neglecting.
Where it gets interesting is that when communities mobilise they start to want to tackle injustices, real or perceived. Often government is seen as the perpetrator. The consequence of encouraging community action in areas that feel they are taking a beating from government may well be an organised backlash against government.
This will put localists on the spot, as I indicated in last week's post about the West Kensington and Gibbs Green estates. The natural and political reaction will be to pull the plug. A more farsighted approach will be to risk the backlash because campaigns of opposition can build community. If the real objective is to enable people to become more self-reliant, a bit of red-blooded campaigning might be just what the doctor ordered.
March 16, 05:41 AM
| West Kensington estate: move along now, nothing to see here? Picture by West Ken and Gibbs Green |
With other speakers at the event organised by the Our Society network, Jonathan Rosenberg, who helped set up Walterton and Elgin Community Homes, set out some of the tests by which we could judge the government’s intentions (you can read more about them here).
One of those tests was that the government should take seriously the rights of social housing tenants to choose how to run their homes. In particular they should implement an obscure but important bit of legislation, Section 34A of the 1985 Housing Act.
The effect of this would be to give tenants and residents of local authority estates the right to take their estates over and run them themselves.
This would have a similar impact to the ‘tenants’ choice’ rules which enabled residents to take over the Walterton and Elgin estates when Westminster Council wanted to sell them for development in the 1980s. More than 20 years on, residents of Hammersmith and Fulham’s West Kensington and Gibbs Green estates face a similar challenge, with plans to demolish their homes to make way for the redevelopment of Earl’s Court.
Barely a whisper was heard from government about this test of community power until now. Yesterday (15 March) housing minister Grant Shapps announced a consultation on what he described as the ‘right to transfer’ – effectively, putting S34A into effect.
As Mr Shapps put it:
‘I want to make it easier than ever for council tenants to take charge of local services, from minor repairs to major regeneration. And it will no longer be acceptable for councils to dismiss tenants' proposals for improvement out of hand. Nobody knows the needs of a neighbourhood better than the local community. Now I want to see tenants use these powers to prove us right.’
The residents' campaign believes this means ‘certain death’ for the Earl’s Court scheme. But it is unlikely to be simple: the council and developers have staked an enormous amount on it going ahead. Planners recently approved the first stage, a housing development which needs to be built before the contested demolition can take place.
But it makes it much more difficult for the developer, Capital and Counties, to steamroller through its masterplan against the wishes of local people.
It will be interesting to see how Mr Shapps and his colleagues now play their hand. They have an opportunity to show they mean business about localism; but to do so will enrage a council that is one of the government’s strongest supporters, as well as developers who will highlight the economic gains to be achieved, if only those troublesome locals will move along.
Now as a year ago, it’s a big test for the big society. Will Mr Shapps stick or will he twist?
March 15, 04:14 AM
News that a Welsh town of just over three thousand people is being granted city status really does make you question what a city is.
| Urban is as urban thinks? |
Is St Asaph really much more than a cluster of houses around a cathedral? And if so, why should we consider it alongside the rising global megacities and mega-regions like Hong Kong-Shenhzen-Guangzhou, home to 120m people? Within two decades, according to the United Nations, 60 percent of t
he world's population will live in cities. That may well not include the population of St Asaph.
St Asaph, or even Perth and Chelmsford, the troika awarded city status to celebrate the Queen's diamond jubilee, are hardly what Ed Glaeser or Jane Jacobs had in mind in their respective celebrations of capitalism and community. Neither are they the stuff of Sir Peter Hall's monumental tome, Cities in Civilisation (though I understand his eminence would make an exception for Blackpool).
Nor do these towns - and let's not be mealy-mouthed about it, that's what they are - reflect the kind of totalitarian urbanism of Le Corbusier, which is anything but urbane:
'A city! It is the grip of man upon nature. It is a human operation directed against nature, a human organism both for protection and for work.'
There are cities like that, but you wouldn't want to live in them. Even Ebenezer Howard's garden cities, the quintessentially English attempt to fuse landscape and living, are a far cry from our new jubilee cities.
One thing our new cities have in common is a past, even if their future is questionable. Lewis Mumford, introducing his six hundred pages of musings on The City in History, argues:
'If we would lay a new foundation for urban life, we must understand the historic nature of the city, and distinguish between its original functions, those that have emerged from it, and those that may still be called forth.'
It is the calling forth that really matters. A city is not simply a label, or a size of population, or even simply an economic entity, although it is all these and more. Above all, it is a state of mind and a way of living. A village is contained: a city spills out and over and into. A town looks to itself: a city looks inward and outward and everywhere.
The idea of a city is a place where anything can happen, and frequently does. It is not the number of people alone that achieves this, but the variety and intensity of what they do, and the possibilities that emerge when they do things together. A city, if it is to function as a city, is a place of ideas and invention and creativity, drawing from the past and creating new futures with it. It is also a place of confrontation, where the ugly side of life cannot be avoided and human failings can't be kept behind closed doors.
Most of my working life has been lived in cities: in Cardiff, a compact cultural capital; the east end of London, a melting pot of cultures, needs and struggles; and Sheffield, a city that is learning to love and be enriched by its landscape instead of subjugating it. All have their character, and their thousands of characters that add up to a kaleidoscope of possibilities.
Can St Asaph, Perth and Chelmsford wear the mantle of 'city' with pride? If they can, it will be because they have learned to do far more than celebrate their past or their locations. Their people will have learned to think as city dwellers - ready for the the possibility of the unexpected, the challenge of facing injustice and inequality, and the serendipity of constant evolution.
March 08, 03:30 AM
It’s like your front room, but with pigeons and no chance of fighting over the remote. Welcome to the new world of telly-dominated public spaces.
| Waiting for the gift of sound and vision. Picture by PaulSh |
I like Victoria Square. Its public art, its use of different levels and sense of enclosure, and its position at the civic heart of Birmingham make it a great space. As Les Huckfield commented on Twitter, there are days when the whole of Victoria Square is ‘alive in an unrivalled cultural mix’.
No doubt some bright spark at the BBC thought the big screen would be a superb way of bringing this cultural mix together. There are big screens in 22 cities and towns now, a joint venture between the BBC, local authorities and the Olympic organising committee.
The BBC says, without the faintest hint of irony, that this will bring our cities to life:
Each screen is customised to reflect life in its community with a broad range of local content, including events listings, events and partnerships with community, arts and media organisations.
The promotional video says the screens will bring local communities together, and shows clips of people cheering at sporting events and ‘interacting’ with no doubt carefully crafted digital content.
Imagine that. Public spaces customised to reflect their local communities. Who’d have thought it? Luckily we have a huge national corporation to show us what to do.
Not everyone thinks this is a great idea. Following my initial comment on Twitter, people voiced their displeasure at the screens in Millennium Square, Bristol (‘embarrassing, blaring away to everybody and nobody’) and Manchester’s Exchange Square (‘horrible’).
Dan Gregory sarcastically tweeted: ‘Think of it as a brilliant piece of public art. What else could reflect the lives of the people of Brum than a supersized TV screen?’
The trouble is the people at the BBC really think that. They see the big screens as not only extensions of Olympic jollity but also as showcases for local talent.
I’m all for showcasing local talent. But seriously, do we need to mediate it through a giant screen and the BBC’s filters of what constitutes good taste and acceptable content?
The point about public space is that it’s a setting for the public – for people to make what they want of it, a stage for formal or informal performance, a place of meeting and conversation. The users of the space become its creators. Stick a 25 square metre screen in and everyone faces in the same direction.
In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, public screens were used to channel the energies of a cowed populace into the fury of the Two Minutes’ Hate. In today’s public spaces all you need to subdue the masses is a steady stream of cheery blandness, with occasional interjections by Robert Peston.
March 05, 03:37 AM
When I run workshops I often ask people to bring in a picture of somewhere they think is a great place. There’d be pictures of the Taj Mahal, the Golden Temple at Amritsar, or Bradford City Hall.
| It's a place... great. Picture by Jim Barker |
What he didn’t say, but is part of the Asda recipe, is that you don’t really have to interact with anyone else. You arrive in a box cocooned from other people. In the store what interaction you have is with the produce, not the other customers. At the checkout there might be a ‘good afternoon’ or a ‘thank you’ – or you could go to a self-service checkout and not bother with any of that. And then you’re on your way.
Urbanists, designers, and people like me throw their hands up in horror at such an approach to life. Where’s the civility, the animation, the variety, the interest? Where’s the sense that life isn’t entirely dominated by the need to shift goods and sell and consume and then come back for more?
