IN DEPTH

In future regeneration must offer a convincing account of place and society and connect with what people care about most. In the rst of a 12-part series, Julian Dobson argues that we need to bring regeneration home
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Fans of the cult TV show Dr Who get it. Ever since the 1960s, followers of the charming Time Lord have known the Doctor will be back. Hell regenerate. For the destroyer of Daleks, regeneration is second nature. Whatever his opponents throw at him, hell be down but not out. He wont necessarily look the same, sound the same, wear the same outfits or try not to flirt with the same companion but the stuff that makes him the Doctor will be constant. Gardeners understand it too. The seed may look very different to the plant, but it contains within it all the genetic material the plant needs. Theres a continuity and an identity that links it to the past and binds it to the future. It regenerates. Regeneration that works the real thing couples the concepts of continuity and rebirth. A regenerated place is the same, but different: reinvigorated and better equipped for the circumstances that lie ahead, but with a sense of

In pursuit of the
identity that roots it in the past and in networks of people, and connects it to the future and the people we will become. Its a continuous process of survival and strengthening. But words like regeneration and transformation have been devalued and debased by years of misuse and definitions that tie them to the vagaries of policymakers rather than the life of communities. Every pedestrianised shopping centre is branded a transformation, every set of uPVC windows a regenerated estate. Local identity is diminished: according to the New Economics Foundation, two fifths of our towns are clone towns. Regeneration risks becoming yesterdays buzzword, discarded through over-use. Its time to reclaim regeneration for the places and communities that need it. Over the coming year, well explain how, where and why that needs to happen, and show examples of real regeneration in action. But the circumstances will be more testing in the next decade than in the last one, so we need an approach that can carry us through those challenges and beyond. WHERE THE HEART IS Throughout this series well use the idea of home to explain how we think regeneration needs to be grounded in our communities. Governments and local authorities tend to talk not of home but of place, using concepts such as localism, placemaking and place-shaping to describe actions

Above: the public feeling inspired by Antony Gormleys installation Another Place has secured the artwork a permanent place on Crosby beach

that have a spatial and local impact. Home is more than all of these: it is what connects place with people. There is a rich academic literature about home, but regeneration practice tends to pay scant regard to it. Academics talk of place attachment and place identity; as the environmental psychologist Maria Vittoria Giuliani puts it, not only do we acknowledge the existence of an affective bond with places, but also the importance that this can have in qualifying our existence, whether positively or negatively. And not just our individual, private, existence, but also the existence of entire human groups. Home is an obviously physical concept. Its bricks, mortar, furnishings and decoration. Its our neighbourhood, town or city. When the energy company E-on decided to knock down the Tinsley cooling towers in Sheffield in 2008, one of the strongest protests from local people was that when they saw the twin towers from the motorway or the train, they knew they were nearly home. Home can refer too to familiar or treasured landscapes on a wider scale London, Yorkshire, Wales, or Africa. Its difficult to imagine home without a spatial context. But home is an intensely social idea too. What makes a house home is the fact that we live there, and generally with people we want to live with. What makes locality home is the everyday social exchange of people: we recognise faces, learn names, start to appreciate whats important or interesting to others. We might even join

18 | New Start | January 2010

IN DEPTHL

We asked people on Twitter their hopes for regeneration for the coming decade. Here are a few of their responses...
Susie Hay: I long for people to take action without waiting for the f word (funding) that gets all off the hook. No funding equals freedom. Yaser Mir: Include high quality design, sustainability , equality and diversity consider how all communities can live side by side. Toby Blume: Stop regarding regeneration as something that can be done without tackling underlying causes of poverty and inequality. with economic and environmental change. Chris Doyle: Ubiquitous broadband for all in digital Britain, bringing the UK into the global digital marketplace. Kelvin Owers: Tax breaks on saving existing buildings, and repurposing them. Less focus on building new. Simon Cooke: Confidence, motivation, initiative, enterprise and community, not consultants and architects. Dan Thompson: Small, locally distinct, community led acupuncture. Crispin Moor: People and enterprise focus. Accountable and performance managed. Rural as much as urban. Less obsession with maps and boundaries and buildings. Gary Kirk, Meden Valley Making Places: Tackle energy efficiency in properties, and a programme to address poor quality housing and open spaces. James Kennell: More ideological conviction to make up for fewer economic incentives! Giles Simon, Co-operatives UK: Communities investing in and taking over shops, pubs, local businesses, community buildings, local services and housing.

real thing
in with some of it. You can live alone and still use home socially but where that interaction is missing or lost individual wellbeing tends to suffer. Home is an economic construct, too. Its where we spend much of our money, and sometimes where we earn it. At best, its an investment in ourselves and those close to us. It supports local businesses and provides local work. But at worst, it becomes for the well-off an obsession with cash values and a stepping stone to individual advancement that offers nothing to the surrounding community; and for many of the poorest, something that traps them in a place they hate, stymies opportunities and limits life chances. But even in the most economically difficult circumstances or for the most mobile people, home has huge cultural significance. Our attachment to unpromising plots of land can be remarkably fierce. Our investment in our homes and localities is not just an investment of cash but of cultural capital and creativity. Planners and developers ignore that at their peril. That attachment, though, can be strained. The most recent DCLG Place Survey found that although 80% of people in England were satisfied with their area as a place to live, only 59% felt they belonged to their neighbourhood and a paltry 29% felt they could influence decisions in their area. And as the Young Foundation pointed out in its recent study, Sinking & Swimming, people have become significantly less happy. In 1991 seven million prescriptions

Rob Greenland: A smaller State gets out the way and communities take the lead more. State works out ways to support people to do things themselves. Colin Buchanan (planning consultants): Increase the price of all modes of transport to encourage city centre living, mixed use development and sustainable travel. Nick Poole: Reconnect to simple everyday values, abandon the centrist state and let people regain their dignity through mutualisation. Elizabeth Varley: Greatest hope for regeneration is that all business becomes social business that enterprise always means good for community as well. Neil McInroy: Regeneration becomes proactive rather than reactive in dealing

New Start | January 2010 | 19

IN DEPTH

In some places regeneration is a dirty word. This poem by Manchester performance

Regeneration
The golden sun glistened above the dilapidated ruins that were once humans homes Shadows grow as the fiery planet slowly climbs To the top of the world Radiating a spot Where Mr Rolls lived Cries of childrens laughter Echo around the building site Entrancing the wolf that whistles bares its bum But rarely bites A white cooker stands high and alone On a drumlin of sand soil and societal sediment Once the fabric of peoples lives Green curtains are half drawn in the glassless window of a second floor flat And above The chaos of twisted steel Jagged slabs

Concrete boulders A yellow workmans hat Diggers dig and cranes roar In an attempt to bring the community to the floor Brick by brick and stone by stone Pull old buildings down Build new homes This is how regeneration begins People lose Contractors win The chaotic destruction of whole communities All in line with Government policy Architecturally brainwashing Generation after generation Barbed wire fences and floating dust Large cranes and plant covered in rust Builders and joiners from out of town Tear our houses shops and boozers down But order must be carried out to the letter Please the bosses and make things better

20 | New Start | January 2010

were issued for anti-depressant drugs; by 2007 that figure had risen to 34 million. One of the failures of much self-styled regeneration is that it not only neglects to create attachment, but actively undermines it, moving people when they dont want to be moved, assuming that whats glossy and sanitised is by definition better than the dog-eared and disorderly. Its an error of judgement thats repeated ad nauseam as planners and funders seek quick returns on their investment. And it turns regeneration into a hate-word (see above). Home, then, with its negative connotations as well as positive, must be at the heart of any understanding of regeneration. What regenerates a place or community the genetic material that makes it itself and not something else is also what creates home. Regeneration at every

scale is homecoming and home-making. It is not the delivery of projects or the development of buildings but the creation of meaning. TEN YEARS FROM NOW, WILL WE NEED REGENERATION? More than a century ago in News from Nowhere, William Morris imagined a utopian Britain run on cooperative, agrarian principles. He was a dreamer. His ideas were ridiculed in favour of pushing forward the economic model that gave us the Great Depression and Beveridges Five Giants of squalor, ignorance, want, idleness, and disease. A decade ago Tony Blair imagined a Britain where nobody would be seriously disadvantaged by where they lived (see New Start, December 2009). Despite being a more achievable ambition, were no nearer it than we are to

IN DEPTHL

poet Mike Garry and pictures by Ciara Leeming help to explain why
And when they have finished their rebuilding Ex-homeless people begin to move in Theyre impressed for a month or two Then realise that the plastic glue hardboard and Formica That holds this fragile box together Is just like Princess who scissored the ribbon On the outside pristine And on the inside a midden First they find large black cockroaches Second big black rats These house are built on flats That were built on top of houses That were built on a bog Soon the houses begin to bend and bob from side to side Cracks appear and whole streets slide Then a rat like councillor decides This crime ridden area of dilapidation is in serious need of regeneration Lets build things up and make things fine With a grant from sexy Heseltine 500 million already spent And 44.90 collected in rent Rebuilding doesnt make problems go away It just creates new dumping grounds For the poor the black the Irish and the gay. These people who redesign our lives Live a million miles away with their wives And kids who play on vast green lawns Surrounded by blooming flower beds But would swap it all for a Sunday with Dad They are far away from floating dust speeding cars that maim and kill A different kind of hurt A different kind of pollutionville Mike Garry can be contacted at mikegarry@hotmail.com. To hear Mike reading this and other poems, visit his website at www. cheersta.co.uk
Photos: Ciara Leeming

Ciara Leemings pictures of housing regeneration projects in northern England can be viewed at http://www.socialdocumentary. net/exhibit/ciara_leeming/691 or at www.ciaraleeming.co.uk

Morriss idyll. As the Young Foundation has demonstrated, even what progress we have seen has been offset by greater unhappiness as well as material inequality. Whats clear from all the evidence is that the problems facing our communities and society are more intractable than most politicians and policymakers imagined. Even when we have continuity of government, theres a discontinuity of policy. The Conservative governments of the 1980s and 1990s gave us urban development corporations, City Challenge, and eventually the single regeneration budget. New Labour accelerated the policy merry-go-round with the new deal for communities, neighbourhood renewal fund, sustainable communities plan, sub-national review of economic development and regeneration, and much, much more.

Seen from the ground, these policies attract an abiding critique: they are not given time to work, they are riddled with arcane funding rules, and they turn the idea of building skills and capacity from a process of nurturing into yet more paperwork. And however benevolent the ministers and civil servants, the perceived need to demonstrate that government action is getting results makes it harder to learn lessons, while in their eagerness to tick all the required boxes local officials stifle initiative and invention. A report for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation by Oxford University researchers published in 2008 had the telling subtitle, Not knowing what works. As the introduction pointed out: Since 1997, the government has implemented a raft of person- and place-based policies to tackle disadvantage.

New Start | January 2010 | 21

IN DEPTH

For the most part, these policies (person and place) have developed separately within their specific domains... However, this separation does not reflect a reality in which poverty and disadvantage are mediated by place, and places are affected by the poverty or otherwise of their inhabitants. Even if we could get the policy mix and implementation right, there are compelling reasons why regeneration will be a continuing need. Think for a moment about the definition drawn up by civil servants in the regeneration framework document, Transforming places, changing lives (see panel, below): The governments view is that regeneration is a set of activities that reverse economic, social and physical decline in areas where market forces will not do this without support from government. The history of the last half century shows us that economic, social and physical decline have gone hand in hand with rising affluence. The economist Joseph Schumpeter expressed this as creative destruction: to make way for the new, the old must be demolished. But what in economic and market terms is considered a good innovation and new products brings social ills in terms of skills becoming redundant, places losing their economic raison detre and the personal costs of stress and unemployment. One of the greatest policy failures of the last decade, arguably, has been the unwillingness to recognise that the market forces that create prosperity and opportunity are the very same forces that bring decline and deprivation. They create losers as well as winners, as surely as Strictly Come Dancing or X Factor. A 40-year analysis for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in 2007 found that spatial inequality had worsened, with cities becoming more polarised between rich and poor. The losers tend to be the same kind of people in the same places. Figures for business start-ups help to illustrate the problem. Even in the prosperous years between 1995 and 2004, more than one third of firms failed to survive the first three years, and survival rates were lower in poorer areas. Only 57% of new businesses registered in Wolverhampton

One of the greatest policy failures of the last decade, arguably, has been the unwillingness to recognise that the market forces that create prosperity and opportunity are the very same forces that bring decline and deprivation.
lasted three years. We applaud the winners, but who counts the cost to the losers? The problem is that poverty of place becomes a selffulfilling prophecy: the places with the worst conditions are poorest, and because of their conditions, the ambitious leave and those with resources to invest stay away. As the 2009 government strategy document, World class places, puts it:

Its the way you tell em... Here are some of the key terms used to describe regeneration and related activities in the last decade, along with some of the definitions offered and a quick critique of their pros and cons...
22 | New Start | January 2010

Regeneration
THE DEFINITION: The governments view is that regeneration is a set of activities that reverse economic, social and physical decline in areas where market forces will not do this without support from government. Transforming places, changing lives (DCLG, 2008) PROS: Recognises regeneration as a complex concept it covers a range of activities and interlocking problems. CONS: Assumes regeneration is needed because of market failure, which is a late stage for effective intervention. Responsibility is placed firmly with government. A top-down, economically biased interpretation.

Renaissance
THE DEFINITION: Achieving an urban renaissance is about creating the quality of life and vitality that makes urban living desirable We must bring about a change in urban attitudes so that towns and cities once again become attractive places in which to live, work and socialise. Towards an Urban Renaissance, introduction by Lord Rogers, 1999 PROS: Links place and people it focuses on creating places where people enjoy living. Encompasses culture and quality of life. CONS: A view of urban renaissance that ignores poverty and inequality risks being reduced to caf culture for the middle classes.

IN DEPTHL

Poverty isnt just about a lack of jobs, education or wealth, its about unsafe and bad housing design and low quality neighbourhoods

Poverty in this country is not just about poor education, unemployment or low wages, and lack of opportunity. It is typically associated with poor housing and poverty of place badly designed estates or low quality neighbourhoods, with dysfunctionally designed, energy inefficient homes, unsafe passage-ways and poor public spaces. In such a context, regeneration has to be a sine qua non for a stable and cohesive society. Without constant action to reinvigorate neighbourhoods and towns that are distressed, and to generate new opportunities for people whose potential has been frustrated, we face ever more severe social consequences. And those consequences are already severe enough. Department for Work and Pensions figures for 2007/08

showed four million children living in poverty after housing costs are taken into account. For working age adults it was seven-and-a-half million, and for pensioners two million. Those are just the bald figures. As the department stated in evidence to the Commons work and pensions committee: The impact of poverty on children goes well beyond material disadvantage... Children who experience poverty are more likely to have low self-esteem and lower expectations for their future. They are more likely to be poor themselves and there is a strong association between parental earnings and the earnings of their children when they enter work. But despite a wealth of analysis and initiatives, we seem stuck with the same problems. In 1998 the Social Exclusion Units report, Bringing Britain together, offered this critique of previous initiatives: None really succeeded in setting in motion a virtuous circle of regeneration, with improvements in jobs, crime, education, health and housing all reinforcing each other. Ten years on, the 2008 Monitoring poverty and social exclusion report concluded that the comprehensive vision of the Blair government had been lost in favour of a crude focus on worklessness: Ten years ago, the challenge was to get child poverty reduction added to the governments agenda. Ten years on, the challenge is to prevent it dominating the social policy agenda to the exclusion of virtually all else.. the answer is nowhere near as simple as work is the route out of poverty. Does this mean, though, that were stuck in a continuous loop of improvement and decline, boom and bust, with regeneration acting as little more than a government-dispensed palliative? That would be a dispiriting case for regeneration indeed. TOWARDS CITIZEN-LED REGENERATION There is an alternative approach that takes us towards a new, positive way of thinking about regeneration without glossing over the difficulties or resorting to utopian

Sustainable communities
THE DEFINITION: Places where people want to live and work, now and in the future; that meet the diverse needs of existing and future residents, are sensitive to their environment and contribute to a high quality of life. They are safe and inclusive, well planned, built and run, and offer equality of opportunity and good services for all. Homes and Communities Agency PROS: Condenses the comprehensive eight-point approach to sustainable communities set out in the Egan Review of 2004. Recognises the need for a holistic approach that benefits everyone. CONS: Risks being confused with the specific agenda of environmental sustainability, which is one part of the matrix.