And yet for many people the triangulation of life is the house they live in, the building they work in and the store they shop in. Huge vested interests work to keep it that way: to keep our heads down, our eyes half-shut and our minds half-closed.
It can be hard to escape the drudgery of life and the big retailers, the volume housebuilders and the purveyors of dead-end work do just enough to numb the pain of it all. There’s something to be said for not having to work harder than you must, living in a house where everything comes fitted, or doing all your shopping in the same big shed as everyone else. And the Asda car park becomes a great place: a place that is supremely functional and unchallenging.
You can quickly move from youth to middle age to tired old age in these great places, without noticing very much, feeling very much or changing very much.
Truly great places aren’t like that. But neither are they the upmarket, cultured alternatives for people with the resources to get their shopping delivered to them and the leisure time to idle in charming surroundings. The mistake many urbanists make is to imagine that great places are full of well-heeled people having polite conversations and sipping good wine in a pastiche version of a Parisian street café.
This too is a sanitised, dulled version of the real thing. A truly great place changes you. It makes you look twice and think twice. It stirs a reaction.
For me, a great place is the chilli in the curry. It may be a carefully designed place that succeeds in bringing unlikely people together, like Sheffield’s Peace Gardens; it may be one that brings a smile to your face or presents you with something you never quite noticed before; or it may be somewhere that acts as a challenge to its surroundings, to neglect and dullness and the despotism of the everyday.
Last week I was told about the Edible Bus Stop. A patch of uninviting grass by a bus stop in Lambeth, south London, once the site of homes bombed during the second world war, has become a communal garden.
A year ago this was just another drab weed patch. Two neighbours decided to do something about it, put out 400 leaflets and persuaded 40 people to turn up one morning and start digging.
Local people donated plants, a helpful councillor kept things sweet with the local authority, and a boring, uncared for space became a community hub. A street party last July was a roaring success. Next weekend (11 March) locals are getting together for a first anniversary dig to prepare for the new growing season.
The Edible Bus Stop is a great place for all the reasons that the Asda car park isn’t. Where Asda works at an industrial scale, the Edible Bus Stop is human. Where Asda is driven by commercial realities, the Edible Bus Stop demonstrates a reality beyond the bottom line.
Where Asda does away with interaction, the Edible Bus Stop encourages it. And where Asda’s profits help to fill the distant pockets of Wal-Mart shareholders, the Edible Bus Stop helps fill the lives of friends and neighbours.
You need deep pockets to dehumanise on an industrial scale. The good news is that you can rehumanise where you are, and you all you need to get started is imagination.
February 26, 05:55 PM
John Steinbeck's famous novel, The Grapes of Wrath, seems to have something for every age - and our own is no exception. It must be 25 years since I first read it, and I was struck by this passage on the relationship between tenant farmer and landowner.
Some of the owner men were kind because they hated what they had to do, and some of them were angry because they hated to be cruel, and some of them were cold because they had long ago found that one could not be an owner unless one were cold. And all of them were caught in something larger than themselves.
Some of them hated the mathematics that drove them, and some were afraid, and some worshipped the mathematics because it provided a refuge from thought and from feeling. If a bank or a finance company owned the land, the owner man said, The Bank - or the Company - needs - wants - insists - must have - as though the Bank or the Company were a monster, with thought and feeling, which had ensnared them.
These last would take no responsibility for the banks or the companies because they were men and slaves, while the banks were machines and masters all at the same time. Some of the owner men were a little proud to be slaves to such cold and powerful masters.
Steinbeck's account of the uprooting of sharecroppers in the Oklahoma dustbowl echoes the accounts of the Highland Clearances more than a century previously. Those too were done in the name of 'improving' the land. In the words of 19-year-old Grace Macdonald, writing in the early nineteenth century:
'There was no mercy or pity shown to young or old, all had to clear away, and those who could not get their effects removed in time to a safe distance had it burnt before their eyes.'
Evictions and removals continue, and still in the name of improvement. In Africa or South America it's about feeding cattle or felling timber. Nearer home it's often disguised as 'regeneration' (though it's really about property development, as I blogged here in the context of Earl's Court in west London).
The state or the local authority, given the opportunity, will often act with the same coldness and slavery to the machine of Steinbeck's owners, 'decanting' families from one place to another. Occasionally it's handled sensitively and with respect for the people who have made their homes in a place. More often than not, people are treated as an inconvenience.
Steinbeck goes on to make an important point about property and ownership. A tenant, about to be evicted, muses:
'Funny thing how it is. If a man owns a little property, that property is him, it's part of him, and it's like him. If he owns property only so he can walk on it and handle it and be sad when it isn't doing well, and feel fine when the rain falls on it, that property is him, and some way he's bigger because he owns it. Even if he isn't successful he's big with his property. That is so.
'But let a man get property he doesn't see, or can't take time to get his fingers in, or can't be there to walk on it - why, then the property is the man. He can't do what he wants, he can't think what he wants. The property is the man, stronger than he is. And he is small, not big. Only his possessions are big - and he's the servant of his property. That is so, too.'
What's that got to do with us now? Go to Greece and see what happens when the investors and lenders have no interest in the welfare of those they have lent to or the quality of their lives. Or, if Greece seems like a distant world, go down to your local town centre and ask how the owners of all the properties that stand empty are caring for the people who live there and the quality of the place.
That's why we can't create better places without getting to grips with asset ownership, and not just ownership but care. And it's why, for all its problems and pitfalls, community ownership of local assets should be encouraged and supported.
February 22, 07:45 AM
One of the best things about the current exhibition about high streets at the Lighthouse in Glasgow is the way it looks creatively at the possible futures for the high street as well as indulging nostalgia with artefacts and film clips from the past.
Many of its ideas about possible futures echo suggestions in The 21st Century Agora, the submission to the Portas Review I coordinated last year.
The thinking behind those suggestions was that we need to see the high street first and foremost as a social space where people can go to do things they want and that add value to their lives, not just to shop. The idea of the 'agora' was to reflect the ancient Greek marketplace which was not only a commercial space but also a civic and cultural one.
I spent most of yesterday in workshops organised by Architecture + Design Scotland exploring just how these ideas could start to transform our high streets, and what was preventing them happening.
My presentation was on the theme of 20 things you can do in your high street without shopping' - all of which are already happening or could do so with minimal effort.
But start to put them together and to layer in other activities, including public services and business start-ups, and you have the beginnings of a recipe for a place that rebuilds the character of a town, maximising the value created by the people who use it rather than extracting that value.
What's getting in the way? A lack of coordination and shared vision is a key issue raised by participants in the workshops. Property owners, retailers and local authorities all pursue their own agendas, despite mechanisms such as town centre management and business improvement districts that are intended to bring people round the table.
One difficulty is that it can be hard for a local authority to tell the difference between positive coordination, which animates and populates space, and risk-averse control, which prevents activity in the name of avoiding harm.
It can also be hard for investors and landlords, many of whom own property they never intended fo have responsibility for, to see that the days of regular rent rises and a steady income are over. They have been slow to imagine anything other than the traditional model of property ownership. But as some town centres teeter on the edge, the commercial value of many of these investments is becoming precarious. Owners can't just wait for a tenant to turn up that will pay the 'right' price.
So these owners, reluctant or otherwise, need to get involved in rethinking the use of their properties. They need to understand that non-commercial uses are not unprofitable - they bring diversity and footfall into town centres, shoring up the commercial activity that still exists and creating space for new forms of business.
Similarly, local authorities need to understand that thinking differently is a sign of progress, not of failure. I've come across council officers who are afraid to acknowledge the scale of the issues they face because they're worried it will flag up their towns as 'failing'. They're averse to every risk apart from the one staring them in the face: that failure will happen because they do nothing.
• See also this presentation and this one for more background and context.
• See also this presentation and this one for more background and context.
February 14, 04:48 AM
| The closure of Deep Navigation: picture by Janice Lane |
'The whole village was out on that mountain the day they blew the klaxon horn and the pithead was blown up,' she said. 'Then it just went very quiet. The jobs went and the shops closed.'
Shirley doesn't romanticise about the good old days of King Coal. The village was permanently filthy from coal dust; the women blocked the streets to campaign against the lorries that rushed through the narrow streets scattering pit spoil everywhere.
'I didn't care when the pits went - I used to pray to God every day for my husband to come home safely,' she said. 'You never knew when there would be an accident.' But she knew that when the mines went she lost much more than her fear.
Shirley's story had a happier ending than many. The spoil heaps and coal dust of Deep Navigation have now given way to a remarkable country park, with dippers nesting where once nothing could live. But, despite local people's best efforts to attract work to the area through facilities such as Wales's largest climbing wall, there are few jobs.
The regeneration of the Taff Bargoed valley has taken the best part of 20 years, and is not complete. Repurposing a place is expensive. Abandoning it can be even more costly, with an unseen price in terms of ruptured relationships, disrupted education and mental stress.
We're a long way from fully understanding the importance of place to wellbeing. We're beginning to do so with the natural world through the concept of ecosystem services - the way nature provides us with materials, regulates our environment, supports life and provides a setting for culture. But what about the cultural and psychological value of a pit village or a council estate?
Those who dream up grand plans and impose them over people's heads like to think of themselves as regenerators and placemakers. But they often fail to appreciate the value of place as a setting for everyday life, the sense of home people create in adversity. A recent study for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that such a sense of belonging was 'frequently rooted and constructed in the realm of the often mundane and everyday interactions between people in localised settings'.
Yet the grand planners assign no value to this sense of belonging. Quite the reverse: it's seen as a sign of stroppiness and ignorance. Take the West Kensington and Gibbs Green estates in west London, where local people want to take over their homes in the face of a council-inspired plan to demolish them to make way for the shiny redevelopment of Earl's Court.
| End of an era - beginning of a new one? picture by Janice Lane |
As Dave Hill explains in his blog for the Guardian, the conditional land sale agreement signed by Hammersmith and Fulham Council is far from a guarantee of new and better homes for local people. While the council says it is 'completely confident' that its deal with developers CapCo will create new homes and jobs, it also admits the agreement is an 'emerging document' which is far from finalised.
Grand planners have a long and frequently shameful history of uprooting people while promising jam tomorrow. Their schemes never factor in the loss of a community or the value of friendships, support networks and emotional ties that exist in a place. Those losses don't appear on their balance sheets, but must be borne in silence by the supposed beneficiaries.
No wonder people so often would rather fight the planners and stay where they are. Change happens and is sometimes unavoidable; but if we accounted more honestly for the effects of change we might start learning how to manage it better.
February 11, 01:16 PM
The other day I had to stay overnight in central Birmingham. Searching around for reasonably priced hotels, I came across a place called Bloc that I hadn't spotted before. The reviews were OK and the discount was good, and it looked comfortable enough.
| Look: no people! |
On arrival I saw more people than I saw at any other point during my stay: two. The place is designed for minimal human interaction - no breakfast room, no food other than vending machines on each floor, and one person on reception. The rooms are apparently designed to be exceptionally comfortable, and if your idea of comfort is a padded cell with a TV in the wall then you'd really have no reason to complain. 'Ambient' lighting and no windows create a permanent twilight. If you're the cat-swinging type there's no room to indulge yourself here.
What's fascinating is the way this experience of being shut in a glorified cupboard is presented as the ultimate in urban chic. Once you've stayed there you can start to read between the marketing lines: the off-site construction (stacks of boxes with a bit of cladding), the 'significant savings' and 'creative thinking' that result in 'something never experienced before at this price in the UK'. Check out the hotel's blog and you'll find they gave up listing local 'gems' in May last year when they'd reached the grand total of four.
The following morning I had breakfast in Brimingham's famous Victoria Square Cafe. It's a classic English city cafe, with full fry-up and a mug of tea for a very reasonable £3.75. While I was there suited men were checking their laptops; a young women who was obviously a regular came in with an order of Byzantine complexity, including detailed instructions about just how runny the fried egg had to be; and a troop of about 15 guys in hi-vis orange jackets and hard hats turned up for their morning break.It was busy, but the staff had time to chat to the customers and engage with them. The contrast with Bloc couldn't have been more striking.
You don't have to be gregarious to see how much poorer the experience offered by Bloc is. When you're with other people you can choose how much to engage with them - you can throw yourself into the conversation or just sit back and be a fly on the wall. But when conversation is consciously excluded from the experience, superfast wi-fi and satellite TV are a poor substitute.
Victoria Square cafe is reasonably priced because there are no frills. Bloc keeps its costs relatively low (if you can get a discount) by excluding human beings. What it spends on the fittings it saves on the payroll.
Most of us are looking for ways to cut costs right now. Sometimes you can do it in absurd ways, like building aircraft carriers without aircraft; sometimes you can create what appear to be smarter systems with fewer staff, which is a favourite resort of the public sector. But removing human interaction leaves us all the poorer. As public authorities and businesses prepare new rounds of cost-cutting, they need to be careful not to kill all conversation in the process. I'll happily go back to the cafe, but I won't be returning to Bloc's padded cells in a hurry.
February 02, 09:00 AM
You can imagine how people reacted. The idea of 'events in the gents' doesn't really bear thinking about.
Yet the anarchic enthusiasm of a bunch of people in Hackney to bring their local high street back to life says something about the way people care about their communities - even to the point of breaking into a boarded-up public toilet and reopening it as a 'pop-up shop’, a temporary space to showcase local talents.
The local council responded to this attempt to revitalise a bit of Britain's Victorian heritage with a Victorian lack of amusement, seeing the opening of the toilets as nothing but an inconvenience. The council wanted to demolish the toilets and build new shops; members of the local Clapton Improvement Society said there were enough empty shops already, and what was needed to support a vibrant new market was well-maintained toilets.
Events in the Gents is one of the more bizarre results of a campaign by residents and traders to bring life back into Chatsworth Road, a traditional east London high street. Within walking distance of the mega-mall at Westfield Stratford City! It offers a clue about how our high streets are to survive.
As well as the efforts of the improvement society, there’s a traders’ and residents’ association brought together with the help of Euan Mills, a local resident and urban designer. When the project started one in five shops were empty; now there’s a lively market that has even featured in Condé Nast Traveller, which wrote:
‘It’s a major hit…not only for its shopping pleasures but also for the days-of-yore snacks at What the Dickens, a gourmet coffee stand that’s manned by Victoriana-clad chaps who serve treats like devilled kidneys.’
Using social media and old-fashioned networking, Chatsworth Road traders and residents showed what could be done when people share knowledge, information and the will to make a difference. The problem now is how to manage the group's success and keep rents at levels affordable enough to maintain a diversity of independent businesses.
Events in the Gents and the Chatsworth Road market are the work of what Empty Shops Network founder Dan Thompson calls 'pop up people'. They are people who are prepared to experiment and take risks to inject activity and colour into our drab and declining towns.
They manifest what politicians and business leaders are often good at talking about but poor at doing: enterprise. And their enterprise often has public benefits many business people don't think about until they've made their millions.
As Dan puts it in a report launched today: 'Pop up people are truly entrepreneurial, even if their project is more about community then commerce.'
Dan talks about artists who are reviving empty spaces in Tooting Market in south London and Temple Works, a factory styled in the form of an Egyptian temple in Holbeck, Leeds. From Margate to Coventry and beyond, pop-up people are showing an imagination lacking in our clone town high streets.
A look at some of the facts and figures highlighted in Dan's report shows how much we need pop-up people. Empty shops are just the most visible reason, with 15% of our high street stores now vacant,
We have far more retail space than we need - 88m square feet built in the last 15 years in an unsustainable rush for quick gains. Four out of five supermarkets in the planning pipeline will be out of town.
You could add a fact that doesn't appear in the report, which is the recent prediction by property agents Jones Lang LaSalle that 50% of high street leases will come up for renewal by 2015. The chain stores which are already reducing the number of outlets as Internet shooting increases will pull out of more traditional high streets and concentrate on ‘prime’ locations. As they put it in an article for Property Week:
‘25% of high street and shopping centre leases are due to expire by 2013 and 50% by 2015... the next 24 months are likely to see a swift and dramatic playing out of this polarisation.’
As the prime minister prepares to respond to the Portas Review, we need to learn how to mobilise Britain's pop up people. But we need to match their entrepreneurship with an enterprising attitude among local authoirities, property owners and the large retailers - people who have the power to make places better but often fail to use it intelligently.
The idea of localism and the advent of neighbourhood planning creates an opportunity for local people to be much more assertive about the kind of towns they want. But there isn't much time - it really is a case of use it or lose it.
• Alongside the Pop-Up People report is a wiki explaining how to do it yourself and share learning with others, a film, and even some musical extras.
January 30, 05:11 PM
Not everything that counts can be counted; and not everything that can be counted counts. The saying, so famous it’s been attributed to Einstein, probably originated with an American sociology professor called William Bruce Cameron in the early 1960s.
It’s apposite that a discussion of measuring value should start with a mistaken attribution. It can be fiendishly difficult to prove cause and effect. This is why accountants exercise such unmerited power: Enron and Bernie Madoff notwithstanding, the bottom line is that they decide the bottom line.