Placeshaping
THE DEFINITION: The creative use of [local authorities] powers and influence to promote the general wellbeing of a community and its citizens. Lyons Inquiry, 2007 PROS: Recognises the importance of local government as a champion for places and citizens. Strong emphasis on creating local identity and community cohesion and representation. CONS: Inward-focused and sets community and citizen activity firmly in the context of local authorities role the approach is somewhat paternalistic. It is also easily confused with placemaking, a concept much closer to the Egan vision.

Localism
THE DEFINITION: We need to devolve down decision-making to the lowest sensible level clear accountability, efficiency and engagement are much more likely to be achieved when this is the case. New Local Government Network, 2005 PROS: Associated with the devolution of decision-making and a transfer of power from central government. Links strongly with ideas of neighbourhood renewal and civic identity. CONS: Still associated with local government rather than citizens. You can have local decision-making without tackling poverty and disadvantage. The risk is that localism becomes a euphemism for laissez-faire.

New Start | January 2010 | 23

IN DEPTH

Urban regeneration needs a new narrative, says David Barrie

The last 20 years has delivered some remarkable urban regeneration schemes in the UK from Tate Modern to new waterfronts in NewcastleGateshead and Liverpool, from the occupational transformation of Shoreditch to the Scandi-style minimalist repaving of most city centres. But the debt-fuelled boom is over: bank lending is tighter, housebuilders darent start on site, the mathematical foundations of value uplift have been wrecked by low land values and the number of people in poverty has increased, when the very purpose of regeneration is to help poor people become more prosperous. Urban regeneration needs a new narrative. What might it be? There are those with heavy pens, pumping millions of pounds into the system, redrafting the interdependency of the public and the private and rolling out statism as innovation. Then theres the crew wielding luxury Mont Blancs: lawyers and accountants reframing the idea of value-uplift and calling it a TIF, or politicians like David Cameron or Tessa Jowell heralding a new age of localism or mutualism but not giving us much of a clue on cast or story. What seems clear is that economic change will be less reliant upon property developers, unless they are prepared to innovate by shifting to sustainable development or become increasingly transparent and flexible. Local development will become more answerable to the people and well see less of a massive-shopping-centre-witha-town-attached approach to urbanism. The industry will now push for value to be assessed on a broader basket of assets and currencies, over and above rental income. More time, attention and pride is about to be invested in local councillors and planning officers. Small projects are back in vogue, rather than physical projects so big that they make the earth tilt. And new, non-aligned organisations or aggregated civic organisations at the most local level are about to become flavour of the month, so long as they offer a genuine bridge between citizens and state, engender trust, express identity and promote the welfare of the larger community. Who are the poster boys and girls of this new world? Theres the army of activists who lead their communities but believe in collaboration, the welfare of the larger community and power of collective bargaining. Then there are the people who understand that enterprise in all of its many forms social, as well as commercial is a key route to progress. At the centre of this narrative are two of the oldest characters in the book: the taxpayer and the consumer. But the new element is the collective. The new vehicle: the non-profit. The new hero: the social entrepreneur. The politicians suggest we are at the dawn of the social economy. However, only one or two investors in regeneration see value in life-cycle costs, mutualism or assets other than land. Some time soon a bright spark is going to come up with a marketable link between carbon credits and the financing of urban renewal. In the meantime, everyone talks of paradigm shift and only a few engage with whats likely to become the new key theme of regeneration: equity. David Barrie is principal consultant at David Barrie & Associates and specialises in regeneration, community involvement and the design and delivery of public projects. David blogs at http://davidbarrie. typepad.com

fantasies. It is to see regeneration in terms of re-creation rather than just as a response to failure. Reinvention of place is needed because of time and change: our preferences change, technologies shift, we discover new ways of doing and being. Regeneration is required most in places that struggle to cope with time and change, but even those that arent struggling sometimes need to repurpose. Its about rethinking place and community for each new generation. So regeneration needs to start with the people who live in and use a place. Regeneration that works, that creates home, begins with citizens defining their hopes and problems, not with programmes and budgets. A citizen is an individual who has rights and a stake in the place where she or he lives, but that stake is a social one citizens can only exercise their citizenship by engaging with other people. And just as citizens are anchored in community, so they are anchored in the places where they seek to create home. The future for regeneration policies, at all spatial levels, must lie in the action and assent of engaged citizens. This is a seismic shift from regeneration that originates in the legislative process, or is led by masterplanners and developers. Policymakers, masterplanners and developers must become the servants of alert, engaged and creative citizens making up their own minds about their homes.
24 | New Start | January 2010

So heres a working definition of regeneration to play with: Regeneration is the action of citizens and those who work with them to recreate home for new times, especially where there is poverty or disadvantage. See if you can think of a better way of putting it, and please contribute your suggestions and join our conversation (see panel). Over the rest of this year well explore further how this idea of regeneration can be fleshed out and embedded in the way we think about the future. The next article will examine what values should attach themselves to citizen-led regeneration, and how we should rethink the idea of value to produce better decision-making.

JOIN THE CONVERSATION

Here are three ways you can join in our debate about the future of regeneration: Write a response: our feedback section (see pages 26 to 31) is a forum for your views or if youd like to make a more substantial contribution relating to this series, contact Julian Dobson at julian@newstartmag.co.uk Engage with us online: talk to @NewStartMag or @juliandobson on Twitter, blog your thoughts at www.newstartmag.co.uk/blog, or comment on other readers blogs Co-host an event: if youd like to partner us in taking this conversation forward at a face-to-face event, or would like us to speak or facilitate a discussion at an event youre putting on, please get in touch email julian@newstartmag.co.uk

real regeneration

In February 1996 the oil tanker Sea Empress hit the rocks at the entrance to Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire, spilling more than 72,000 tonnes of oil and polluting around 250 kilometres of coast. A cost-benefit study later concluded the clean-up operation had generated 500,000 of extra local income and created 25 new jobs. Against those benefits, of course, had to be set the huge damage to the areas fishing and tourism industries. The research estimated between 1,100 and 1,400 jobs were lost overall. The study illustrates the difficulty with traditional measures of success, such as spending generated or jobs created. Both the standard measures of the economy gross domestic product (GDP) and gross value added (GVA) measure activity: more activity equals more spending and is typically considered beneficial, less is a bad thing and can lead to recession. So the work involved in cleaning up an oil spill can be viewed as an economic positive,

even if it would have been better not to spill the oil in the first place. Another way of looking at that 500,000 of local income and 25 new jobs would be to say that this was money that could otherwise have been spent on activities to improve local peoples quality of life, and labour that might have been put to more creative purposes. The problem is that we dont measure the right things either because the measurements seem too difficult, or because theyre not acceptable to funding agencies. Its not for want of talking about it: the debate about how to measure quality of life and the social impact of investment is well-established (see panel, p30). But were still stuck in patterns that measure jobs created or safeguarded rather than the skills and attitudes and life chances generated by that work, and economic output rather than the impact of that work on society and how sustainable it is. Whats astonishing is that we use values and measurements in assessing the impact of regeneration programmes that we dont use in our own lives. We asked New Start readers what values we should use in measuring the worth of the places we create. The answers were revealing: they included how useful we feel as a member of our community, sustainability, the social fabric of society, the importance of locality, how well you know your neighbours. Nobody mentioned the number of cranes, the amount of speculative office development, or the number of cars on the road. Obviously we need to know whether the money we spend does the job we want, and whether we can afford what we plan to do. But as David Boyle puts it in his book

If regeneration is to make sense in the next decade, it needs to measure and value what matters. In the second feature in our series, Julian Dobson explains why

Getting the measure of things

26 | New Start | February 2010

real regeneration

We need a new way of socialising and greening economic development, says Neil McInroy
Now is the time for sturdy. In turn that enables us to assess a clunky and unsubtle and in some instances has a new wave of local local economys brittleness, its vulnerability been environmentally damaging, detached economic activism and weak points. This leads us to better from labour market needs, social context and that seeks to nurture policy and action which fully considers a local identity. and protect the localitys powers of recovery and understands Our resilience work opens the door to an environment and create greater social and what can drive it. alternative view of economic prosperity that economic equity. Our work on resilience is well under is not at the expense of the environment or To do this, we need to challenge the way and is rooted in practice. Following community. We need differentiated, smart assumptions that underpin current approaches, international research work in six locations, and bespoke strategies and policy that actively including growth and a belief that economic we have embarked on an ambitious pilot plan for a transition to green, balanced success will inevitably result in positive process in six areas in England, including more growth, and are capable of managing decline social return. At the core of this reconfigured than ten local authorities. We also have an and developing the social economy. economic development must be a greater ongoing pilot in Melbourne, Australia. This is work in progress, but we and our appreciation of creating resilient places. Our research disrupts the key assumption pilot areas are at the forefront of socialising While historically used in the context The pursuit of growth has been clunky and unsubtle and in of natural disasters, resilience and its application to economic planning some instances has been environmentally damaging, detached offers a way forward for local economic development. Like a boxer who can take a from labour market needs, social context and local identity. punch, a resilient place can ride economic and environmental punches. that economic development is mainly about and greening economic development and Lets be brutally honest. The practice of the commercial economy (wealth generators). creating resilient places for the future. local economic development has created This is not resilient on its own. Practitioners u Neil McInroy is chief executive of the some outcomes which have proven brittle need to develop ways to harvest commercial and short-lived. Renaissance has been patchy, success better, and consider how the public Centre for Local Economic Strategies. u Read Alison Gilchrists article on community post-industrial recovery in some locations economy (taxation spend) and social economy was only partly achieved, trickle-down of (social enterprise as well as human and social resilience in Latest Thinking, p70-71 wealth did not reach some people or places, capital) can be equal players in the local inequality widened and we were working economy. REsOuRcEs: beyond the limits of the environment. This These three elements need to be wedded Toward a new wave of local economic needs to change. effectively to each other and reflected in activism: http://snurl.com/u4t27 Economic assessments, strategy, policy policy. This should be the basis for all local and delivery have tended to work in isolation economic assessments and strategies. Delivering economic success an international from their social and environmental context. Our work also disrupts the orthodoxy that perspective on local government as stewards Resilience allows us to think about the assumes growth is synonymous with economic of local economic resilience: http://snurl.com/ broader palette of aspects that make a place development. The pursuit of growth has been u4t2b

Money Matters: [money] gives a high value to useless things (junk food), to dangerous things (stealth bombers) and to fleeting things (fashion trinkets), but places very little value on the really important things like loving, caring human beings. Economists might argue that the concept of utility gets you around this dilemma that we can measure things not just by what we spend but by how ready we are to spend on it. But that doesnt capture the value of an inspiring learning experience, an encounter with someone who changes the way you think, or the readiness of people in your community to help you in an emergency. Thats why we argued last month that regeneration needs to come home: it needs to start with the people who live in and use a place and create a sense of meaning, purpose, rootedness and engagement with whats around. This is what makes community and neighbourhood more than a lumping together of people and buildings. We offered this definition: Regeneration is the action

of citizens and those who work with them to recreate home for new times, especially where there is poverty or disadvantage. That leads us to some very different ways of thinking about what regeneration should achieve. It starts by addressing inequality and deprivation; it builds on that by creating local assets and opportunities; and it succeeds when it achieves resilience and wellbeing. ThE dANgER OF ThE gROWTh-cENTREd APPROAch Its axiomatic in political and economic circles that the solution to recession is growth. Get the economy growing and the rest will sort itself out. But it isnt as simple as that. Theres a longstanding critique of this assumption, going back to the 1970s, where Richard Easterlin questioned the efficacy of growth in improving quality of life and E F Schumacher explained the necessity of living within environmental limits. But arguing the case for less or different consumption, or for not going for the biggest New Start | February 2010 | 27

real regeneration

be little more than wishful thinking unless its underpinned and driven by sustainable practice. Here regeneration practitioners can take a lead. That requires a tectonic shift in thinking in some quarters. It means ending the kind of analysis that produces league tables of regeneration projects, with the most expensive at the top as if this were a helpful gauge of how effective, well-planned or sustainable they might be. Big, strategic projects are doubtless necessary in many cases, but their size doesnt make them more necessary. There is little evidence of such a shift from the traditional leaders of UK regeneration. Michael Parkinsons 2009 report, The credit crunch and regeneration, focused strongly on commercial property and housing markets. His sequel, launched in January at a conference held under the banner of The Northern Way, focuses on the need for economic development and continued public investment. But there are significant gaps. Inequality gets not one mention in 100 pages of text. Poverty is mentioned once, in a description of the hidden social consequences of the downturn. The same goes for climate change. The single mention is a passing reference to the Department of Energy and Climate Change. Theres a little more on low carbon as in the low carbon sustainability agenda, which means little if you fail to explain how it is to be put into practice. Search the report for concepts like flourishing and thriving and you wont find them. Of the three uses of the word green, two refer to the green belt. Similarly, the British Property Federations regeneration manifesto last year offered numerous suggestions of ways to keep building going from tax increment financing to a European scheme called Jessica (Joint European Support for Sustainable Investment in City Areas) which allows agencies to use ERDF funding as a revolving urban development fund, offering loans or equity to get schemes off the ground. But it was Towards a beTTer sense of value fundamentally geared to finding new ways of funding The links between environmental business as usual. sustainability, quality of life and Instead of investing in bricks and mortar personal wellbeing are becoming or job creation or training and then calling impossible to ignore. Our new it regeneration, we need to begin by models of regeneration must demanding quality of life outcomes. start with these links. In a future where competition for Were still stuck in This is the case public funding is more intense regardless of the speed than weve known in the past, patterns that measure jobs at which we emerge activities that meet such a created or safeguarded rather from recession. threshold will be worthy Sustainable of investment and public than the skills and attitudes and recovery will support. life chances generated by that The panel overleaf gives a brief introduction to some work, and economic output of the ways of measuring rather than the impact of that or creating value we should now explore. Most work on society and how of these ideas have been in sustainable it is. circulation for some time theyre not the musings of the radical fringe. They need to be brought into the heart of policy and programmes. New Start | February 2010 | 29

possible scale, has consistently been viewed as anti-business and the clinching argument therefore bad for jobs. Nobody appears to know how much of our economy consists of activities to remedy the effects of other economic activity. There are figures that aggregate lost production and remedial activity: a recent study cited by the Royal College of Psychiatrists, for example, puts the cost of mental health problems in the UK at 110bn a year. In 2003 the cost of crime to individuals and households in the UK, according to the Home Office, was 36.2bn. The UK security industry is worth around 6bn a year. More than 20bn is spent on private healthcare every year in the UK. Some of these figures are lost opportunities; others are activities that employ people and create products. However you account for them, they represent time and money spent putting right what has gone wrong. In fact, the more damaging the activity, the stronger the economic multiplier effect may be: the tobacco smoked creates work for cancer specialists, a polluting industry creates opportunities for land remediation, and so on. Over the last decade regeneration programmes have been bedevilled by the skewed thinking that applauds activity rather than quality. Major cities have sought to anchor their renaissance in shopping centres, bars and hotels, with scant thought about what consumers would be buying or where the money spent ends up. Superstores have been given planning permission in the hope that theyd become anchors for other local businesses, when they have frequently had the opposite effect. If we consistently use methodologies that translate negatives into positives and make decisions on the basis of such misattribution, its no wonder the prescriptions we offer for our economy, society and communities so often fail to work. So the next stage in our pursuit of real regeneration has to be to revisit our values and apply them in a way thats fit for purpose.