As the famous Robert F Kennedy speech I quoted last week made clear, the measures of value preferred by accountants and economists leave much to be desired. In fact much that is to be desired is left out of their reckoning. So moves towards more rounded assessments of value, such as the Office for National Statistics’ exploration of wellbeing, are important.
One of the more promising bits of progress in the last year has been Chris White’s social value bill, which has just passed its second reading in the House of Lords.
The bill seeks to make sure that public service contracts can be let to organisations that provide the greatest social value, not just the cheapest price, and that greater weight is given to economic, social and environmental wellbeing. It’s an attempt to allay fears that greater diversity in public services will simply result in a free-for-all for sharks and charlatans.
| Who decides who's creating the social value? |
The history of our parks and green spaces over the last 40 years is a case in point. Ten years ago the Urban Green Spaces Taskforce estimated that 30 years of cost-cutting and compulsory competitive tendering had left Britain’s parks £1.3bn adrift of the investment required just to stand still. The last decade has seen a concerted effort to put that right, but now money is tight again and green spaces are an easy cut.
In times like these it’s important to restate the value created by projects and activities that aren’t seen as non-negotiable essentials like the NHS. One way to do that is to measure social value, and over recent years numerous tools have been developed to gauge ‘social return on investment’. There has been huge progress in finding ways to create economic proxies for the social goods like health and wellbeing, volunteering opportunities and community activities.
But there’s a catch. The burden of proving social value can fall on those least able to bear it. Community groups are being increasingly asked to justify the worth of what they want to do, and to do so in ways that satisfy budget-holders and funders who want in turn to demonstrate worth to those who fund them.
As well as doing the hands-on work of creating social value, local groups are expected to develop enough number-crunching and research capacity to prove the value of what they do to any prospective supporter. Once again, it's the accountants who decide the bottom line.
A recent study for Greenspace Scotland is revealing. It found the tools for measuring social return on investment (SROI) were complex and cumbersome, and were difficult to operate without additional help.
'From the outset there has to be a recognition that SROI requires time, resources and commitment,’ the study found. 'Even with support, the SROI process requires considerable commitment and enthusiasm from community group members.'
It was also extremely difficult to measure deadweight (outcomes that would have occurred anyway), drop-off (declining results over time), attribution (what caused the outcomes claimed as achievements) and displacement (activities that were happening elsewhere but now aren’t).
Doing this kind of exercise in a robust way would place a Sisyphean burden on community groups; it wouldn’t be surprising if many prospective participants, faced with the challenge of continuously proving the benefits of their work, decided not to bother. At this point it becomes legitimate to ask how you demonstrate the social value of measuring social value – is it done for the benefit of the community, or so that funders can answer auditors’ awkward questions?
From the perspective of policymakers there are good and clear reasons to measure and demonstrate social value. But from the perspective of those creating the social value, the blessings look more mixed.
The challenge to ‘prove it!’ concentrates the mind. But it can be used by those with power and resources as a way of withholding resources and power from those who lack them. And as we’ve seen in the case of planning appeals for out-of-town shopping and supermarkets, those with capital and clout are far better placed to commission research ‘proving’ the social benefits they bring than those without.
So let’s applaud Chris White’s bill when it becomes law, and let's commission proper research to measure the social value of activities that haven’t already been well researched and where the answers are in doubt. But shouldn’t we make sure, too, that social value doesn’t become yet another hoop through which ordinary people have to jump in order to make a difference where they live?
January 26, 08:10 AM
These are grim times. With the International Labour Organisation saying we need 600m new jobs worldwide, with the World Bank and the IMF warning of deepening problems, we need to know what our priorities are.
This week’s Davos World Economic Forum will offer one version of a future our leaders would like us to rally around. David Cameron called for bold leadership behind his approach:
‘We put forward an aggressive set of plans to get to our economy back on an even keel. £5.5 billion saved in the first financial year. Welfare bills – cut. The cost of government – cut. Public sector pay – frozen. The state pension age – increased.’
All in the name of getting our economy on track. But the results are those set out by the Resolution Foundation this week: as they put it, the squeeze on living standards is set to run and run.
And as they also point out, wages for the typical worker have been flat since 2003 – while the economy was growing. There is no reason at all to imagine trickle-down economics will work any better in depressed 2012 than it did in booming 2005.
Those savings in welfare, the cost of government, public sector pay and pensions won’t make a bean of difference to improve the lives of ordinary working people, even if they are tremendously reassuring for the better-off. So when ministers and opposition politicians focus on GDP growth as the benchmark for our performance, they’re asking the wrong questions.
They say that if you ask a silly question you get a silly answer. We need to ask the right questions. We could start by rewinding 44 years to Robert Kennedy’s speech at the University of Kansas in March 1968.
‘Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product...if we should judge American by that - counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.
‘Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.’
It’s a far bolder and more visionary kind of leadership that can look beyond deficits and GDP figures. It’s not one on offer at Davos. But I know which gets my vote.
January 22, 06:32 PM
Man Bites Dog is a fundamental law of journalism. Every wet-behind-the-ears junior reporter knows 'dog bites man' is not news because it happens every day.
Man Bites Dog, however, is enough to get the editor of the Back Street Bugle hurling his green eye shades across the room before yelling 'hold the front page!’ and furiously thumping his ancient typewriter,
The news-consuming public understand the Man Bites Dog rule. That’s why the stories most typically shared are (using Sunday’s BBC website as a random example), ‘Man did not notice nail in brain’; ‘Scotland’s secret artist mystery’; and ‘Schoolgirl sailor triumphs after battle with authorities’. In other words, the surprising, unusual or bizarre.
Politicians, though, disobey the Man Bites Dog rule. They take something outrageous and exceptional and use it to suggest a pervasive rottenness. Britain is broken, young people are feral monsters, and anyone claiming benefits is likely to be a scrounger, a cheat or a rogue.
Just look at the evidence, they cry. Work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith, fulminating against turbulent priests at the weekend in good Thatcher-era style, spluttered that there are people living in expensive houses claiming unemployment benefits.
Shouldn't the moralising bishops be more worried about Joe Taxpayer and working families who are ‘doing the right thing’? (Claiming benefits you’re entitled to, in Mr Duncan Smith’s book, would seem not to be the right thing at all).
Well, it wasn't that long ago that ministers were pointing to the fact that some people were getting more than £100,000 in housing benefit as evidence that the system was rotten. As it turned out there were about five of them. And that’s in the context of 4.92m people claiming housing benefit across the UK, financed by just under 30m taxpayers.
Politicians have always spiced up their speeches with anecdotes and examples, There's nothing wrong with that. But it becomes mendacious when an exceptional or exaggerated example is used to infer a generality. Remember Theresa May and the illegal immigrant allowed to stay because of his cat? She wasn’t making it up, she said. Except of course someone did make it up, and she repeated it.
Or take last week's pseudo-story about migrants, touted by two government ministers as evidence of a scandal because 371,000 people not born in the UK claimed out-of-work benefits at some point last year. It turned out that 98% of these claims were almost certainly legitimate.
In a big system - and it's hard to find one bigger than the tax and benefits system, which one way or another affects us all - there will always be abuses or anomalies, and the raw numbers will look quite large when you take them out of context.
But to argue that this requires a reform of the whole or justifies arbitrary cuts, such as the £26,000 cap currently proposed, is specious. It's like pretending we live in a world where men routinely go around biting dogs.
January 15, 04:54 PM
| 'Yes, Mr Shapps - I'm feeling better already!' |
Imagine a health service where there were no agreed standards of practice, no national resourcing and no way of knowing whether care in a hospital in Blackburn was any better or worse than in a similar institution in Brighton.
If that’s inconceivable, just take a hop along the road in Westminster from the Department of Health to the Department of Communities and Local Government, where this new approach is all the rage. Let’s call it laissez-faire localism.
Last November a parliamentary select committee produced a withering critique of the government’s paper, Regeneration to Enable Growth (see previous blogs here and here, and my evidence to the select committee here). The government’ has just published its response to the committee, which is to reassert the virtues of laissez-faire localism.
Faced with the criticism that the government’s approach was incoherent and failed to define either the nature of the problem, its causes or how any remedy was expected to work, ministers came up with the following statement:
‘At its core, regeneration is about concerted action to address the challenges and problems faced by the community of a particular place. It's about widening opportunities, growing the local economy, and improving people's lives. But beyond that high-level definition, it is not for Government to define what regeneration is, what it should look like, or what measures should be used to drive it. That will depend on the place – the local characteristics, challenges and opportunities.’
To stick with the health service simile, this is like saying health is about feeling well. But beyond that high-level definition, it’s all down to the patient and their local doctor. Illness is just something that randomly happens and how you deal with it depends entirely on your local circumstances.
When it comes to dealing with deprivation and disadvantage, Grant Shapps, the minister responsible (if that’s still a meaningful concept) asserts that local communities are ‘in the driving seat’ and catalogues the powers that have been devolved from Whitehall.
Devolving power is helpful, as are some of the new rights and initiatives listed in the latest iteration of the regeneration toolkit. I’ve argued for many years that governments need to trust local people to develop their solutions and give them greater powers to implement them. Real localism is about giving people the ability and resources to take action at local level.
But Mr Shapps is doing something else here, though the way it’s being presented is highly disingenuous. There’s a huge difference between delegating responsibility and abdicating it.
Laissez-faire localism doesn’t put communities in the driving seat. It leaves them to clear up the mess after others have driven over them. National and international market failures and the shortcomings of public policy are simply imagined away. Laissez-faire localism pretends localities are not interconnected, and it presents the results of national economic and social policy as purely local issues.
On the intellectual gossamer of laissez-faire localism are strung the hopes and aspirations of our most hard-pressed communities - communities that have borne the brunt of decades of economic change, frequently aided and abetted by central government.
Market failure and public policy failure are inconvenient truths, and the temptation to wish them out of existence must be irresistible. So Mr Shapps blithely passes the buck, even while market failure is happening on a gargantuan scale across the eurozone. It will lead to precisely the blight and deprivation that only a few years back would have had ministers running to announce regeneration strategies.
Mr Shapps would, and does, argue that the government is doing its bit. The regeneration toolkit lists all the scattergun initiatives sprayed out by central government over the last year and a half.
However there is no analysis of whether or how they will work together, how they are expected to achieve their objectives and how their success or failure will be assessed. Neither is there any serious acknowledgement of the context, which is a radical reduction of support to those areas most in need of regeneration.
In his defence Mr Shapps rewrites history, arguing: ‘We can't go back to the top-down, centralised system of the past which attempted to impose a one-size-fits-all approach to regeneration with little regard for the needs, circumstances and wishes of local people.’
There was plenty wrong with the regeneration initiatives of the past, but to say they were one-size-fits-all is at best a highly selective reading of the literature - if indeed the literature has been read at all.
In a global economy, it’s not only intelligent but essential for national governments to take an overview of the factors that lead to blight and deprivation, identify causes and consequences, and apply additional support where it is most needed - while at the same time promoting, working with, and responding to the local initiative and energy and knowledge of cities and citizens.
There is, thankfully, a foolproof and largely risk-free way for Mr Shapps to test the validity of his own thesis. If he seriously believes the government has no role in regeneration he should resign as a minister. By his own reasoning his job is redundant, and the salary could be more usefully spent on any number of local projects.
January 13, 06:10 PM
The Poor Law is the stuff of legend. It's what inspired the ire of Charles Dickens, the zeal of well-connected Victorian reformers, and the drive of politicians like Lloyd George.
Yet while the Poor Law is long gone Britain is a place where Poor Law attitudes prevail. Look at the government's triple defeat in the House of Lords this week and that might sound surprising. But then ask yourself why it was necessary and how much it will really achieve.
That's not to denigrate the intelligence and moral compass of many of the noble Lords who decided some of the provisions of the Welfare Reform Bill were a kick in the teeth too far for people who already find life hard enough.
Nor should we underestimate the achievement of everyone behind the Spartacus Report, a demonstration of what can be achieved when ordinary, apparently powerless people choose to work together to make their voices heard.
But let's take a look at the bigger picture. What started with some intelligent and ambitious proposals a few years ago from Iain Duncan Smith's Centre for Social Justice to create a coherent benefits system has turned into an exercise driven by a desire to save money, as if the measure of our achievement as a society was how little we spend rather than how much we help.
That's the mentality of the Poor Law: not what difference can we make, but how little assistance can we get away with? Check out the speeches of some of the peers in this week's debates, and some of the reactions from government ministers, and you'll see how little has changed. Listen to David Cameron or Ed Miliband most of the time and you'll find a consistent unwillingness to depict benefit claimants as people who have something to offer and not just something to take.
Of course we all know or have read anecdotes of abuse and examples of fraud. But politicians and commentators have taken those examples and foisted on us the untrue and poisonous generalisation that these stories typify the lives and attitudes of those on welfare.
So we allow the Poor Law mentality to take over, and then make exceptions for people who suffer from cancer or particular kinds of disability, as if their circumstances make them unlike other benefit claimants rather than similar to them. And we congratulate ourselves for resisting particularly Draconian measures while failing to challenge the doctrine of 'less eligibility' - that help should be a last resort given to the desperate, and so humiliating that people don't ask unless they really have to. It may no longer be the law, but it's certainly the mood of a substantial section of the public.
The problem with our welfare state is not than it gives people handouts, but that it considers the job done with the handout. It is very poor at enabling people to live in ways that make the most of their circumstances and build their skills and capacity. Yet in places or individual circumstances where there's no immediate and realistic prospect of work, that kind of help is what's needed.
If you talk to people who live in poverty you get a very different view of what life is like. Oxfam and Church Action on Poverty have been doing so for half a dozen years using a model called the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach, and have unsurprisingly found that when you have very few material resources in life, things like a home and security and certainty of income, even if the level of income is pitifully low, become hugely important.
People make trade-offs between security and extra income because they know that losing an insecure job or their home could tip them over the edge. Stress and loss of confidence can set off a vicious spiral of mental and physical health problems that reduce the likelihood of bouncing back.
The state doesn't have to be paternalistic or patronising in the way it provides help . The experience of the time banking movement shows how people in difficult life situations can improve their wellbeing through peer to peer networks. It's worked for people with head injuries in Hackney, mental health problems in Catford and in hostels in Cardiff. What's important is to provide the long term support and infrastructure to enable this to happen, rather than fostering an adversarial relationship that assumes claimants are trying to milk the system.
There are some signs that the government is ready to consider such approaches in its attempts to join up support for what it calls the 'most troubled' families. These initiatives are based on the understanding that it's actually better value (including better value for money) to help people manage and make the most of their lives rather than just punishing them when they fail.
The logic of support and making the most of what people have instead of judging them by what they haven't needs to replace the Poor Law mentality that is driving our welfare state into a blind alley of blame and hostility.
January 10, 06:03 AM
Soon there will soon be more episodes of the big society than of Star Wars. Like Star Wars, the big society’s narrative may eventually run out of steam; unlike Star Wars, it seems less likely to develop much of a cult following.
After being savaged by a cynical press and a jaundiced public, it might seem a surprise that there are people still trying to put a new gloss on the big society story. Yet there are, and it’s worth looking at what they have to say because it goes to the heart of some of the dilemmas in the interface between politics and social action.
Two particular papers stand out for me because they address the question of optimism and how we view human nature and human potential. One is from the conservative think tank, Policy Exchange, by the political historian Anthony Seldon; the other is for the Royal Society of Arts by the scarily intelligent Jonathan Rowson and colleagues.
Both see the big society as an essentially optimistic idea, in that it is based on a belief that human beings, all things being equal, are on a path of personal and social progress. They don’t go quite as far as to say that we are perfectible but they take the starting point that people need to be released rather than controlled.
| Have we got the mental complexity for a big society? Picture by April Gazmen |
Rowson quotes prime minister David Cameron"s statement that he has 'profound faith in human beings' (a point he's been less willing to make in the case of, say, benefit claimants) and points out that this optimism, which underpins his statements about big society, is unusual for a conservative.
But both papers suggest the idea has lost its way somewhat, and the solutions proposed are interesting if we’re to take the idea of optimism about human nature seriously.
Professor Seldon says some fascinating things about how the big society story can be re-energised through a focus on 'goodness', trust, optimism and forward thinking. He draws extensively on the ‘learned optimism’ theories of psychologist Martin Seligman, describing how a focus on wellbeing can build personal resilience.
But ultimately he plumps for the old-fashioned call of political pundits for more leadership, harking back to Margaret Thatcher as his ideal. The way the big society is to be realised, apparently, is through a political programme driven through determinedly (ruthlessly?) from the centre.
Rowson, as befits someone working for the RSA, is more abstruse. His paper outlines the ‘psychological foundations’ of a more participatory and involved society, drawing extensively on the developmental theories of Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan.
The thesis here is that we need to find ways to improve our ‘mental complexity’ in order to put the ideals of the big society into effect. ‘The big society has been presented as a vision, but lacks a strategy,’ he argues.