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Better ways of measuring value some starting points

Measuring wellbeing The new economics Foundation has called for national prosperity to be measured in terms of national accounts of wellbeing. The challenge is to match the multiplicity and dynamism of what constitutes and contributes to peoples wellbeing with what gets measured, nef says. such measures need to capture the strength of peoples social, family and neighbourhood networks of support, how positive they feel about their lives and their psychological state. Central to that is the idea of resilience the ability to withstand shocks and changes. an international study conducted in 2006-2007 found Denmark and switzerland had the highest levels of personal and social wellbeing in europe, with the uK trailing in the bottom half of the table. The French president, nicholas sarkozy, has now set up a commission to develop new ways of measuring economic performance and social progress which take wellbeing into account. similarly, the Young Foundations local wellbeing Project has set out in partnership with three local authorities Hertfordshire, south Tyneside and Manchester to examine how public policy could be geared towards improving wellbeing. The findings, published in January, argue that wellbeing can be made a practical policy goal, both nationally and locally, and that it provides a very different way of thinking about changing needs than traditional approaches. Find out more: National Accounts of Wellbeing: www. nationalaccountsofwellbeing.org Local Wellbeing Project: www.youngfoundation.org/ publications/reports/a-state-happiness-new-report soCial reTurn on invesTMenT social return on investment (sroi) seeks to measure social value in financial terms. it aims to balance social and financial outcomes in a way that can be incorporated into existing methods of auditing. while it has not yet found its way into mainstream programmes, sroi is well established in the united states and is being promoted by the scottish government as a way of measuring the contribution of voluntary and community agencies. sroi works on seven principles: understanding how social change is created through dialogue with stakeholders; examining what is changing; valuing what matters; only including what is material; avoiding over-claiming; transparency; and verifying results. The methodology is now being used to measure the impact of community green spaces in scotland. Find out more: The SROI Network: www.sroi-uk.org The SROI Project in Scotland: www.sroiproject.org.uk eConoMiC resilienCe The Centre for local economic strategies has pioneered work on economic resilience. it calls for a shift from a growth-focused model to one that takes into account equality, employment and social issues. neil Mcinroy explains the approach on page 27. Find out more: Towards a new wave of local economic activism, http://snurl.com/u4t27 soCial iMPaCT bonDs social impact bonds are a way of raising finance for actions that have a social value. The idea is being developed by the Young Foundation and social Finance. The aim is to link investments by commercial players or charitable foundations with a programme to improve the prospects of a group of people (young people at risk of offending, for instance) and a commitment by national government to make a payment if the desired social outcomes (such as fewer people in prison) are achieved. Find out more: The Young Foundation: www.youngfoundation.org/socialinnovation/tips/social-impact-bonds-and-social-value THe FlourisHing region The concept of flourishing has been used to bring together economic and quality of life outcomes. east Midlands Development agency used it to inform the 2006 regional economic strategy, expressly stating the objective as improving wellbeing as well as wealth. it defines flourishing as growing and innovative businesses, skilled people in good jobs, participating in healthy, inclusive communities and living in thriving and attractive places. Find out more: East Midlands Development Agencys regional economic strategy: www.emda.org.uk/res

join the conversation

Here are three ways you can join in our debate about the future of regeneration: u Write a response: our feedback section (see pages 32-37) is a forum for your views or if youd like to make a more substantial contribution relating to this series, contact Julian Dobson at julian@newstartmag.co.uk u Engage with us online: talk to @NewStartMag or @juliandobson on Twitter, blog your thoughts at www.newstartmag. co.uk/blog, or comment on other readers blogs u Co-host an event: if youd like to partner us in taking this conversation forward at a face-to-face event, or would like us to speak or facilitate a discussion at an event youre putting on, please get in touch email julian@newstartmag.co.uk

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Climate for
If we want to achieve our aspirations for regenerating communities, we have to frame them within an understanding of environmental limits. Julian Dobson explains why
Humans cant resist building houses of cards. Given the flimsiest of foundations and a little sleight of hand, we construct fantasy kingdoms that leave observers awestruck until they all fall down. From the Tower of Babel to the South Sea Bubble, from Daedalus and Icarus to the Wall Street investors of the last decade, legend and history is littered with human hubris and its devastating effects. None more so, it would seem, than the financial crisis of 2007-2009, which brought entire economies such as Iceland and Greece to the brink of ruin, and left the UK saddled with the long-term costs of a 250bn bailout. But if you think that was the worst we could do, think again. The banking crisis was triggered by the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market: real estate underwritten by loans that the lenders knew were unlikely to be repaid. The trick was to pass the liability on before the chickens came home to roost. The financial markets fell because the assets against which loans were secured proved worthless. At the same time the world has borrowed against environmental assets at an unsustainable level. These assets, unlike sub-prime mortgages, are precious because theyre finite: but weve behaved as if they were infinite. The effect, ultimately, could be the same: the asset cannot cover the level of activity secured against it. For an interconnected global economy, the depletion of energy and mineral resources and the pollution this causes could prove as devastating in the 21st century as food shortages and crop failures have been in history. The legacy of the industrial economy is a climate that is changing rapidly but unpredictably as increasing quantities of greenhouse gases continue to be pumped into the atmosphere. But when global assets are under pressure, you cant produce more liquidity in the system by injecting additional resources the equivalent of the Bank of Englands quantitative easing because there is no storehouse of environmental goods that can be used as a credit line. With no spare planets, we have to find sustainable ways of doing the things we value before we reach a crisis point where the only option is to use less. A reminder of how close that point might be emerged on 10 February. While climate scientists raged about allegations of data misuse and leaked emails, a group of business people warned the moment of peak oil might be much closer than we imagined. The UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security doesnt contain Greenpeace die-hards or people who sit in hand-sewn yurts making their own muesli. This warning came not from the radical fringe of green economics, but from business people who think it terms of viability and profit margins. In brief, it suggests that the worlds ability to extract oil could peak within the next decade, and possibly as early

@AndySawford: Create green jobs by getting serious about adaptation, with councils developing local strategies.
as 2015, and after that prices are likely to increase rapidly as well as becoming much more volatile. This is likely to affect private and public transport, retail, agriculture, power generation and domestic lifestyles, all of which will need to change to minimise the consequences of more expensive oil. What about regeneration? For people working with communities, engaged in economic development or striving to improve urban design and the built environment, this might all appear a bit distant from the day job. It matters, though, because it will significantly change the way we have to do the day job. Just as the economic recession is putting the greatest strain on the poorest communities, environmental pressures will bear hardest on those with the fewest resources. For transport engineers and urbanists, climate change and resource depletion could involve the most significant rethinking of spatial planning in a century and a half: we may need to think about living in a post-commuter economy where goods and services are produced and consumed much closer to home, and home will need to be much closer to centres of economic activity. Driving 20 or 30 miles to go shopping or for leisure activities may become prohibitively expensive, unless we can develop smarter, cheaper ways of getting around that have minimal impact on the environment. Our homes and workplaces will need to become much more energy efficient both in terms of reducing our usage and avoiding waste. For areas that are already deprived these issues are

26 | New Start | March 2010

@martinedmondson: Strong desire amongst Gen Y graduates for jobs with purpose/value companies offering green jobs could get great value from grads.

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change

@jurup: Look at developing bicycle infrastructure potential for jobs in refurbishing bikes, bicycle repairs, cycling lanes.

@indy_johar: Look at how we grow the numbers of green start ups and what type of fertile ground is required to do so.

@cyberdoyle: Community fibre networks enabling more rural employment. Local data centres less energy than travelling to work.
New Start | March 2010 | 27

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@seanamcginty: Re-engineer ALL council services to cut waste, duplication, crazy council crap and carbon footprint using social enterprises!
magnified. Fuel poverty will further disadvantage the poorest members of society. Areas with little or no economic activity will struggle if the cost of connecting them to work opportunities rises. Repairing and maintaining the urban fabric will become more expensive. a Whole-system approaCh In the first of these articles, I argued that regeneration needed to create a sense of home. Placemaking strategies need to connect with peoples aspirations and what gives them meaning and purpose, shifting from the linear approach adopted by government programmes and project management toolkits to an organic outlook that nurtures and supports communities through continuous change. Last month I suggested that to enable this to happen, we need to examine the values that underpin our approaches. Instead of measuring what delivers economic output or looking at the number of jobs created or qualifications gained, we need to focus on the qualities we are generating: resilience (the ability to withstand and recover from shocks) and wellbeing peoples satisfaction with their lives, relationships and neighbourhoods. The issue of environmental sustainability provides both an inescapable context and a call to action. The phrase we cant go on like this has become a political slogan, but contains a deeper truth: we cant go on acting as if economic growth is a never-ending escalator, and we cant put off rethinking the way we live in the hope that it will become the next generations problem. The governments approach to sustainable development, articulated in the 2005 strategy Securing the Future, set out five guiding principles:
u living within environmental limits u ensuring a strong, healthy and just society u achieving a sustainable economy u promoting good governance u using sound science responsibly

@lcpu: Expand the Sheffield tram to where I live, get rid of the bus fumes & get more people out of cars.

What could a low carbon society look like?

Climate change legislation requires an 80% reduction in CO2 emissions from a 1990 baseline by 2050. There is no blueprint that will guarantee that. But there are a host of options available that, with investment now, can put us well on the road. Here are just a few of them. Most are already feasible or could be within a few years, but progress towards them has been painfully slow. Some are well advanced outside the UK. To make real strides forward, as many as possible should be investigated, promoted and funded now rather than later.
28 | New Start | March 2010
u reneWable and alternative energy

supplies the governments current target is that 15% of uK energy consumed should be from renewable sources by 2020. in 2008 the figure was 5.5%. large-scale offshore wind energy could create 70,000 jobs and provide 25% of the uKs electricity by 2020, according to a study by the Carbon trust. this would require investment on a scale equivalent to the investment in north sea gas during the 1990s massive, but not impossible. onshore wind farms are more controversial and bedevilled by planning problems. however, community-based schemes such as baywind energy Cooperative in Cumbria have successfully overcome local objections. the coop has been part-financed through community share issues, and 0.5% of income is ploughed into an energy conservation trust. Wave energy and tidal energy are still at an early stage of investigation. tidal energy could produce up to 20% of the uKs current needs, but mega-projects such as barrages across the severn estuary, the Wash or pentland Firth could have a significant environmental impact. While eight of the worlds top 20 ideal sites are in the uK, little progress has been made and governments are more willing to promote nuclear energy as an alternative form of large-scale generation. last month (February) south West rda

announced a 12m competition to help businesses develop more modest wave and tidal energy technologies. solar energy is currently prohibitively expensive for most householders, with payback periods of several decades on an initial investment in photovoltaic panels. large-scale installations combined with the incentive of a feed-in tariff (where householders are paid a guaranteed price for the electricity they produce) could bring the cost down. Feed-in tariffs have successfully provided incentives for micro-generation in many european countries germany introduced such a scheme in 1990 and the uK is introducing a feed-in tariff from april 2010. biomass is seen as carbon neutral because although Co2 is released into the atmosphere when wood pellets are burned, it is absorbed by the new trees planted to replace the used wood. yorkshire Forward is helping to develop englands largest wood pellet mill, near goole,

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the missed oPPortunity: the not-so-Green new deal Country China Japan Germany Italy South Korea UK Fund ($bn) 586.1 485.9 104.8 103.5 38.1 30.4 Period 2009-10 20092009-10 20092009-12 2009-12 Green fund ($bn) 221.3 12.4 13.8 1.3 30.7 2.1 Green percentage 37.8 2.6 13.2 1.3 80.5 6.9

Source: extract from Tim Jackson, Prosperity Without Growth, table 7.1 (Earthscan, 2009).

You dont achieve sustainable development just by ticking one of those boxes: you cant seek a strong, healthy and just society and hope youll get a sustainable economy along the way. It demands a way of thinking that sees our social, physical and economic fabric as part of a whole that recognises both the aspirations of human beings and the limits of the environment within which they operate. That might appear obvious, but it doesnt inform much day-to-day thinking within government. Indeed, the official progress report on the DCLGs 2007-8 sustainable development action plan revealed widespread ignorance: few of the departments staff, it said, understood the

relevance of sustainable development. Such ignorance spills over into poor decision-making and planning. It might help to explain the missed opportunity of the governments economic recovery plan. A very small proportion of the 20bn fiscal stimulus has been invested in environmental technologies and projects despite detailed proposals from a host of sources for a green new deal. While China and South Korea billed much of their economic support as green (see table, left), the UK focused on retaining jobs within existing industries through initiatives such as the 400m car scrappage scheme. Changing this culture must be an urgent priority. If the peak oil taskforce is correct, we havent time to wait for a new government to lumber through further legislative processes: we need to act now to build the infrastructure for a sustainable society that will allow us to realise our aspirations for regeneration. The comments featured on this pages are suggestions received from some readers, while on the following pages we explain some ways of getting there.

@creativecoop: More investment to turn grassroots green projects into big social ideas.

which is expected to produce enough power to heat 13,000 homes. geothermal energy uses heat from the earth to warm buildings. in southampton a geothermal borehole helps to supply a district heating system whose users include a university, a hospital, the citys civic centre, a supermarket, a swimming pool and more than 1,000 homes. it sells 40gW of heat each year, as well as 22gW of electricity. Compared with standard heating systems it saves 12,000 tonnes of Co2 each year. Combined heat and power is a tried and tested technology that captures the heat either from conventional power sources or from waste incineration and uses it to warm domestic and public buildings. in the past district heating systems (on council estates, for instance) have proved unreliable and unresponsive to consumers requirements, but improvements in technology have made such schemes more attractive.
u the built environment

light bulbs, while discounted central heating systems are available for customers who are able to pay. the scheme has created the equivalent of more than 100 full-time jobs. the merton rule, adopted by merton Council in south london in 2003, requires the use of onsite renewable energy in new developments. it has now been adopted by many other local authorities and been embedded in national planning guidance. funding for the national affordable housing programme. it covers issues such as energy efficiency, building materials, pollution and water run-off. the four pilot eco-towns will include technologies such as smart meters to monitor domestic energy use, charging points for electric cars, and green travel schemes. but new buildings and eco-towns make up a tiny proportion of our built environment. a far bigger task is to retrofit the existing housing stock, public buildings, offices and factories (see pages 55-59). the local government association estimates a 500m-ayear programme to provide basic insulation for 10m homes could create an extra 20,000 jobs. Kirklees Warm Zone (pictured above) is a partnership between Kirklees Council and scottish power to provide energy efficiency support to local residents and tackle fuel poverty. more than 30,000 homes have been improved with free insulation and low energy
u inFrastruCture projeCts

big projects such as roads, hospitals, or utility pipelines often fail to plan for green infrastructure the network of blue and green spaces that acts as a life support system for society. research by natural economy northwest has identified 11 distinct economic benefits of green infrastructure, including improved land and property values, tourism, recreation and leisure, flood alleviation and health and wellbeing.

green building technologies are readily available and the government has made much of its decision that all new homes must be zero-carbon by 2016. in december last year the government issued a consultation paper on its code for sustainable homes. although the code is voluntary, compliance is a condition of

New Start | March 2010 | 29

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join the conversation

here are three ways you can join in our debate about the future of regeneration: u Write a response: our feedback section (see pages 32-37) is a forum for your views or if youd like to make a more substantial contribution relating to this series, contact Julian Dobson at julian@newstartmag.co.uk u Engage with us online: talk to @NewStartMag or @juliandobson on Twitter, blog your thoughts at www.newstartmag. co.uk/blog, or comment on other readers blogs u Co-host an event: if youd like to partner us in taking this conversation forward at a face-to-face event, or would like us to speak or facilitate a discussion at an event youre putting on, please get in touch email julian@newstartmag.co.uk

What could a low carbon society look like?