But he goes on to make the point that most people don’t have the mental complexity to develop and balance the ‘key competencies’ of autonomy, responsibility and solidarity:
‘Given that the majority of people are not at the order of mental complexity which is implicitly called for, architects of the big society need to engage with this neglected perspective, and consider revising their decision-making and policy announcements appropriately.’
In short, this tends towards technocratic solutions: it suggests that the rest of us don’t know what we’re doing, at least not just yet. While I’m sure most of us can plead guilty to this, I’m less convinced it provides us with grounds for optimism, given the scale of the challenges we face to live sustainably, build community and create a good quality of life fairly shared by all.
Both Rowson and Seldon assert or imply that we need to look to leaders or experts for help in finding a way forward. Yet if the big society ideas have any value, it is in the conviction that ordinary people themselves can develop solutions to the problems they face.
That belief in the potential of ordinary people is where I see grounds for optimism, though not necessarily grounds for optimism about the big society. That optimism doesn’t lie in giving intellectual or philosophical assent to ideas about the self-generated perfectibility of humanity, but in the evidence that change is possible in a world characterised by contradiction and conflict.
Whether the big society will be part of such a narrative of hope remains to be seen. My view is that while it is too diffuse to fit a conventional political narrative, it has become too loaded with political baggage to be adopted by most of those who are serious about social change.
Nearly three years after its original launch, the big society has been helpful in opening up a debate about a process of change in which people take more responsibility for their environment and community and start to take action at a local level. But has proved poor at describing what that change might be and why it really matters, which is why it has been so vulnerable to the 'cover for cuts' accusation.
Neither political drive nor expert intelligence will create a climate in which ordinary people feel more able to make their communities better and more equitable places to live in, both now and for future generations. Instead we need to foster a climate where people learn from and with their peers in an environment of mutual exchange and support.
To do that, our narratives need to be populated with stories that show what is possible, and how change can be achieved by people who may not have reached optimal levels of mental complexity or, perish the thought, graduated from the Margaret Thatcher college of leadership.
For the political pundits and intellectual elite, that may mean getting out more. For the rest of us, it means listening to, weaving together and sharing the many stories of human beings who have woken up to the possibilities around them. That doesn't just happen: it needs to be generated, networked and curated in ways that are accessible and adaptable.
What gives greatest cause for optimism is not a theory or a programme, but inspiration and a helping hand. The challenge is to share and spread that inspiration effectively enough to create a multiplier effect, where each idea and connection breeds many more.
January 02, 06:01 PM
For a few optimistic hours on New Year’s Day, I thought David Cameron had decided not to offer the British people a new year’s message. I nearly wrote a piece praising him for judging the mood of 2012 perfectly, by eschewing the opportunity to pound the public with platitudes.
Sadly this was one resolution the prime minister failed to make. Instead, while the heads of European governments tried to sound grim and statesmanlike in the face of financial crisis and public indignation, Mr Cameron did his best to sound like the captain of a public school rugger team, urging Britons to ‘go for it’ (whatever it is).
‘This will be the year Britain sees the world and the world sees Britain,’ he began, searching his rhetorical vault for a suitably Churchillian flourish. It didn’t really get better. Instead of the ‘safe haven’ trumpeted by George Osborne last year the best the premier could offer was ‘some protection from the worst of the debt storms now battering the Eurozone’.
He concluded: ‘I know that if we lift our eyes to the other side we have it in our power to come through this stronger, better balanced, focused on what this fantastic country does best.’ But without an understanding of what ‘the other side’ might be, and a sense of how to get there, celebrating what we do best is little more than nostalgia.
It will take more than the London Olympics to inject a bit of optimism into this mess. There aren’t many optimists around as we kick off the new year, and even fewer with a credible basis for their optimism. So where are we to get hope and direction for our economy and society?
| Cleaning up after the crash: it takes more than a broom |
The N.Y. Times yesterday has the usual new year predictions by business leaders. It was comical how each and every one refused to be definite. Last year they almost gave a date for the expected revival. The slump is now looked upon as though of infinite duration.
Turn to Sunday’s New York Times and you’ll find a clutch of economic experts offering their new year analysis for 2012. Although they believe the US is on the road to recovery, they’re far from sure. Their opinions are full of fears of European meltdown, hardship for millions of ordinary Americans, and greater worries ahead. As former Obama adviser Christina D. Romer puts it:
Over the next 20 to 30 years, rising health care costs and the retirement of the baby boomers are projected to cause deficits that make the current one look puny. At the rate we’re going, the United States would almost surely default on its debt one day.
Roth’s diaries continue long after the recovery has begun. But as he observes on Christmas Eve 1936:
It is hard to understand why, in the face of all this seeming prosperity, there are still about 8 million unemployed in the US.
By the autumn of 1940 he has come to the conclusion that only a few gain from an economy that thrives on speculation and risk-taking. Despite hankering after the opportunity to make his own fortune on the stock market, he observes:
... The inevitable result will be a group who will end up with a profit but the vast majority broke and disillusioned.
So where’s the cause for optimism, either in Roth’s assessment of human nature or the New York Times’ contemporary views? Given the less than spectacular record of economic pundits and professors, maybe we should look elsewhere for principles to guide our business, social and political activity.
Here are three that optimists could start with. The first is to focus on activities that build relationships of respect. By that I mean activities that involve building networks of support and mutual exchange, civic, commercial and social. Instead of waffling about us being ‘all in it together’, this starts with those who really are in it together.
You could call it building community. Look at the way WiganPlus is working to reward local people who take part in voluntary activity by teaming up with traders and the local council to offer ‘points’ (similar to Tesco’s Clubcard) that can be exchanged for goods and services, such as spare cinema seats or car parking. The idea is that business relationships are just part of a network of links that help people get by and encourage them to help each other.
The second is to build equality. As Benjamin Roth noticed, even the good times aren’t good for the poorest, and the bad times drive down the living standards of the worst-off even further (often as an entirely predictable consequence of policy). Welfare, not wealth, is the first casualty of austerity.
Equality comes not just through redistribution but through sharing. Sharing starts with the principle that even the have-nots are ‘haves’ when it comes to time, friendship, or kindness. It is the principle behind movements like Abundance in Sheffield, which shares out surplus fruit every autumn, and provides a place where people can share knowledge and skills in cooking and preservation. Equality is about valuing everyone as a contributor and participant, actual or potential.
The third principle, linked with the principle of sharing, is to build self-reliance. The major failing of the welfare state has been that it provides for people’s needs without giving people the resources to meet their own needs in future. The answer isn’t to force people into self-reliance by reducing support, but to use support intelligently to build self-esteem, practical skills, education and social networks. Community Links’ work on ‘early action’ with young families is an example of such an approach.
There are many more. The point is that optimism starts with actions that give us reasons to be optimistic, not with vague hopes of a better future somewhere beyond the Eurozone apocalypse. By choosing to work in a way that values and builds up others, we create reasons to be hopeful - and by choosing to hope that others will share those values, we create the opportunities for optimistic work.
December 22, 01:33 PM
It’s enough to make you gag on your value mince pies. Barely a week after Mary ‘Queen of Shops’ Portas presented her menu of recommendations to save the high street, we learned that there are enough supermarkets in the planning pipeline to swallow every Tesco store in the country.
Analysis by property experts CBRE shows that if all the plans for new supermarkets currently in the pipeline are approved, the amount of supermarket trading space in the UK would rise by 50%. If that happens, we can wave goodbye to local resilience: we will be chronically dependent on a super-size food supply system dominated by four major corporations.
| Picture by Jordi Martorell |
What’s more, supermarkets can offer the golden carrot of jobs. The bigger the store, the bigger the headline figure of jobs created - and what local authority would resist a promise to offer some of those jobs to long-term unemployed people?
Thus the myth of retail-led regeneration is woven and sold to planners and councillors. But at a time of falling household income, the money spent to support these new supermarket jobs is money that is not being spent elsewhere. Nobody measures this displacement, though - the spin is that the jobs and spending are all new.
CBRE, as a savvy organisation that knows which side its toast is buttered, presents this boom as not only the ‘only game left in town’, but as great news for town centres:
‘Aside from their local job-generating potential, an important attribute of grocers which is increasingly coming to the fore is their potent High Street anchoring characteristics.’
The key study people cite in this respect is one from Southampton University, thrillingly titled ‘Revisiting the impact of large foodstores on market towns and district centres’. Researched between 2007 and 2009, it suggests that people who visit edge-of-town supermarkets are also likely to visit shops in the town centre. It was commissioned by Tesco.