Working green infrastructure into traditional grey infrastructure could achieve significant improvements at low cost. green roofs can provide space for biodiversity and reduce flood risk from water run-off; planting trees can reduce the urban heat island effect of built-up areas; and road and rail verges can be managed to encourage wildlife. many european cities. the suburb of vauban in Freiburg, germany, is renowned as a successful car-free neighbourhood. in paris, the vlib scheme enables parisians to pick up and drop off a bike at will for as little as one euro a day. introduced in 2007, it now provides more than 20,000 bicycles for citizens use and 1,450 pickup points across the city centre. in ulm, germany, a similar idea is being tested with small cars (pictured left). Car clubs are nothing new there are small-scale car clubs across the uK but the ulm scheme provides 200 vehicles, enough to offer a realistic alternative to car ownership in urban areas. people who sign up to the Car2go service are able to use a smartcard to access a car near where they live, drive away and just pay for the time they use. public transport is usually seen as the poor relation of car ownership, but as motoring costs increase this could change. Fast, comfortable bus services on dedicated lanes such as Kents Fastrack system have succeeded in changing commuters perceptions and making public transport more popular. bus rapid transit networks demand much less investment than light or heavy rail systems and are more adaptable to changing patterns of demand. the strength and innovation of its financial services sector, that hurdle shouldnt be insurmountable. one suggestion is climate bonds debt securities designed to raise capital for environmental investment. this is particularly appropriate where money is needed for technological innovation or large-scale production (such as offshore wind power) and investors can achieve a return on their capital. an international network is now seeking to develop workable models of bond finance. local taxation is a more straightforward, but limited, way of raising funds. in boulder, Colorado, voters approved a climate action plan tax in 2006 (pictured below left). residents pay a levy on their electricity use which is invested in local schemes to reduce greenhouse gases. this year the tax is expected to generate revenues of $1.6m.

u travel

an oil-based commuter economy could become financially unsustainable within the next five years (see page 26). that will require a radical rethinking of travel and working patterns. town planning for the last half-century has focused on improving road networks, providing parking and mitigating the effects of congestion. a post-commuter economy could involve a major shift in working patterns with people working from home or in local networked offices; increasing strain on public transport systems as private motoring becomes less affordable; and the further isolation of rural communities that have become largely car-dependent. until now, congestion has been the main factor influencing moves towards greener travel. londons congestion charge has reduced the strain on the city centre but other cities have been reluctant to follow suit: manchester emphatically rejected a such a charge in 2008 despite the promise that the funds would be used to extend the citys tram network. a variation is being tried in nottingham, where businesses have agreed to a parking levy to finance the expansion of a tram network. more radical schemes have been tried in

u loCal Food

u green FinanCe

one difficulty in moving towards a lowcarbon economy is that to make the transition quickly, an enormous amount of investment is required. to do so in a time of public spending cuts might be regarded as a big ask. but in a country that prides itself on

interest in local food production is growing as a means of both reducing the Co2 emissions associated with global food distribution networks and the degree of waste generated by supermarkets and food producers. some 18 million tonnes of food ends up in landfill every year in the uK. local food production reduces transport costs, offers opportunities to revitalise rural areas and reconnect them with local markets, and can stimulate community activities. the incredible edible todmorden project (New Start, may 2009) has brought dozens of organisations and individuals together in one pennine town with the aim of becoming self-sufficient in fruit and vegetables (pictured above).

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Back to the hood

For regeneration to succeed in difficult times, we need to rediscover neighbourhood renewal. In the fourth part of our Real Regeneration series, Julian Dobson explains why
Last month, a week after two neighbourhood wardens were taken off the streets of New Wortley, Leeds, teenagers ransacked the local community centre. The chair of the residents association claimed the action was a protest against the removal of the wardens, who had won the trust of local people. The city council countered that the events were unrelated and the wardens wouldnt have been at the centre when it was broken into anyway. Whoever is right, the incident illustrates the fragile nature of confidence in some of our poorest neighbourhoods confidence that, in many cases, has been built up painstakingly over many years. And as John Houghton argues on page 28, the achievements of a decade of neighbourhood renewal are now under threat. The vision of neighbourhood renewal, as expressed in the national strategy action plan of 2001, was that within 10-20 years, nobody would be seriously disadvantaged by where they lived. Despite real improvements, disadvantage 26 | New Start | April 2010 continues, and risks deepening as recession hits the poorest areas hardest. We launched this series of articles by arguing that the role of regeneration was to create a sense of home renewing the attachments between people and place where they have become dysfunctional and disconnected. To do that, we have to start where we live: in the neighbourhood. Whats more, we have to start with the neighbourhoods that are most difficult. The reason isnt to satisfy centrally imposed targets about the relative performance of rich and poor areas, but because dysfunctional neighbourhoods have a debilitating and draining effect on everyone. They do so in economic terms, with low land values, dire job prospects and poor business survival rates; and in social terms, with failed education, crime, ill health and worklessness exacting a high toll on public services. But the argument for investing in neighbourhoods is an ethical one too: our worst areas hold up a mirror to society as a whole.

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The lives of the most vulnerable are a better measure of our civilisation than the successes of high achievers. When we look at whats happening at neighbourhood level, we need to go beyond the raw statistics. Not all lowincome neighbourhoods are dysfunctional far from it. And there are many middle class neighbourhoods where wealth disguises the loss of neighbourliness. Fear of crime can create blight and distrust in wealthy areas where remotecontrolled gates sprout like teenagers acne, not just in traditional working class communities. The confidenT neighbourhood The key to a functional neighbourhood isnt income: its confidence. Increasing the income of the poorest is essential, but on its own it may simply provide an escape route. Confidence is what enables someone to open a shop or start a business, to buy a house or use the local park. Confidence is what allows people to use the streets after dark or socialise with their neighbours. The first sign of a lack of confidence is rising crime (or fear of crime) and a neglected environment. Its no coincidence that much of the work of neighbourhood renewal has involved tackling visible indicators of fear and distrust neighbourhood wardens or community support officers patrolling the streets, litter-picking days, environmental projects, improving dilapidated houses and shopfronts. As one resident interviewed for the evaluation of the shortlived guide neighbourhoods programme put it: There is a lot of jargon about regeneration... but really, as a resident, there is only one question. Is this an area I want my children to grow up in? The guide neighbourhoods programme, which ran from 2005 to 2008, was an attempt to share the learning from areas that had successfully tackled disadvantage. None of them had become rich areas, or even middle class ones: but they had gained confidence, and were able to share their experiences with others.

As one visitor remarked: What they achieved is absolutely out of this world because when I walked round the estate... I noticed that there was no rubbish. I noticed that there was no dogs running around, no graffiti and I noticed that it felt quiet and peaceful and people tend to their gardens Many of the guide neighbourhoods achieved a sense of safety and stability without expensive demolition and rebuilding programmes, and without trying to change the social mix of the area by breaking up housing estates or seeking to import people with more disposable income. They shared a belief that local people, given support, had it in themselves to change their neighbourhoods perceptions and prospects. Furthermore, the guide neighbourhoods programme demonstrated the value of peer learning. Visitors said they particularly valued the personal experience and accessibility of residents and colleagues; their willingness to share learning, and the honesty with which they did so. Similarly, a research report by DCLG in 2007 found the neighbourhood management pathfinder areas were improving faster than comparable areas where there was no neighbourhood management in place. Residents were increasingly satisfied with local policing, street cleaning, and maintenance of public spaces. Significantly, the researchers pointed out that the neighbourhood management pathfinder areas were still deprived they had a long way to go before catching up with the better-off. But the spiral of decline had stopped. The recent evaluation of the national strategy for neighbourhood renewal has reinforced some of these findings. It stresses the need to build on the achievements of the last ten years with more targeted action that brings together the resources of a range of partners. But it also calls for a more sophisticated approach that recognises the natural functions of some neighbourhoods. There will always be a need for places that are affordable

Confident, social and productive: Bromley by Bow, London

The bromley by bow centre in east London has a simple ambition: To At the heart of the centres success is the creation of social networks. help create a cohesive, healthy, successful and vibrant community, and Local people are contacted through gP surgeries and schools, or through to remove the label deprived from bromley by bow. cultural events. Arts and music play an important part in the centres not an easy one, though, in an area which is 70% social housing, work. The philosophy is that it should be as easy as possible for people suffers from poverty, ill health and poor skills, and is cut off from the to get involved. surrounding area by main roads and railway lines. The result is a more productive community. You can see that in Since 1984, starting in a local church with business terms: the centre hosts a range of an elderly and declining congregation, the social enterprises, including green dreams, centre has opened its doors to the surrounding a firm of landscape architects, and a graphic community, celebrating diverse cultures and design company. but productivity is also meeting simple but essential needs such as evident in the burgeoning artistic and cultural good quality childcare. in 1997 the centre, now activities on offer, including a partnership with a separate secular charity, opened the bromley grand union orchestra, which brings together by bow healthy Living centre. musicians from all over the world. Most Local people have grown in confidence as importantly, the centre helps local people to staff from the centre have worked with them become more self-reliant, reducing dependency to address health problems, help deal with on state or local authority help. debts and advise on benefits, or support them u Find out more: http://www.bbbc.org.uk/ as they looked for work. A Grand Union Orchestra event at Bromley by Bow

Photo: www.third-avenue.co.uk

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real regeneration

We need to learn the lessons of the last decade of neighbourhood renewal,

between 1999 and 2009 the new Labour government delivered a surprisingly radical programme of neighbourhood renewal that narrowed the gap between the poorest neighbourhoods and the rest of the country. The decline of many poor neighbourhoods was halted and reversed, aided by general prosperity and increased spending on public services. on basic measures like joblessness and crime rates, the gap between the poorest places and average neighbourhoods started to shrink. After a decade of progress, the future feels frosty. An uncertain political landscape, severe public spending cuts, a suspicion of big government programmes and signs of a harsher public attitude to poverty. The changed context makes it all the important to learn the lessons from the past decade, and the scarcity of funding makes it imperative to build on what has been achieved. The first key lesson is the importance of neighbourhood focus and community engagement. Programmes worked when they tackled the specific and interconnected problems in each place in a tailored way, and match-funded public spending with the equity of local activism. in age of localism and austerity, targeting funding where it matters most and harnessing the efforts of local groups will be more important than ever. The second key lesson is the need to tie efforts to regenerate the poorest neighbourhoods into wider programmes. nationally and locally, neighbourhood renewal was often kept separate from mainstream policies, including housing programmes which impacted directly on deprived places. The emphasis in future must be on getting mainstream public

entry points for new arrivals, for example. There are other, more isolated, neighbourhoods that will present harsh and continuing challenges. Such places, if theyre not to decline irreparably and expensively, will always need support. But in a time of scarce resources such help has to be chosen carefully. Masterplanning and remodelling is likely to prove much less helpful here than sustained and supportive community development. The SociAL neighbourhood Successful neighbourhood renewal wont limit itself to making the place safe. Much of the work in designing and implementing the national strategy lay in devising and applying targets for improvement in health, educational attainment, employment while the replacement of the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund with the Working Neighbourhoods Fund in 2008 focused attention and resources on addressing poverty by getting people into work. Much of this work was underpinned by tried and tested methods of community engagement festivals, arts activities, or local environmental action. Often these were simply a means to an end, which was to find ways of shifting the deprivation statistics. Its disconcerting to think social activity has to be justified on policy grounds. Thats not how ordinary neighbourhoods or communities work: they have festivals because they want to get together, have clubs and societies for people to share interests. Social life is part of the fabric of healthy community life. But even in better-off areas such activities have become fragmented, which might explain why regeneration projects are often somewhat gauche in trying to get people together. The decline of social capital the bonds that link people together, from family to leisure activities has been well documented since the publication of Robert Putnams Bowling Alone. But as David Halpern, director of research at the Institute of Government, noted recently, the trend is not universal: We Anglo-Saxons have spent the past few decades using our growing personal wealth to escape from the inconvenience of other people... We use our wealth to 28 | New Start | April 2010

ensure that we can do what we want, when we want to. In contrast, our Scandinavian neighbours seem to have used their wealth to see more of one another to go out with friends, to join more reading groups and so on. You dont have to be wealthy to build social capital. On the edge of Edinburgh, the Craigmillar Communiversity has used music, drama and art for many years to bring local people together and express the spirit of the neighbourhood. Londons Notting Hill Carnival is an example of a festival that has taken on a life of its own, growing from its roots in west Londons Caribbean community in the early 1960s into a nationally important celebration. Instead of seeing social activity as a means to an end, we need an approach to neighbourhood renewal that sees it as a worthy end in itself. Encouraging local celebrations

Above: the Good Life community allotment project in Longbenton, North Tyneside, shows what productive neighbourhoods can achieve

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argues John Houghton

services to rigorously prioritise the poorest neighbourhoods without the incentive of additional money. Although the floor targets, which set out basic minimum standards for the poorest places, had their flaws, the governments decision to abandon them undermined the drive to make neighbourhood renewal a priority for all local agencies. The third key lesson is the need to understand the roles which different deprived neighbourhoods play in the local economy and the different trajectories which they are on in terms of growth or decline. Policy has tended to group all poor neighbourhoods together and address them as static places. in reality, of course, they differ widely and the state of the surrounding housing and jobs market influences their development. Some poor neighbourhoods are isolated economically and have low levels of population churn. others are highly transient, play an escalator role for some households, and with the right interventions could benefit from surrounding growth. As we learn more about how poor places change (or dont change) over time, the emphasis needs to be on efforts which will link their development into opportunities in the wider economy. Ten years ago this month, the government launched its consultation on the draft national strategy for neighbourhood renewal and confirmed another slug of funding allocations through the 2bn new deal for communities programme. Things could only get better. clearly, were now in a very different age. but if we can learn and apply the lessons from the past, build on whats been achieved and realise the potential of poor neighbourhoods, things dont have to get worse.
u John Houghton is a writer on regeneration and principal consultant

with Shared Intelligence.

breaks down barriers and helps to overcome depression and disaffection; and mental wellbeing is key to physical health and productivity. In 2004, for example, 38% of incapacity benefit claimants had been diagnosed with mental health problems. A social neighbourhood is more than a safe and stable one. It is one that offers quality of life without making it dependent on increasing affluence and as strategies to create mixed communities unravel in the wake of the recession, it will become more important to be clear about the distinction between affluence and wellbeing. The ProducTive neighbourhood The third step in creating neighbourhoods that work places people are proud to call home and that are able to regenerate themselves is productivity. If neighbourhood renewal is to take place in an era of constrained resources, it must make the most of residents productive skills. This presents a dilemma, because it places a premium on action that helps people stay where they are. In the past many who have benefited from regeneration programmes (for example, by gaining skills or a job) have taken the opportunity to move out, leaving their neighbourhoods for those with greater needs. Unless this drain of talent is plugged, the poorest areas will always be unpleasant to live in and the spiral of neglect will accelerate. But productive talent is about more than work and jobs. Voluntary activity is a key indicator of local productivity. Seedley and Langworthy in Salford are productive neighbourhoods, winning the North West in Bloom competition for six successive years and demonstrating the energy that can exist in a deprived area.

Longbenton, North Tyneside, is another productive neighbourhood. The Good Life community allotment project described in New Start in July 2004 and October 2007 has brought veggie boxes to local residents, countering the effects of poor diet and the lack of local fresh produce. Its an example of people taking responsibility themselves for renewing their communities. A productive neighbourhood brings economic benefits. Not only does it become safe for local retailers; it also becomes a place to do business. The Arts Factory in the Rhondda, south Wales, has spawned a range of companies, including a biodiesel manufacturer that creates car fuel from used vegetable oil and a second-hand book seller. A productive neighbourhood can set off a virtuous circle of economic activity, where local people spend money on locally produced goods and services. These suppliers in turn spend more within the locality than, for example, a national or multinational company would do. The New Economics Foundation has developed a tool, LM3, that can be used to measure this local multiplier effect. Such local productivity needs to be at the centre of regeneration policy. But while it may be cheaper than many of the large-scale capital programmes of the past, it wont be easy. To make it work there needs to be constant support not just via commendations and ministerial visits, but by financing people on the ground and backing their ideas wherever possible. We need neighbourhood renewal for strategic and policy reasons. But we need it too because we cant afford wasted communities. The Arts Factorys motto is no more throw-away people. At a time when were all aware of the value of resources, its very apt.

join the conversation

here are three ways you can join in our debate about the future of regeneration: u Write a response: our feedback section (see pages 30-35) is a forum for your views or if youd like to make a more substantial contribution relating to this series, contact Julian Dobson at julian@newstartmag.co.uk u Engage with us online: talk to @NewStartMag or @juliandobson on Twitter, or get involved in our new Future of Regeneration blog at http://www.regenfuture.org/ u Co-host an event: if youd like to partner us in taking this conversation forward at a face-to-face event, or would like us to speak or facilitate a discussion at an event youre putting on, please get in touch email julian@newstartmag.co.uk

New Start | April 2010 | 29

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Dealing in a few
Read, watch or listen to any discussion about broken Britain and you wont need to wait long before social housing is mentioned. And it wont be in glowing terms. Welfare dependency, crime, antisocial behaviour, educational failure, ill-health: all are dumped on the doorstep of the social housing estate. Sometimes it takes a historian to remind us that the affordable housing we have today was built as a solution to remarkably similar problems. Take Friedrich Engels description of the Manchester slums in 1845. In such dwellings only a physically degenerate race, robbed of all humanity, degraded, reduced morally and physically to bestiality, could feel comfortable and at home, he wrote setting a rhetorical bar even Phillip Blond or David Cameron might struggle to reach. The academic Anne Power quotes H G Wells: It is only because the thing was spread out over a hundred years and not concentrated into a few weeks that history fails to realise how much massacre, degeneration and disablement of peoples lives was due to the housing of people in the nineteenth century. When you look at todays problem neighbourhoods and estates, its worth remembering that there were times when many of them were thriving, even if they may never have been affluent. So why is housing so knotted into the challenges of regeneration today, and what can we do to create a new sense of home? The soluTion ThaT became The problem Municipal housing was once the brave new world. Inspired by the Garden Cities movement and by the clarion call for homes for heroes for returning troops, new estates sprang up across the country. Many, like the massive cottage estate in Becontree, east London, were huge improvements on what had gone before, acres of solidly built semi-detached homes with gardens and bathrooms. But for the last half-century, housing policy in the UK has driven a wedge between the haves and the have-nots. In the process, both groups have been cheated. Many attempts to deal with the problems focus on social housing in isolation. Estates are contrasted with supposedly functional private housing markets, and policies aim to bring the stability of home-ownership into areas of affordable housing. But the reality is that the private market is broken too. Since World War II housing policies and trends have reinforced social and spatial inequalities. Politicians and think tanks fret about the loss of social mobility, but fail to acknowledge that the gap between social strata is getting ever wider. In 1953 only 32% of English households were owneroccupiers. Most people rented a situation comparable with some European countries, such as Germany, today. Throughout the sixties and seventies there was a steady growth in owner-occupation, associated with rising 24 | New Start | May 2010

For ten years UK housing policies have reinforced disadvantage and widened the gap between rich and poor. Julian Dobson explains why rethinking regeneration must involve rethinking housing
affluence; but there was also council house building on an industrial scale, creating many of the estates now considered the most difficult. The class divide often became starkly visual, suburban semis contrasting with municipal slabs. The introduction of the right to buy in December 1979 saw more than a million better quality council homes sold to their tenants. Pressure on the accommodation that remained intensified, with tenancies rationed on the basis of need. The people with the most severe problems became concentrated in the housing that was least desirable. By the time Tony Blair took office in 1997, Britains most intractable social problems were firmly associated in the minds of pundits and policymakers with the worst estates. While the Social Exclusion Unit was careful to point out that deprivation existed in areas of private rented and owneroccupied housing too, regeneration funds were largely focused on social housing estates. More than a decade on, the same concerns remain. The press release announcing the extension of the DCLGs Connecting Communities programme in January this year had a familiar ring: Each area faces different issues but the challenges can be broadly characterised as involving high levels of unemployment; low levels of educational achievement; high levels of social housing, high levels of antisocial behaviour and crime, and low levels of community cohesion. The dream ThaT became a nighTmare No wonder council housing became the option of last resort. By the turn of the millennium home ownership rates in England had reached a record 70%. Those with resources or without ties played the housing market like the stock market, cashing in on house price inflation. Others paid over the odds because they thought a rising market would produce equity they could pass on to their children. Like Midas, homeowners seemed convinced everything they touched would turn to gold. The slump of 1989-1990 was a wake-up call. But for all the repossessions and horror stories of negative equity, the call went unheeded: the late nineties and most of the noughties spawned another unsustainable house price boom. Homeowners may have known that the housing market is cyclical (see graph, right), but the temptation to bet on cashing in at the right point in the cycle proved irresistible. And until the banking crisis of 2007-08, the wherewithal

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home truths

Above: a post-war estate in east London, typical of the type of area often considered most difficult now

was there too, with easy access to debt finance and ever higher loan-to-value ratios. More deep-rooted factors were at play as well. One of the strongest factors pulling families towards better-off neighbourhoods is the prospect of good schools. Estate agents were quick to spot buyers readiness to pay a premium for homes in the best catchment areas; a survey by Nationwide last year found a 10% increase in SATs performance at the nearest school created an uplift of 3.3% in local house prices. Over time, the links between housing and education entrenched neighbourhood divisions. Those who could get on the home-ownership ladder sank more and more of their wealth into bricks and mortar. In 1984 the average firsttime buyers mortgage was nearly twice their income; 20 years later it was more than three times their income. Forty percent of people buying a home in 2004 were ploughing at

Boom and Bust: real house prices (source: nationwide Building society)

least 30% of their income into housing-related expenses. Households were forced into a cycle of requiring better jobs (or two full-time incomes) to allow them to buy in wealthier areas to achieve better life chances for their children. Once on the treadmill, it would only deliver the goods if it kept accelerating. To achieve a return on your investment, house prices had to keep rising in real terms. So as the market gave to the haves, it took from the have-nots. Whats more, it operated unevenly, with knockon effects on labour markets. It reinforced geographic as well as social divides, with demand in London and southeast England pumping up prices well beyond those achievable elsewhere. In 1993 an average-priced home in Kensington, central London, would buy you two average-priced homes at Leven in Fife. But by 2003, a study by the National Housing and Planning Advice Unit found last year, a Kensington home would buy no fewer than 24 comparable properties in Leven. Between 1993 and 2003, the value of the homes of the wealthiest 10% of the UK population rose by 322%. In the same decade, the poorest tenth of homeowners saw their homes rise in value by 102%. The recession hasnt changed the underlying imbalances: while prices have fallen, this has been offset by tougher lending criteria that require buyers to find more money for deposits. big soluTions, small change Over the last decade national and local housing policies have failed to address the systemic nature of the problem. Solutions have tended to fall into two categories. The problems of social housing were to be alleviated by a

New Start | May 2010 | 25

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mixture of improvement, replacement and an injection of owner-occupiers. The problems of private housing were to be addressed by increasing supply and seeking cheaper ways of building. Theres no doubt many of the programmes to replace council housing were needed because the homes themselves were unfit for purpose. Schemes such as the redevelopment of the Castlefields estate in Runcorn had widespread resident support. But others were perceived as breaking up existing communities and sparked fears that local people would be forced out. The so-called mixed communities programme, for instance, was founded on the premise that to tackle entrenched disadvantage, social housing estates had to be broken up and uplifted through the good offices of an influx of homeowners. Large-scale redevelopment plans in places like Canning Town, east London, or the Ferrier estate in Greenwich, south London, generated vociferous local protests (New Start, May 2009). More recently, Hammersmith and Fulham Councils plans to demolish the West Kensington and Gibbs Green estates (New Start, February 2010) prompted local people to declare they would take them over themselves. Meanwhile the solution proposed for the home ownership market was to bring down the cost by massively increasing supply. The 2004 review of housing supply by economist Kate Barker noted that over the decade to 2001 construction of new homes fell to its lowest level since World War II. Barker called for at least 70,000 new private homes a year to be built to curtail real-terms price rises, along with an extra 17,000 affordable homes a year to meet social need. Development restrictions should be lifted to provide more housing where it was needed, she argued. This chimed with the massive investment in housebuilding that was the cornerstone of John Prescotts sustainable communities plan of 2004 (New Start, December 2009 and April 2010). More holistic approaches to neighbourhood renewal were rapidly sidelined. But here, too, there was opposition. Local authorities and residents in many parts of southeast England and beyond recoiled at the imposition of housebuilding targets. And then came the recession, and private housebuilding went into reverse, taking much of the Barker plan with it. The long Way home Six years on, the sustainable communities plan has been derailed. While the Homes and Communities Agency has traversed the country kick-starting frozen developments into life, and local authorities have been granted powers to build the first council houses in a generation, the fundamental problems remain. So how can we shift housing markets in a way that 26 | New Start | May 2010

A more diverse housing market: Some starting points...

There are tried and tested approaches to housing that escape the cycle of boom and bust in the private market and concentrated deprivation in social housing. at present they tend to be regarded by the public sector, housebuilders and consumers as niche markets but theres no reason why they should continue to be. housing co-ops cooperative housing is an alternative to traditional rented housing, especially (but not only) within the social housing sector. co-ops can own or manage their homes, giving tenants and residents a stake in the way their neighbourhood is run and a voice at board level. residents may choose to run a range of ancillary services alongside the homes themselves. There are many forms of cooperative housing, from district-wide organisations like community gateway in preston to small independent co-ops. u More information: www.cch.coop communiTy self-build community self-build is a way of bringing down the cost of new homes and providing for people who otherwise might never have a place of their own. self-builders can work with housing associations or form co-ops, and may build for rent, shared ownership or to own their homes outright. not only do the builders bring down the cost by contributing their labour; they also have the chance to learn skills and gain qualifications in construction trades. u More information: www.communityselfbuildagency.org.uk communiTy land TrusTs community land trusts buy or create assets for the use of local communities, which are held in perpetuity for local benefit. although most are concerned with housing, they may also run business ventures such as community shops, pubs or post offices, build local halls or run services such as leisure facilities. community land trusts are well established in the us. They now have widespread political support in the uK. in devon, the county council has put 850,000 into a community land trust at high bickington, which will provide 18 new homes, two workshops for local businesses and a woodchip heating plant. u More information: www.communitylandtrust.org.uk co-housing co-housing is where a group of people create their own community, often with a number of private homes clustered around a shared centre that can provide communal facilities. it can be a particularly attractive option for people in later life, with care provided within the community. co-housing can be rented or bought on a mortgage, and schemes can be built from scratch to allow groups to plan the kind of facilities and amenities they want. While it is rare in the uK, there are hundreds of co-housing projects in denmark and several dozen in the us. springhill co-housing in stroud, gloucestershire, provides a range of accommodation and a common house where meals are prepared for people who choose to eat together. The homes are built to high environmental standards around a pedestrianised private street, five minutes walk from the town centre. u More information: www.cohousing.org.uk

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more organic solutions have to be found. Meanwhile we need to open up wealthier neighbourhoods to those on lower incomes. Planners need to be strong enough to resist the nimbys and sprinkle affordable housing generously across middle-class neighbourhoods. They should also resist gated communities that create physical barriers within neighbourhoods. More mixed neighbourhoods will in turn help to reduce the social segregation of schools. 3 Be more flexible about land use The homes we build tend to be an inflexible solution to problems of social and industrial change. Labour markets shift rapidly and social demographics are fluid, but houses stay for a century or more. Housing solutions need to become more adaptable to 21st century lifestyles. In particular we need to rethink housing within city centres. In many areas there is a vast oversupply of retail and office space and no realistic prospect of using it for its intended purpose. Much of this could be converted to both short and long-term housing. The private rented sector, which so far has grown largely on the speculative buy-tolet craze, could play a key role in offering a wider range of house types and locations. We also need to think of different ways of using land where theres an over-supply of homes. Some local authorities will need to take tough decisions about the prospects for growth in their areas and plan accordingly. 4 Enable people to put down roots A strong theme in the election campaign was the importance of encouraging and enabling citizens to play a stronger role in society. For that to happen, they need to be able to commit to a town or a neighbourhood for the long term. Three things frustrate this: labour markets that demand highly mobile workers, education markets that put a premium on neighbourhoods with high-performing schools, and housing markets that reward those already on the ladder at the expense of those who arent. There are alternatives that have been shown to be more affordable and sustainable. Some of these are described in the panel on the opposite page. Over time, promotion and funding for such alternatives may create links and bridges between the haves and havenots. But its taken us half a century to get into this mess. In a time of limited resources, it will take years to emerge. But we can at least stop digging the hole were in.

Above: a blue plaque marks one of the first houses to be built on the Becontree estate in east London

enables housing to regenerate communities rather than ossifying them? There are plenty of instances where housing is part of the solution rather than part of the problem (see box, left). But they are relatively small scale, and exist at the margins of the market. four Ways To begin The shifT 1 Stop the rot Spirals of decline often begin with empty homes. One empty property is an eyesore; a cluster changes a neighbourhoods reputation. Boarded up homes awaiting renovation or neglected by private landlords send a signal that an area is going downhill. Yet there are half a million empty homes across the UK. Local authorities have had new powers to deal with them since 2006, but often fail to use them. There are also pockets of social housing that need complex and sustained intervention. It is difficult to see how this will happen without intensive and expensive actions that bring together physical, economic and community development. It takes time and money, but there are no short cuts. 2 Open closed communities The rationale for the mixed communities initiative was that neighbourhoods are more sustainable if theres a mix of housing types and tenures. But its unrealistic to expect a continual influx of affluent people to change every difficult neighbourhood. Improvements must build on the strengths that already exist within neighbourhoods. The policy of demolish and divide is clumsy and expensive. Longer term,

join the conversation

here are three ways you can join in our debate about the future of regeneration: u Write a response: our feedback section (see pages 32-37) is a forum for your views or if youd like to make a more substantial contribution relating to this series, contact Julian Dobson at julian@newstartmag.co.uk u Engage with us online: talk to @NewStartMag or @juliandobson on Twitter, blog your thoughts at www.newstartmag. co.uk/blog and www.regenfuture.org, or comment on other readers blogs u Co-host an event: if youd like to partner us in taking this conversation forward at a face-to-face event, or would like us to speak or facilitate a discussion at an event youre putting on, please get in touch email julian@newstartmag.co.uk

New Start | May 2010 | 27

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Just the job?