This idea of the supermarket as an anchor to the high street only holds good if what is on offer at the supermarket is substantially different from the rest of the town centre. As supermarkets increasingly diversify into everything from clothes to TVs, it might be truer to say stores only act as an ‘anchor’ for the few activities that don’t interest them or where there is no serious money to be made.
So who will present an alternative vision of a high street? It’s a role that should fall to the local council as the authority responsible for local economic, social and environmental wellbeing, acting as a voice for the whole community.
Yet too often social and environmental considerations are jettisoned in the scramble for anything perceived as creating jobs. Councillors are frequently advised that they don’t have grounds to refuse planning applications, and they begin on the back foot because their role is often to react rather than to make things happen.
This is where the idea of ‘town teams’ in the Portas Review could come into its own. By bringing local people, businesses, community organisations, councillors and council officers together to create a shared vision for the high street, it should be easier to resist predatory planning applications. Planning inspectors should have to show overwhelming reasons for overturning a town team’s recommendation.
Neighbourhood plans for town centres should specify that new developments should add to the diversity of activities and demonstrate how they will keep money circulating within the local economy. They should show how they will build social, economic and environmental wellbeing by sourcing goods and services from local suppliers and creating opportunities for independent businesses and community activity.
Some supermarkets may be able to do that, building a symbiotic relationship with independent traders and the local community. Where they can, they should be encouraged. But given that we already have an oligopoly where four major chains sell more than three quarters of Britain’s groceries, our councils should ask some very hard questions before feeding this cuckoo in the nest.
December 19, 06:46 AM
Two events last week cast a spotlight on one of the key issues as we try to navigate our way through recession and economic restructuring towards (we presumably hope) a better future: is there any point in localism when the issues we face are so massive?
You could take virtually any piece of political or economic news as an example, but i’ll take two events I was involved in: a talk by architect Irena Bauman for Incredible Edible Todmorden, and the Mary Portas review of the high street.
First, Irena Bauman’s talk. The author of How to Be a Happy Architect had an incisive critique of big-ticket boosterist projects where no thought was given to ongoing care, and which were done at the expense of neighbourhoods which continued to deteriorate.
| The market in Haymarket Square, Boston, exists because public protests stopped it being turned into an expressway |
Speaking in Todmorden, where the public realm is being transformed by just this kind of spontaneous and people-centred intervention, Ms Bauman had a sympathetic audience. But most decision-makers, planners, project managers and political leaders don’t think like this.
Take last week’s Portas Review of the high street. It wasn’t long before the backlash arrived, and it’s been interesting to see the points that have been made.
There’s been a lot of stuff from particular interest groups who were disappointed that their specific recommendations weren’t taken on board. That’s par for the course. More interesting is the critique that Portas has been tinkering on the edges when what we really need is structural and systemic change.
There is a lot of validity to this viewpoint, expressed here by Neil McInroy. Town centres, he points out, are expressions of a much wider economy and cannot improve without reference to those wider circumstances. To make a difference you need to deal with the whole system.
I have some sympathy with this, because it’s clear that our economy needs rethinking on a very broad scale and that most of our leaders have not woken up to that, or dare not tell the punters what they really know: that we have entered an irreversible global shift of economic and political power, combined with unprecedented risks to natural resources, that will make the planet a very different place for the next generation.
The difficulty is that the more you deal at a macroeconomic and geopolitical level, the less human the solutions and interventions tend to be. And, as we have seen in both the Durban climate change negotiations and the continuing financial crisis in the eurozone, progress is painfully slow and often non-existent. To argue in favour of systemic interventions can - in practical rather than theoretical terms - be a process of delegating responsibility for change to those who have the greatest financial and political interest in preserving the status quo.
I recently read Michael Ward’s fascinating pamphlet [pdf here] about Beatrice Webb’s quest to end the punitive and inhuman Poor Law regime which confined paupers to workhouses well into the early years of the 20th century. She and her husband Sidney were leading lights in the quest for social reform; yet for all their lobbying and politicking, in took nearly 40 years from the publication of her famous Minority Report to the establishment of the welfare state by the Attlee government; and 100 years on, that legacy is under threat as politicians return to the spirit, if not the letter, of the Poor Laws.
Of course it is worth working for systemic change. But it is a slow and often unrewarding process. And it can be a dull, dehumanising one in which ordinary people often feel powerless to make a difference, and that plays to the self-importance and vanity of those who seek status in order to achieve public good, but end up contenting themselves with status.
That is why the making-do, the tiny interventions, the miniature expressions of ambition and aspiration and human spirit, are so vital. Like good theatre, art or literature, they show what can be. And they also help to make it happen, by demonstrating resistance and resilience, imagination and innovation.
That is why Todmorden is prophetic. That is why Irena Bauman’s critique matters. It’s why the Portas Review is a move towards a paradigm shift. In an international context, it's why people like Vaclav Havel stood head and shoulders above their contemporaries. And it is why I continually come back to the belief that small is bountiful - that by taking action and amplifying that action through sharing, change starts to happen.
December 13, 02:09 AM
On a sleety December day in Wakefield or Wigan, Weston-super-Mare or Wisbech, a walk down the high street amid hard-up Christmas shoppers is a long way from most people’s idea of a good time.
Today Mary Portas, TV’s Queen of Shops and the retail guru appointed by David Cameron to revive our high streets, is delivering her verdict. Can our sad and declining town centres be turned around with a bit of stardust and glamour?
When the news came out back in May, I was a little sceptical. So what spell did the Queen of Shops weave to make me change my mind?
| It'll take more than street furniture to change our high streets |
Within a few weeks I’d brought together nine organisations to submit evidence to the high street review. We called for the reinvention of the high street as a ‘21st century agora’ - a market for social interaction and ideas, not just for goods and services. We said the high street needs to be multifunctional, rooted in the unique talents of the local community.
A subsequent meeting with Mary Portas’s team suggested she not only understood what we were were proposing, but appreciated the extent of the challenge. By September I was feeling much more positive about the review’s prospects.
But there’s a mountain to climb. A weighty review of the evidence, published alongside the high street review and commissioned by the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, shows how much has changed since out-of-town shopping burst onto the scene in the 1980s: as far as shopping is concerned, town centres are now a minority interest. Most of our retail floorspace is out of town and most shopping out of town or online.
A generation has grown up on the convenience of car-based supermarkets and retail parks, where everything is under one roof, the environment is safe and clean, and you know what you’re getting. As a team of academics recently put it, this has become ‘the hegemonic retail format’. It may be bad for the local economy and for the environment, but people aren’t going to suddenly change because someone says they should shop locally.
The good news is that the review has a recipe for a happier high street - and it’s one that echoes and builds on our suggestions. It’s to think of the high street as a social space, not just as a space to buy or sell. It needs to be a place that caters for all a community needs, from civic facilities such as libraries and learning centres to parks and green space, entertainment and culture, and places to start and grow businesses.
As credit crunch turns to spending crunch, we all need to be involved in making the most of our town centres, ensuring that every place is a place of activity. That means letting the local community create the vision, as in Brentford High Street or Chippenham; ensuring artists and makers can find space to showcase their work, as pioneered by the Empty Shops Network and Meanwhile Space; and valuing and prioritising local ownership and produce.
It also means, as Mary Portas has suggested, supporting distinctive local markets where people can test new products and ideas at a low cost. It means creating town teams who can bring different parties to the table and get them involved in the future of their centre; and it’s why we need a renewed focus on ‘town centres first’ planning policies that support local character and activity.
There is much that central government can do to make the most of Mary Portas’s recommendations. But the real challenge is for towns and cities to take the lead, working with local residents to develop a vision everybody can share in.
If local councils want town centres to thrive, they need to find out how people feel about them and do something about it - whether it’s developing a local smartcard that rewards people for supporting local shops and community activity, like WiganPlus, or staging a free music festival, like Sheffield’s Tramlines, or helping community organisations to take over key spaces, like Hebden Bridge Town Hall.
As the new economics foundation argues, this is about putting money back into the local economy. But it’s more than that: it’s also about creating a sense of local pride and a return to local ownership, where assets are held by local people and organisations and used for local benefit.
Austerity shouldn’t mean years of misery. Town centres should become places where we have a good time and play a part in community life without having to come away laden with shopping bags - and what better time to start than when people are hard up?
• You can read more about our submission to the high street review here, or download the full document. There’s also a short presentation on Slideshare. To join a network of people who want to develop new ideas for town centres, visit reviveourcentres.ning.com and look out for updates in the new year.