Government approaches to poverty assume there are enough jobs for everyone. But what if there arent, and what about the work nobody will pay for? Julian Dobson explores some options
Lets cut benefits for those who refuse to work. No mistaking the message, or the underlying assumptions, of the Conservative campaign poster in the election run-up. Dig a little deeper, though, and it isnt so clear. On the one hand, theres a common perception that there are people who get benefits they dont deserve, noted last year in a Joseph Rowntree Foundation study on attitudes to income inequality. On the other, there are some stark statistics. There are now 2.51 million people unemployed and seeking work, 8% of the working age population. The overall employment rate, at 72%, is its lowest since September 1996. Official labour market statistics show some disturbing trends. More than one million people are working part-time 24 | New Start | June 2010 because they cant get full-time work, the highest level since 1992. The number unemployed for a year or more rose by 94,000 in the first quarter of 2010, reaching a total of 757,000, the highest since 1997. Meanwhile the number of vacancies fell to 475,000. This slackness in the labour market is the tip of the iceberg. There are another five and a half million people of working age who are economically inactive surviving on benefits or other peoples income. These are the ones caricatured by politicians and commentators as workshy. But little effort is made to figure out what refusal to work really means when there are half a million vacancies between more than eight million nonworking people.

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policy gaffes of the 75p increase in the state pension in 1999 or the removal of the 10p income tax band in 2008. But just as few in the UK dispute the need for a safety net, there is a general assumption that it is being abused. So every welfare reform adds new layers of conditionality, with one eye on the commentators who specialise in spotting people who appear to get something for nothing. Yet there have always been large numbers of people outside the labour market. What has changed is who those people are, how their inactivity is financed, and the public attitudes that are attached to what they do. In the first half of the 20th century it was common for only one member of a household to do paid work, and households tended to manage on one income. In 2010 that is unusual. What has changed positively has been womens participation in the labour market. In 1955, according to a Nottingham University study, 45.9% of working age women were employed. By 1975 that had risen to 55.1%, and by 1995 to two-thirds. But the caring and domestic multi-tasking previously lumped under the dismissive job title of housewife didnt simply disappear, to be done by millions of household appliances. Some was outsourced to paid workers; some done informally within families and social networks; and some juggled into the spare hours of dual-earning households (with the woman usually bearing most of that burden). Couples and families increasingly found they couldnt manage on one income alone to fund the lifestyles of their peers; but as two-job households increased, so did no-job households, where nobody had the skills, qualifications, networks or opportunities to compete. There was no explosion of well-paid jobs to match the aspirations of equal opportunities. In fact a study by the Office for National Statistics in 2003 found that the employment rate for 1564-year-olds in 2000 was remarkably similar to that in 1902 71% compared with 69%. So inequality within households and between genders began to give way to inequality between the qualified and the unqualified, between those living in areas of opportunity and those in areas of disadvantage. For the poor, male and female, breaking out of the cycle became ever more difficult. The answer isnt to turn the clock back to the 1950s or roll back advances in gender equality, which still have a way to go. But when labour markets and welfare systems fail to offer enough reasonably-paid jobs to provide routes out of poverty for those dependent on state benefits, we need to think differently. The new governmenT: an opporTuniTy? Look at the coalition agreement between the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives and youll find much familiar ground, but also some potentially significant changes. Theres action to push jobseekers allowance (JSA) claimants into the workplace as quickly as possible. Receipt of benefits should be conditional on willingness to work. Welfare-to-work contracts should more closely reflect providers success in getting people into jobs. Nothing radically different there. What is new is the commitment to end all existing welfare to work programmes and to create a single welfare to work New Start | June 2010 | 25

The standard critique of welfare dependency is that it is either a problem of claimants own making for which they are morally culpable, or a regrettable consequence of a creaking tax and benefits system. Both critiques share a view that paid employment is the solution to poverty; that the issue is either to make work pay, or to make the unpaid work. What neither analysis really gets to grips with is a complex society in which some want to work but cant; a few dont want to work at all; some do work but on the margins of society, without declaring their earnings; and many others work but dont get paid or recognised for it, providing informal care and support in their families and communities. For the last half-century social policies have swung between palliative and punitive approaches to poverty and welfare. When the apparently deserving have been hit, were all compassion. The lasting memories of Gordon Browns approach to poverty, for many, will not be the tax credit system or the campaign to end child poverty but the

Photo: KPA/Zuma/Rex Features

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programme to help all unemployed people get back into work. For more of an insight we need to turn to the new work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, and the think tank he founded, the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ). This has been hugely influential among the Cameron set and offers an analysis that goes well beyond the thinking of the previous government. Last years CSJ report, Dynamic benefits, advocates a root-and-branch overhaul of the benefits system to remove disincentives to work. In particular it accepts the case, advocated over many years by New Start, the Community Allowance campaign and anti-poverty groups, for increasing the amount people can earn before benefits are withdrawn. It calls for the benefit withdrawal rate to be eased so claimants entering work never lose more than 55% of their earnings after taxation. These are important proposals that could make employment more attractive to people who might otherwise find themselves working long hours for rewards only marginally better than welfare subsistence. They recognise that the choice not to get a job is often entirely rational: it simply is not worth the extra effort and expense. Indeed, one of the key findings of the Joseph Rowntree Foundations report, Monitoring poverty and social exclusion 2009, was that more children than ever suffer poverty in households where at least one adult works. The CSJ report advocates sweeping away the current system and replacing it with just two payments: a universal work credit and a universal life credit. The work credit would be for the unemployed, sick or those on very low wages; the life credit would replace benefits designed to ease the cost of living, such as council tax benefit and housing benefit. For a relatively small initial cost, it argues, the lives of many people in poverty would be transformed: A total of 4.9 million households with low-earning workers would see their incomes rise by an average of 1,000 per year. By careful design we can minimise the number of low earners who lose out. 600,000 previously workless households would enter employment, and the national income (GDP) would increase by 4.7 billion. Consequently, 829,000 households including 210,000 children would move above the poverty threshold. This, of course, assumes there is paid work ready and waiting for those 600,000 households, at salaries that allow them to become net contributors to the exchequer. And theres the difficulty. Towards posiTive welfare What has been lost in recent decades is the recognition that there are useful things people can do with their time without earning an income. The idea that those who do not earn are by definition not pulling their weight is a very modern one. The result is that we think of poverty as being entirely income-related, and work as synonymous with employment. A positive approach must acknowledge that unpaid work is still work and can have the same psychological and social value; and that poverty of life experience is as destructive as lack of income. 26 | New Start | June 2010

A positive approach would recognise the value generated by creating homes and communities places where children can grow up and elderly people grow old surrounded by people they know and trust, where social networks are cultivated, achievements celebrated, and supportive environments created. There are important steps towards positive welfare in the CSJs thinking. But it remains rooted in a view that life on benefits is not a sensible choice, doing nothing to challenge the stigma associated with welfare or the assumption that paid work is the only work worth doing. Todays labour markets are not only unable to offer enough jobs at sufficient levels of pay to meet everybodys needs, but are also deeply insecure: not only are there no more jobs for life, there are few workplaces where you can be sure of a job next year. But there is plenty that still needs doing. Children and old people need to be cared for. Isolated people need befriending. Streets and buildings must be looked after and repaired. In particular, we are on the brink of a crisis in care for the oldest members of society. Over the next 35 years, according to a London School of Economics report for the Cabinet Office, the demand for unpaid care of frail older people by their children is expected to rise by 90%. As the population ages, demand for care is expected to outstrip supply by 2017. By 2041 there will be 1.3 million elderly people requiring 20 hours a week or more of care from their adult children. Much of this is the stuff David Camerons Big Society aims to address. But its incompatible with longer working hours and a culture of eligibility for state support based on time spent jobseeking rather than time spent in useful activity. Instead, the welfare system needs to reward activities

Above: volunteers using their time to paint a community centre in south London

real regeneration

The Community Allowance

The idea of allowing people on benefits to work in their communities without losing welfare entitlements emerged around eight years ago from the national Community forum. The concept was simple: put benefits spending to work by giving claimants the chance to do useful tasks in their neighbourhoods, under the supervision of established community organisations. This would give people an opportunity to improve their areas, learn new skills and become more work-ready, while giving local organisations more capacity to address issues like environmental blight, ill health, loneliness and antisocial behaviour. The allowance would be paid on top of benefits for a maximum of 52 weeks, with additional earnings capped at 4,469. a study by the new economics foundation concluded every pound spent on the Community allowance would create 10.20 worth of social value. last year three organisations were chosen to pilot the idea in north east lincolnshire, portsmouth and the isle of wight, and Tameside, manchester. it remains to be seen whether the new government will run with this but its an ideal opportunity to test some of iain duncan smiths ideas.

And it is not cheap: it would demand a significant redistribution of the tax burden. But it may be just the kind of support system we need to face an uncertain economic future and growing social needs. A citizens income creates scope for volunteering, community involvement and informal care the kind of social infrastructure that could be stretched to breaking point as people juggle paid employment and caring responsibilities. It recognises that people contribute to society in a mass of ways that cant be measured by GVA or tax revenues. Initiatives like time banking could flourish because there would be no question of contravening available for work rules. A citizens income replaces a culture of compulsion and enforcement with one of permission, where people make their own choices about how they use their time. They might choose to supplement their basic income with a modest amount of part-time work; they might feel better rewarded by using their time for the benefit of friends and family; or they might go all-out for the higher living standards a full-time job offers. But what if they do nothing? The objection is that such a system encourages a culture of handouts. It would be nave to assume nobody would try to take advantage. Over time, schools and community organisations could encourage a more universal culture of volunteering the idea of National Citizen Service is a step in that direction. But changing cultures is a long-term process. To achieve that, we need to invest in family support and community development in areas and with households that have become trapped in welfare. Building neighbourhood enterprises without the risks of losing everything if you fail, and creating intermediate forms of work with clear local benefits, could demonstrate a work ethic people would believe in. A community development approach to local economic development may not create the global businesses of tomorrow. But it can generate opportunities for people for whom the labour markets currently offer little. A crowd of people spending a little money and putting a lot of energy into their neighbourhoods may be a better long-term bet than a shiny investor who arrives brandishing promises of jobs and leaves as soon as production becomes more convenient elsewhere. For too long our approach to poverty has focused on getting people into paid work. Well make more progress in building sustainable communities, solving social problems and creating the businesses of the future when we start by looking at how we can all live better and more worthwhile lives.

Right: New Start focused on the issue of the community allowance in September 2009

that increase social skills and quality of life and nurture communities. The Community Allowance (see panel) is one such idea. But to achieve that, the link between entitlement and formal jobseeking has to be severed. This is where the idea of a universal citizens income could come in. Its the kind of suggestion usually dismissed as utopian or a charter for fecklessness. In reality its a small step from the CSJs universal credit system, but without the need for a Heath Robinson mechanism of incentives and punishments to try to squeeze a huge number of claimants into a modest number of jobs. A citizens income covers everybodys basic needs. Every citizen, employed or not, receives it and it acts as a safety net in the same way that the benefits system is intended to. But because it is universal there is no need for all the infrastructure of means-testing, welfare-to-work programmes, fraud investigation and so on. Those who gain work keep the citizens income, so the incentive to get a job is maximised. Those who lose their jobs will be cushioned from the worst effects of unemployment. People who want to set up in business need not fear being destitute if their enterprise fails. So far the idea has been advocated by the likes of the Green Party and the New Economics Foundation, so it tends to be regarded with suspicion in the political mainstream.

join the conversation about regenerations future

here are three ways you can join in our debate about the future of regeneration: u Write a response: our feedback section (see pages 32-37) is a forum for your views or if youd like to make a more substantial contribution relating to this series, contact Julian Dobson at julian@newstartmag.co.uk u Engage with us online: talk to @NewStartMag or @juliandobson on Twitter, blog your thoughts at www.regenfuture.org, or comment on other readers blogs u Co-host an event: if youd like to partner us in taking this conversation forward at a face-to-face event, or would like us to speak or facilitate a discussion at an event youre putting on, please get in touch email julian@newstartmag.co.uk

Photo: www.third-avenue.co.uk

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real regeneration

Were already wired

When alls said and done, the saying goes, theres a lot more said than done. Its already in danger of becoming an axiom of the Big Society. So Im wary of adding to the deluge. But it cant be avoided: first, because the substance of the idea is still being created; and second, because you cant talk about regeneration without taking part in that discourse about civil society and government. The question for us at New Start, and anyone grappling with the future of regeneration, is what these debates about the role of society and government mean for the most disadvantaged people in the most distressed places. This series of articles began in January by offering a working definition of what were about: Regeneration is the action of citizens and those who work with them to recreate home for new times, especially where there is poverty or disadvantage. So regeneration, in our view, is citizen-led; its about the 26 | New Start | July/August 2010

The future of regeneration is closely tied into current debates about society and government. Julian Dobson explains what a regeneration perspective can offer
connections and links that matter most to people; its about change; and it is about addressing poverty. That offers a platform for a constructive contribution to the Big Society debate as well as a critique of some of its shortcomings. Some, such as the National Council for Voluntary Organisations and Carnegie UK, prefer to use the term good society, which frames the question in a way that should resonate with regenerators. While a big society defines itself by size, a good society forces you to ask more uncomfortable questions. Good for whom? Why? What if one persons good isnt so good for another? Theyre age-old dilemmas, but a view of society or of regeneration that tries to sidestep them is vacuous.

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Ten ways to make the best of the Big Society

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
u This

Make social justice the main goal. Social justice means the fair and equitable distribution of social, environmental and economic resources. Build a broader economy. Extend the principle of decentralisation and citizen control to economic institutions like the banks. Build a bigger democracy. Ensure widespread engagement and participation in government by citizens of all social groups, nationally and locally. Make sure everyone can participate. Ensure adequate and consistent support for local groups and organisations, especially the most marginalised. Make co-production the standard way of getting things done. Draw on the skills, knowledge and experience of providers and users in an equal and reciprocal relationship. Transform the role of professionals and other providers. Professionals should see themselves as facilitators and brokers, working in partnership with those at the receiving end. Redistribute paid and unpaid time. Move towards a shorter working week, spreading employment more equally across the population, supported by changes in the minimum wage and tax rates. Make it sustainable. Ensure the Big Society protects natural resources, prevents social problems and reduces our dependence on economic growth.

Measure what matters. Dont just count short-term financial effects, but the long-term impacts on the quality of peoples lives and relationships. Make it part of a Great Transition. Use the Big Society as the start of a radical move towards a bigger society, a broader economy and a bigger democracy.

list is drawn from an article by Anna Coote, head of social policy at the New Economics Foundation. The full article is at http://www.neweconomics.org/articles/ten-big-questions-about-the-big-society-html

into the Big Idea

Regeneration should be contentious; if it isnt it probably means important voices are not being heard. It needs to address conflict and imbalances and misuses of power. It has to be about social justice, which means identifying and addressing social injustice. What regeneration should bring to the table in the Big Society debate is a conscience. It needs to oppose concepts of society that allow poverty and inequality to go unchallenged, and put forward approaches that are inclusive and geared towards improving the lives and circumstances of the worst-off, and the places they live in. The connectedness, generosity and mutual support the Big Society envisages must stem from a belief that all people are valuable: that what we do should affirm that value, and what diminishes it should not be done. The critique of the Big Society drawn up by the New Economics Foundation (see above) provides a helpful checklist here. If the idea of the Big Society achieves all of this it will be revolutionary indeed. As an illustration of what a regeneration-led approach might mean in practice, its worth recalling the Coalfield Communities Campaign of the 1980s and 1990s, and the initiatives that followed. They were rooted in a sense of the value of those places and the people living in them. Not everything that was done worked but there was a common ethos that neglect was not an option. A hard-nosed economic development perspective might be different like that espoused by the Centre for Cities, for instance, which favours incentives to move people from struggling areas to places where employment is growing. Such ideas are now finding favour in government, which might provide a clue about how radical and rooted in community the Big Society ideal will be allowed to become. What an understanding of regeneration should offer is the ability to identify the fault lines between different approaches within government and civil society, a knowledge of what has been tried in the past and how New Start | July/August 2010 | 27

real regeneration

Five movements the Big Society can learn from

TEnanTS anD RESiDEnTS aSSociaTionS The Big Society network wants to see everyone in the UK being part of a neighbourhood group. Tenants and residents associations already represent more than five million social housing tenants in England alone. They deal with day-to-day problems of crime and grime and build bridges within and between communities. u See www.taroe.org/index.php TiME BanKS Rallying under the slogan, no more throwaway people, time banks work on the principle that one hour of my time is as valuable as an hour of yours. Time banks encourage people to exchange skills i might fix your car in return for help in learning Spanish, for example. They are particularly useful where people are excluded from the labour market through unemployment or disability. u See www.timebanking.org DEvEloPMEnT TRUSTS Development trusts are community enterprises dedicated to creating and keeping wealth in local communities. They own and manage assets such as social centres or shops, often developing facilities and businesses in places others have neglected. Many, such as Westway Development Trust in north Kensington, london, had their roots in local protests in this case, a campaign against the noise and pollution of the a40 motorway. u See www.dta.org.uk coMMUniTy lanD TRUSTS The aim of a community land trust is to acquire land which is held in trust for local people in perpetuity. it could be used to provide affordable homes, to keep alive a village shop, or create business and employment opportunities. community land trusts are now thriving in the US and there is growing interest and government approval in the UK. u See www.communitylandtrusts.org.uk Social SETTlEMEnTS Social settlements have their roots in victorian philanthropy, but continue to play an important role in disadvantaged communities such as Barton hill in Bristol or canning Town in east london. They began as intentional communities groups of people who deliberately move to an area to offer support to local people but now cover a wide range of independent community organisations. u See www.bassac.org.uk

well it has worked, and a set of values that can guide decision-making in the future. But the idea of a good society offers a commentary on regeneration too, which needs to be heard. Much that goes under the label of regeneration has become distant and professionalised (see In Depth, pages 18-23), and needs to become engaged and personal. The Big Society also offers an enthusiasm for innovation thats often missing from regeneration. There needs to be a two-way process of learning so both can become better. The Big Society needs to understand and listen to those who have been building civil society, usually in difficult circumstances, for many years and regenerators need to learn from the more fluid, spontaneous, technology-assisted approaches that are finding favour among the Big Societys advocates. Above are five examples of movements or projects the Big Society can learn from and on page 30 are five new approaches that should influence regenerators. There 28 | New Start | July/August 2010

are many more worthy of mention. If we dont share that knowledge, much will be lost. We also, crucially, need to connect with what moves people from despair and inaction to the desire to make a difference. At the national community land trusts conference in June we worked with poet Brian Lewis to create a book in a day a collection of the thoughts of everyone there, capturing the moment they decided to make a difference where they lived. You can read the book online at http://tinyurl.com/336g9ep. Every project or organisation would benefit from recording such moments. FRoM hERE To ThERE In recent years politicians and pundits have been fascinated by the ideas of behavioural economics: the belief that people will make choices based not on a rational process but, at least in part, by watching and copying what others do. Behavioural economics has important insights to offer. Perhaps its most influential proponents are Richard

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Thaler and Cass Sunstein, authors of Nudge: improving decisions about health, wealth and happiness. David Cameron is a big fan of nudge theory the idea that by reframing choices, you can encourage people to behave in more pro-social ways. Another important voice has been that of writer Clay Shirky, whose book Here Comes Everybody envisions a crowdsourced society one where the power of the internet allows everyone to play a part in communication and civic action, and traditional gatekeepers of power and information become redundant. His belief is that internet technologies can harness the cognitive surplus the spare time and intellectual energy of millions of people to create tools and movements that can be world-changing. He cites the example of Ushahidi, a crowdsourced crisis reporting website that has been used to monitor everything from ethnic violence in Kenya to this years Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Its certainly true that behavioural psychology and the power of the internet can achieve much that was previously unimagined. But global shifts happen incrementally, even when those increments occur at high speed. Research by Professor Gerry Stoker at Southampton University and Professor Peter John at Manchester

University throws some light on what it might take to nudge people towards the ideals of a Big Society. In one experiment, they found door-to-door canvassing increased participation in kerbside recycling by 10%. In another, creating a DVD on topical issues helped increase participation in Wiltshire Councils area boards. In Oldham, giving households positive or negative feedback cards on their streets performance encouraged 6% more people to join in a scheme to recycle food waste. The academics argue their research shows greater value for money and innovation can be obtained in local, decentralised settings; and that if citizens are approached in the right way they are willing to change their behaviour, doing more to help themselves and others. Each of these actions is small but involves an input of time and resource. The difficulty is to effect such change at a significant scale in an unstable environment where time to experiment is limited and resources are squeezed. The think tank Ippr North last month warned that social enterprises and voluntary organisations lacked the capacity to deliver the ambitions of the Big Society (New Start Online, 1 July), and the funding cliff-edge of March 2011 posed a serious threat to their prospects. The same is true of local authorities, where cuts of up to

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Five new approaches that should influence regenerators

UShahiDi Ushahidi began with a blogger collating accounts of violence after the Kenyan elections in 2008. Within a short space of time 45,000 users were contributing. it has now been reconstructed as an open source application that can be used to map and visualise information about a problem, from monitoring elections in Sudan to recording the impact of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. u See http://www.ushahidi.com/ FREEcyclE Freecycle is eBay with a social purpose. instead of selling your junk you pass it on to someone near you who can use it or if you need something, you ask if someone has it to give away. The only cost is travelling to pick up your item. Web based and organised by locality, it could be of great value to community groups or tenants organisations. Since 2003 more than 1.7m people in the UK have joined Freecycle groups. u See http://www.uk.freecycle.org/ UnconFEREncES anD BaRcaMPS Unconferences and barcamps are for networking and generating ideas. The original barcamps were get-togethers of geeks to share mutual interests, write code and hack. now the idea is being used for social innovation, generating initiatives such as Enabled By Design, which improves equipment for disabled people through users ideas. an unconference is an unstructured conference, but based on the same principle of sharing: attendees do not pay, and much of the discussion is self-facilitated. u See: http://www.sicamp.org/ aPPS FoR GooD apps for Good is a new training course that brings together young people to create and design their own mobile and web applications, with an emphasis on solving problems. ideas include an application that allows young people to rate their experiences of being stopped and searched by police, and StudioPhly, which puts young musicians in touch with recording studios. u See: http://appsforgood.org/ ThE School oF EvERyThinG The School of Everything puts teachers and learners in touch with each other. if you want to learn the clarinet in Manchester, say, it will find a teacher near you who may offer a discount on your first lesson. its an example of how an online service can help to create better local connections. u See: http://schoolofeverything.com/

25% of funding coupled with a pledge to protect frontline services risk stifling innovation rather than encouraging it. A discussion group convened by Urban Forum recently found an overwhelming desire to want to believe in the Big Society vision and a belief that there was considerable potential for it to have a radically transformative effect. But it wont just happen. And thats where government comes in. GovERnMEnT PRoBlEM oR SolUTion? On 18 April, writing for The Observer, David Cameron outlined his vision for government. The stifling clutch of state control will be replaced by the transformative power of social responsibility, he said. We will do this by making government more transparent and accountable and by breaking open public services to new providers, unleashing the forces of innovation. The state, of course, will still have a pivotal role, 30 | New Start | July/August 2010

ensuring public services are properly funded to maintain universal cover and guaranteeing standards of provision. But it will have to resist its natural instinct to command and control, loosening its grip to hand over the reins to those who might run services better or deserve a bigger say in the outcomes. Beyond the bombast, what would a scaling back of the state and a scaling up of social responsibility mean? It clearly means balancing the interests of the state and the individual arguments that go back to Rousseaus Social Contract of 1762 and beyond. Nothing new there, then. It is also concerned with the duty of care of the state an area where the coalition government appears to face both ways, depending on the intended audience. From a regeneration perspective, action to improve places must be as close to the people as possible. This dovetails with the coalition governments stated intentions.

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To harness the power of the internet and social networks for the greatest good, everyone has to have access to digital networks and the skills to use them. That means a big investment in basic skills...
But it must recognise, too, that places and the people who live in them are subject to forces and trends that operate at a national and global level from demographic change to capital investment, from the tax and benefit system to the cost and availability of food and energy. Government has to play a strong role here, both on the national and the international stage. It has to be able and willing to respond to a crisis, and capable of balancing local and national interests. But another of David Camerons favourite thinkers, Phillip Blond of ResPublica, believes government intervention has broken Britain. Its a view that ignores global economics in favour of an attack on welfare. The risk is that the answer to any problem becomes a call to reduce government involvement. This may sit well with a deficit reduction strategy that appears to value immediate action above assessing long-term impact, but could prove a much more dangerous experiment than those of Professors Stoker and John: it becomes a game in which the building blocks are removed one by one to discover what is left standing. So from a regeneration perspective, active citizenship must be coupled with active government. There are many examples across the world of how this can be achieved, all tailored to local cultures and circumstances. In Brazil, for example, thousands have their say via local and sectoral councils. Representative democracy is coupled with deliberative tools such as participatory budgeting. A study by the Institute of Development Studies concluded: While no causal link between democratisation of governance and redistribution at the national level has been established, there is emerging evidence that citizen engagement has contributed significantly to democratising access to services. And this in a nation that was ruled by a military dictatorship in the 1980s. In Brazil government isnt seen as the problem: the issue is to increase access to and involvement in government. In the UK, the danger is that under the rhetoric of opening up the state we are in the business of closing it down. GooD SociETy, GooD GovERnMEnT Its clear that what gets people excited from Downing Street down is action. But enthusiasm for the new, the groundbreaking, the unexpected and creative, must be tempered with an understanding of the task. Lets take it as read that the power of the internet is the single greatest shift in our lifetimes in the way communities connect with each other and with government. Clay Shirky makes the point that to tap into the possibilities offered by the combination of digital technology and human generosity, the biggest leap to make is between doing nothing and doing something. So to get the greatest number making that leap and to maximise its value in terms of regenerating places and communities, what would civil society and government need to do? First and its so obvious its astonishing it hasnt been done is to ensure everyone can get online, when and where they want. That means universal broadband access and it means everyone, from the time they start school, having a laptop, home computer, internet-enabled TV or smartphone. Its easy and its relatively cheap, and could generate hundreds of jobs in social enterprises recycling hardware to give away to those who cant afford it. But thats no good if people cant use it effectively. Around half the UKs working age population lack basic numeracy skills, while one in six are functionally illiterate. More than one tenth of the working age population have no educational qualifications. In 2008 nearly 12 million adults were considered digitally excluded lacking access to digital technology or the skills to use it. To harness the power of the internet and social networks for the greatest good, everyone has to have access to digital networks and the skills to use them. That means a big investment in basic skills training and ESOL (English as a second or other language). It means mentoring and learning support, in surroundings where people feel comfortable, and in ways that are responsive to the needs of the learners. That might all sound unexcitingly low-tech and predictable. But its the bread and butter of a Big Society, and its where government as well as the people must take a lead. The decisions we make about investing in inclusion lead directly to a dialogue about the right use of power. Henry Tam, former head of the Blair governments shortlived Civil Renewal Unit and now visiting professor at Birkbeck College, puts it like this: If history has one consistent message for us, it is that genuine cooperation and mutual respect only flourish if none is so powerful as to be able to dominate others, and no one is so weak as to be at the arbitrary mercy of the rest. As we seek to create a good society in a climate of austerity, that message is more pertinent than ever.

join the conversation about regenerations future

here are three ways you can join in our debate about the future of regeneration: u Write a response: our feedback section (see pages 32-37) is a forum for your views or if youd like to make a more substantial contribution relating to this series, contact Julian Dobson at julian@newstartmag.co.uk u Engage with us online: talk to @NewStartMag or @juliandobson on Twitter, blog your thoughts at www.newstartmag. co.uk/blog and www.regenfuture.org, or comment on other readers blogs u Co-host an event: if youd like to partner us in taking this conversation forward at a face-to-face event, or would like us to speak or facilitate a discussion at an event youre putting on, please get in touch email julian@newstartmag.co.uk

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In the eighth part of our series on the future of regeneration, Julian Dobson considers the need for distinctive places and argues that local economic development is the key

Standing out from the crowd

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real regeneration

On the August bank holiday weekend two years ago, several thousand people gathered in the middle of the night in a shopping centre car park to watch the demolition of two cooling towers. Stripped of its context, it sounds like one of those bizarre events that could only happen in England. Why did the demolition of Sheffields Tinsley Towers attract so many people and such strong feelings? Some saw them as ugly eyesores and couldnt wait for them to go. Many others felt they were important landmarks that, for all their industrial functionality, created a sense of identity. A campaign to turn them into artworks that could become the citys answer to the Angel of the North won national acclaim but was scuppered by the landowners insistence that they were unsafe. The most significant comment people used to make about the towers, though, was that they were a sign of home. People returning to Sheffield along the M1 knew theyd arrived when they saw the giant disused structures. They were

Distinctiveness past: Bradford

Bradford exploded into life in the 19th century with the phenomenal success of the wool trade. Many of the citys buildings were erected within a very short timespan around three quarters of a century of intense activity and their styles reflected this new-found wealth. Much of the city centre was the work of a single firm of architects, Lockwood and Mawson, providing a remarkable unity until the demolitions of the 1960s. The buildings were designed to trumpet the citys success and ambition: City Hall, built in 1873, was modelled on the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. The architecture reflected the economic activities. In the centre were substantial warehouses and the Wool Exchange, Bradfords commercial heart; surrounding it were the massive factories where worsted, velvet and silk were manufactured. What were once derided as Satanic mills are now seen as vital parts of the citys identity although finding viable new uses has proved tricky. Bradfords challenge now is not just to make the most of its remaining heritage, but to bring back the commercial buzz that will reanimate those buildings and streets.