Updates
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@edward_quigley Looking forward to the usual roller-coaster :)
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West ham fans going mental http://t.co/rH15aStH
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@edward_quigley cheers!
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@edward_quigley no - but hoping for 3-1 to the irons :)
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Wembley filling up nicely with claret and blue... http://t.co/StrpttHW
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@mikechitty We are the custodians of dreams.
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@Zerocredit_UK should be!
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@mikechitty As you know it's not what you spend but what you keep that matters :)
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Last few tickets remaining for #highstcamp - come and join the people who are creating the town centres of the future. http://t.co/euDO0LSP
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My blog on @HuffPostUK - do we still believe in decent housing? http://t.co/FaVeDMF9
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Government 'failing to get enough homes built' http://t.co/5Tz7dLHU - and homelessness and overcrowding are rising.
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Still waiting to hear about your #portaspilot bid? Come to #highstcamp, share your ideas and learn from others anyway: http://t.co/euDO0LSP
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Very interesting discussion document about the future of @urbanforum here: http://t.co/1sHwfVhH - how does an organisation become a network?
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The right to food: why we need healthy local food networks: http://t.co/Urr9TvgK - and better working conditions too: http://t.co/hG863gXZ
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This speaks volumes: St Mungo's withdraws from Work Programme - http://t.co/6BK2SI1D (via @PinderTim)
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5 days ago from web | Reply, Retweet, Favorite
Posts
May 09, 06:16 AM
Summary of research showing how the release of former military land could create benefits for local residents as well as ex-service personnel.
February 22, 04:57 AM
As retail uses shrink in our town centres and empty spaces open up, what could you do to create social spaces that bring new people in? This presentation, produced for Architecture + Design Scotland, shows some of the things people are already beginning to do. See my other presentations on high streets for the wider thinking behind this.
February 02, 06:17 AM
This presentation introduces some of the key questions town teams, neighbourhood forums and local councils should think about when trying to revitalise their high streets.
November 28, 04:35 AM
This presentation, for the Northern Housing Consortium in the UK, examines why we need to adopt different patterns of behaviour if we are to improve social housing and disadvantaged neighbourhoods. It looks at the idea of coproduction and argues for an ’urban acupuncture’ approach with small, significant interventions.
November 15, 07:32 AM
As consumer spending shrinks and the way we shop changes, is the death of the high street an inevitable reflection of global crisis? Or do we now a chance to refashion the high street as a 21st century agora - a place for ideas, learning, leisure and civic involvement that will generate new markets? See this post for more: http://urbanpollinators.co.uk/?page_id=1028
June 22, 04:57 PM
Why we need a new social contract for housing and regeneration - one that starts by valuing people in our poorest communities.
June 08, 04:48 AM
In tough times, how can we still create great places? Is it time for a JFDI approach - Just have Fun and Do It? This presentation provides a few conversation starters.
March 13, 06:40 PM
There have been hundreds of debates and presentations about the ’big society’, David Cameron’s big idea for transforming the relationship between government and society. But one question has been missed: what would the Bard have to say about it? This presentation tries to answer that question - and finds that in the end, really it’s Our Society.
November 14, 10:17 AM
How can we repurpose heritage assets for community use - and what are the pitfalls? This presentation, created for an event run by Urban Vision North Staffordshire, looks at a few examples and concludes with some thoughts about character.
October 22, 11:42 AM
Is it possible for a big society to be a fair society? This presentation, given at the VONNE policy forum on 22 October, explores some of the dilemmas.
September 06, 11:34 AM
An introduction to placemaking for those new to the idea. What are the key questions to ask - and
June 16, 11:48 AM
This presentation brings together key points from the Real Regeneration series in New Start magazine and headlines from the regeneration manifesto we developed with practitioners and policy experts. An earlier version of this presentation was given at the fifth anniversary celebrations of Powell Dobson Urbanists in Cardiff. I’ve blogged about it here: http://livingwithrats.blogspot.com/2010/05/its-all-about-social-justice.html
May 20, 06:14 PM
This presentation brings together key points from the Real Regeneration series in New Start magazine and headlines from the regeneration manifesto we developed with practitioners and policy experts. The presentation was given at the fifth anniversary celebrations of Powell Dobson Urbanists in Cardiff. I’ve blogged about it here: http://livingwithrats.blogspot.com/2010/05/its-all-about-social-justice.html
May 17, 06:52 PM
This presentation for the Manchester Innovation Boardroom looks at the question - how can we light and heat our cities in future? It suggests that the solutions lie not just in technological advances but in a recognition that things need to be done differently to cut out waste and create new opportunities.
April 21, 06:15 PM
Digital technologies are changing every aspect of life. But
April 15, 08:10 AM
Can national policy address the problems of deprived neighbourhoods? What have been the successes and failures? This presentation illustrates a few of the issues - for some context, see my post here: http://livingwithrats.blogspot.com/2010/04/not-as-broken-as-you-might-think.html
March 24, 06:23 PM
Meet the Gorgons. With snakes for hair and faces that would turn people to stone, you wouldn’t want to stumble across them while casually going about your daily business. I was asked to share some thoughts on the subject, ’Can Localism Deliver?’. In just ten minutes, all you can do is raise a few questions that might help you towards an answer. The first questions, of course, are what is localism and what is it intended to deliver? Assuming we stick with the consensus that it’s about bringing decision-making closer to the people, the deliverable must be a more involved and engaged population: people who have more civic pride and play a greater part in running local institutions or networks. This point of this presentation is to raise three issues that, unless we find ways of dealing with them, will combine to petrify localism, turning the best ideas to stone. All three concern the dynamics of neighbourhoods and the toll they exact on people’s time, aspirations and capacity to engage with local decision-making. Each issue drains the energy from individuals, families and communities - especially from economically active families with school-age children. And the three are interrelated, which is why it’s so hard to deal with them - particularly for national government, which has different departments to deal with each issue. But the Gorgons are siblings, spawn of the same unfortunate union. The three Gorgons facing localism are employment, housing and education markets and the way they interact. At the root is the very understandable human aspiration to want the best for yourself and your children. For the earner in a family, it presents itself in the familiar dilemma: can I get a better job so I can live in a nicer area so my kids can go to a better school? But the aspiration for our children’s future is beggaring our children’s future and undermining social ties. The first of these mutually supportive Gorgons is education. Catchment-area based schooling generally favours better-off neighbourhoods, and sets in train a dynamic that raises the value of property in neighbourhoods with good schools. Good schools put a premium on house prices; so over a period of years, areas with better schools become less and less affordable to those on low incomes. Add in the fact that those who choose private education tend to live in the wealthiest neighbourhoods and you have a system that polarises any large town or city. What price localism when different neighbourhoods have competing agendas? This wouldn’t be such a problem if it wasn’t for our second Gorgon, the housing market. With two-thirds of the UK’s housing owner-occupied, ownership is the only guarantee of moving into the catchment area for a high-performing school. Meanwhile the concentration of social housing in particular areas, and allocation policies that turn it into a dumping ground for people with the most severe problems, militate against the performance of schools in low-income areas, reinforcing the divides. Over two or three generations the cycle becomes more and more difficult to break, as first-time buyers rely on parental equity to get them started on the housing ’ladder’ - and those without miss out. Finally, we have the third Gorgon - the labour market. This is a particularly difficult one to crack, and is influenced by a wide range of factors. The ones I want to highlight here are first, that wage needs are driven by housing and education costs as well as the value of the job; second, that the much-vaunted mobility and flexibility of our workforce pull against developing community roots and social ties, thus creating a greater dependence on state-provided or bought-in services; and third, that the demand for ever-higher qualifications for professional, technical or managerial roles further squeeze earners’ time, earning capacity and ability to get involved in community life. These are fiendishly difficult issues to unravel. But we’re not stuck with doing th
March 08, 04:21 PM
This presentation is for the opening workshop at the Regeneration Academy, Bradford. It examines some of the concepts of ’place’ and of action to improve places, and starts to explain the often confusing terminology.
February 09, 04:45 PM
This slideshow is a ’provocation’ intended as a discussion starter. It was created for a roundtable event organised by New Start magazine, Shared Intelligence and Urbed to debate the need for a ’manifesto’ for regeneration: an agenda for the new UK government in 2010 that could help to create thriving, confident cities and communities for the next decade and beyond.
February 07, 04:35 PM
Key learning points from the Renew Northwest Exemplar Learning Programme 2007. Fourteen regeneration projects in northwest England were shortlisted for this programme, and five chosen as ’exemplars’ for the region. I wrote this report to highlight the behaviours needed to create successful regeneration projects. The Renew website has now been closed so I’m making the report available here.