Pictured: the architecture of Bradfords Wool Exchange complements that of the Florentineinspired City Hall in the background

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important because they were there. Lynne Manzo, associate professor of landscape architecture at the University of Washington, is an expert on this idea of place attachment and identity. Her study of New Yorkers found such attachments to place were deeply personal from a woman whose social network revolved around a particular laundrette to a man who associated a roadside diner with a sense of safety because his father wouldnt abuse him there. At one level thats something we all know. At another, it tends to be forgotten or ignored when places are shaped and structured at any large scale. Its why the planned demolition of Bradfords Odeon cinema, or terraces earmarked for clearance by

housing market renewal schemes in Liverpool, have proved so emotive. Last year the Labour government produced a strategy for urban design and planning, World class places. One of its aims was to help local authorities and their partners create places that were distinctive as well as well-designed and sustainable in other words, places that met this need for identity and attachment. It was revealing that ten years after architect Richard Rogers assembled a high-powered task force to deliver his blueprint for an urban renaissance in the UK, policymakers were still struggling to bridge the gulf between their aspirations for thriving towns and cities, and the reality of developments that often fail miserably to attain the standards expected of them. In the intervening period, weve had a robust critique of the shortcomings of boring, nondescript town centres and dull, samey housing developments. At the forefront has been the New Economics Foundation, whose Clone Town Britain report in 2005 lambasted the trend towards bland identikit towns dominated by a few bloated retail behemoths. Instead we needed home towns, NEF argued: distinctive places where local independent businesses could thrive, with profits ploughed back into local economies rather than siphoned off into the accounts of corporate shareholders. The recession underlined the urgency of creating a viable future for town and city centres, as retail centres hollowed out. Earlier this year a report by the Local Data Company revealed that retail vacancies had doubled in the first half of 2009; by the end of the year 23.9% of shops in Wolverhampton, 27.2% in Margate and 22.5% in Bradford were empty. The evidence of the need to think differently is staring us in the face. The thinking behind many urban renaissance projects has been that great places would create great economies. The philosophy was build it and they will come usually to shop, enjoy the ambience, and see the sights. It was a worldview that took economic growth and the increase of disposable income as givens and used them sometimes very successfully as a peg on which to hang better urban design and the renewal of heritage buildings. Much of the building was fuelled by government and European money. Sheffield is an example of how public funds have been invested intelligently to create a high quality public realm. But those funds are no longer available, and the economic assumptions that underpinned the last decade of regeneration are questionable, if not discredited. So the argument must be turned on its head. Historically, it is economic activity that has created a sense of place. Dundee was renowned for jam, jute and journalism. Stroll around Londons Inns of Court and you can see everywhere the economic activity that makes those places distinctive. Many of the most impressive places in our major cities were created for manufacturing or trading think of Birminghams Fort Dunlop, Manningham Mills in Bradford or Liverpools Albert Dock. They were not built to make their host cities interesting or attractive they were built to get a job done, but in such a way as to boast of the success or standing of their owners.

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Distinctiveness present: Coin Street

Londons South Bank after the Second World War was anything but distinctive. The concrete cultural centre surrounding the Royal Festival Hall, built for the Festival of Britain in 1951, was an island in an expanse of speculative office development and derelict sites. A stones throw downstream, a group of local people decided to resist the encroachment of office blocks. Their motivation was to have affordable homes for the people who had lived in the area for generations. For many years Coin Street was little more than a small housing co-op, valiantly campaigning for local residents. As time passed it grew creating a public garden to serve the homes it had built, gaining control of the riverside walkway along the Thames, redeveloping the derelict Oxo Tower and, most recently, building a purpose-designed neighourhood centre. Coin Streets distinctiveness started with local need and a fierce resistance to development that threatened to destroy a community. But as it has developed and encouraged business as well as social activities, it has grown its own character. Tourists see it as an individual and attractive part of the South Bank without knowing its origins they just know it is a place that works, and they come back.

Many of those jobs are no longer needed or are done elsewhere, and the buildings have found or are finding new uses. Thats part of the evolution that creates a sense of place in a town or city. But we need new functions to rejuvenate old forms and create new ones that will make our places distinctively alive, rather than distinctive but dead. The urban renaissance of the turn of the millennium was driven by design. The urban renaissance of the next decade and beyond will be driven by economy or it wont happen at all. This is not easy. Go to Buxton in Derbyshire and youll see a town struggling to find new and sustainable uses for an impressive heritage. The former Devonshire Royal Hospital originally built as stables for the Duke of Devonshires horses

is a landmark building that has been restored at a cost of 23m for Derby University. But that has been fundamentally dependent on public resources and public sector revenue. How will the rest of the towns heritage become viable? As Ivan Turok, professor of urban economic development at Glasgow University, has pointed out distinctiveness is not something you can achieve through a marketing campaign or branding exercise. And such exercises often produce remarkably similar results: Despite setting out to be different, cities can end up emulating other places through risk aversion or lack of imagination. They may commission the same popular architects to design landmark buildings or target identical industry sectors in vogue at the time.

Above: community housing at Coin Street on Londons South Bank

join the conversation about regenerations future

Here are three ways you can join in our debate about the future of regeneration: u Write a response: our feedback section (see pages 34-37) is a forum for your views or if youd like to make a more substantial contribution relating to this series, contact Julian Dobson at julian@newstartmag.co.uk u Engage with us online: talk to @NewStartMag or @juliandobson on Twitter, blog your thoughts at www.newstartmag. co.uk/blog and www.regenfuture.org, or comment on other readers blogs u Co-host an event: if youd like to partner us in taking this conversation forward at a face-to-face event, or would like us to speak or facilitate a discussion at an event youre putting on, please get in touch email julian@newstartmag.co.uk

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What local planners and economic development professionals should do is to foster the conditions that allow distinctiveness to develop. In a resource-starved environment, this is the only option the old, expensive solutions arent available. To do this they need to recognise and value roots and routes the roots back into the history, heritage and identity of place, and the routes that create connections with future opportunities, other localities, and social and commercial networks that are increasingly global. Successful places are those that discover the hidden assets, talents and passions of their people and use them as the crucible for innovation. It is the making, inventing, creating and trading that animates and develops the place. If the bulk of that activity is organised to serve the needs of global corporations, we will end up with places that reflect the branding, values and uniformity of those corporations. Thats why inward investment can be a poisoned chalice: multinational companies may be committed to their employees and be hot on corporate social responsibility, but they have little interest in the distinctiveness of place quite the opposite, in most cases. Local knowledge and understanding, and a belief in the value of local people, is essential if we are to create new economic activities that keep wealth within a community. There is an important role for market intelligence and foresight to identify trends and opportunities, and the new local enterprise partnerships should prioritise this. But the activities themselves should stem from the imagination and enterprise of local people. As the American urbanist Aaron Renn commented recently: To renew our cities, we have to build on what they are, not what they arent. The lesson of Portland is not the physical things Portland did. The lesson of Portland is that they went their own way and did what was right for them. This is the value of a localised economy. Localisation doesnt mean that everything should be done at a micro level irrespective of efficiency; it does mean that wherever it is viable, the goods and services a place needs should be produced in the vicinity, and used to develop new ones that can be exported. In many cases the skills and confidence of local people will need to be built over time before they can be economically active; this is why community development and the intermediate labour market role performed by many social enterprises is vital. In difficult times, a community development approach to economic participation becomes more important, not less. In the absence of huge funding pots, we need to focus on what Jaime Lerner, mayor of Curitiba in Brazil, calls urban acupuncture focused but significant interventions that change peoples perception of and relationship with the whole. In Curitiba a city that was clogged with private cars became an international exemplar for public transport. The Craigmillar housing estate in Edinburgh changed its reputation through community-organised arts festivals. The curry clusters of Brick Lane in east London and

Distinctiveness future: Todmorden

Todmorden, a small market town at the end of the Calder Valley in West Yorkshire, has already gained international recognition for its approach to sustainability. Incredible Edible Todmorden is a campaign to encourage local people to grow and share vegetables. By simply showing people where their food comes from, it is heightening awareness of the importance of local production and its hoped creating opportunities for local producers, as well as influencing local people through education and example. The campaign has quickly gained a large following and high visibility, with herb planters at the railway station, sweetcorn outside the police station, and guerrilla gardening in neglected public places including the derelict health centre where serial killer Harold Shipman once practiced. Incredible Edible Todmorden shows how community activity can create economic potential a local cheesemaker has already expanded its range, and market stall holders are highlighting their local produce. More significantly, it shows how small actions can change a places identity and character. Three years ago Todmorden was a poor relation to neighbouring Hebden Bridge; now it has an international reputation, fuelled substantially by online social networks and publicity in mainstream media. The Incredible Edible idea is catching on as far afield as Granada and Canada. Not everyone in Todmorden is involved far from it. But a reputation has been established, and is evidenced by physical changes in the look and feel of the town. In a world where social networks and reputation make more difference than ever, thats a very big deal.

Above: canalside planters show Incredible Edible Todmorden in action, and TV chef Hugh FearnleyWhittingstall visits the harvest in 2008, inset

Rusholme in Manchester have grown from the activities of local entrepreneurs. Urban acupuncture isnt the preserve of the professionals and practitioners, though they need to understand its importance. It can be driven by businesses or community groups, by faith organisations or charities. The agencies responsible for place, especially within local government, need to learn to facilitate and encourage it. From that will come the distinctiveness we crave. New Start | September 2010 | 33

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In hard times, we have to change the way we do placemaking. In the ninth of our articles on the future of regeneration, Julian Dobson explains why we all need to become urbanists
What is a great place? It sounds an easy enough question to answer. Its one I pose when introducing ideas of placemaking to council officers, asking people to bring along pictures of what they think of as great places. Often those places are landmark buildings, places with special memories, or favourite holiday destinations. Ive seen pictures ranging from the Golden Temple at Amritsar in India to Bradfords Wool Exchange. What I didnt expect to see was a picture of an Asda car park. The man who brought it along explained why his local Asda was a great place. You can drive there easily, you can carry your frozen peas to the car without them defrosting, Last month I wrote about the importance of distinctiveness, and how it needed to be rooted in local economic development. Urbanism is closely related, but focuses on the physical fabric of a place and how it is used and animated. Good urbanism supports a diversity of economic and social activity; distinctive localities breed good urbanism. Both are essential for the regeneration we will continue to need. Urbanism at its best brings together an understanding of the organic and the planned interventions by human beings that make

Urbanism for e
you can find everything you need to buy, and can go there with your family. Well, its clearly a useful place. But great? If thats the threshold we set, we shouldnt be surprised if we end up with places that look the same, that are entirely predictable in the experience they offer, and encourage minimal human interaction. Compare the sheds we build today with even the sheds of yesterday. Todays are designed to go up in no time, to minimise construction costs and maximise profit. Look at the warehouses of the nineteenth century in cities like Manchester or Liverpool, for example, and youll find solid construction, attention to detail and a celebration of design that reflects the ambition of their builders. Whatever the manifold faults of Victorian industrialists, they at least wanted to leave a more lasting mark than their share price. Go to Bradford today and youll find the question of pride of place being worked out in a very public arena. It pitches the difficulties in implementing a long term vision against the need to deal with immediate problems. The solution could show the beginnings of a route towards an urbanism that is by everyone and for everyone. Urbanism is a tag that tends to be associated with a peculiar type of designer and a particular economic environment. When everyone is making money, the hardnosed might say you can afford to think about the frills or the iconic. In hard times you must protect margins at all costs. So despite the plethora of ugly, cheaply constructed buildings that were the hallmark of postwar development many planning authorities continue to take the view that anything is better than nothing. Good urbanism need not be expensive, though. Its about understanding the ordinary how buildings and people work together in the space they occupy. You dont need a degree in architecture, but you do need to keep your eyes, ears and mind open. 30 | New Start | October 2010 the built environment something of value. It celebrates the culture and diversity and chance interactions of cities, the interplay of histories and uses of buildings, the multiple functions of open spaces and street corners. It understands that the animation and use of place matters as much as design and quality of materials. Bradfords story illustrates why such an understanding of place is vital. Although its been in decline for a century, the city has some impressive assets: a world heritage site at Saltaire, the Bront country which attracts international tourism, the recent accolade by Unesco as City of Film. And much more, including impressive Victorian architecture, a young and growing population, Asian retailers that attract busloads of shoppers from as far away as Leicester, and access to the open spaces of Yorkshires moors. But it has also suffered from a poor reputation as the bargain basement cousin to sophisticated Leeds, as the scene of social unrest in 1995 and 2001, as a place with poor job prospects and ethnic polarisation. In particular, the city centre has been seen as a drain on the district rather than as an asset. Shoppers avoid it; the cultural offer has been limited; the industry that created it has vanished. A city centre dominated by warehouses for the wool trade and the commercial activities that accompanied it had little to offer when that trade disappeared. An incomplete attempt to rethink the city centre in the 1960s led to a fragmented public realm, the dominance of traffic and the loss of heritage buildings such as the Mechanics Institute. So what is to be done? Theres been no shortage of talented and intelligent people to grapple with these issues. Architect Will Alsop then the celebrity of the day was commissioned to think radically about the future of the city, and thats exactly what he did in 2003, proposing a huge lake

Above and right: everyday users of Bradford Urban Garden, set against a backdrop of the citys buildings

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everyone
around the palatial grade 1 listed City Hall. It would have been the centrepiece of a plan to give the city centre a new coherence and dynamism. Unfortunately it also involved removing the prime connections between one side of the city and the other, and flooding the most valuable land. But it was visionary, and visions give the practical people something to work on. So the City Park now being built will be a much reduced version of Will Alsops lake, but will still create a focal point in the city centre, which its hoped will attract blue-chip companies to take office space and draw locals in for leisure and cultural attractions. Another big project was a new Broadway shopping centre. It was felt the answer to a second-rate shopping experience in the city centre was a major retail development with all the big names, one that would bring in the local residents who otherwise would visit the White Rose Centre in Leeds or Meadowhall in Sheffield. The site was eventually bought by Westfield, the Australian developer that is delivering the Stratford City project on the Olympic site the largest urban shopping centre in Europe, with 1.9m ft2 of retail and leisure space. The outcome, though, was a public relations disaster. The Hopkins Hole (so called in honour of former council leader New Start | October 2010 | 31

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Kris Hopkins) appeared at exactly the wrong time. Before the credit crunch of 2007-8 it was all systems go: the existing shops and offices were demolished, the groundworks begun, the basement excavated. Then everything stopped. Neither Westfield nor the local authority nor the schemes opponents predicted the extent and impact of the credit crunch. With hindsight it might be easy to argue things should have been done differently; at the time the council and Westfield were both convinced of the case for the new centre and that it would be commercially viable. The councils view is still that the citys retail offer must improve drastically, and Westfield is the way to do it. But there is an immediate problem: Westfields priority is Stratford, and there is little prospect of work resuming on site in the next year or two. The hole has come to symbolise Bradford for outsiders and locals alike. It speaks of unfulfilled ambition and market failure. But with no money from the developers or the public sector to kick-start building, something else had to be done. The result was the Bug the Bradford Urban Garden. Around one third of the site has been opened up to create routes though the city centre, with grassed areas, wildflower meadows and park benches. The hoardings which last year were transformed by artists into advertisements for Wastefield have been repainted and will exhibit artworks by local schools. After only a couple of months the urban garden is already well used both as a through route and as somewhere to stop and relax. Arts organisation Fabric, which is leading the project with the city council, plans to populate the place with concerts and film showings. Local firm Provident Financial has offered a set of sculptures, while in the spring the garden will blaze with 20,000 daffodils in support of the Marie Curie Cancer Care charity. Inspired by a visit to the Incredible Edible Todmorden project, there will be planters and raised beds to grow vegetables. All this is temporary and its being done on a shoestring. The initial work to create the garden cost 300,000, of which Westfield contributed one third. Westfield was initially resistant to doing anything it owned the site and didnt want the public on it and its preferred idea for using part of it was to create a temporary car park. That would have cemented the perception of Westfield as arrogant and uninterested in local people except as consumers of its product. What changed was a combination of public anger at the blight caused by the empty site and persistent diplomacy, including the personal involvement of Bradford Council chief executive Tony Reeves. Instead there is now an opportunity to celebrate much of the best of Bradford right in the heart of the city, offering a showcase for artists and performers and flexible space that

people can use and enjoy. The urban garden is changing the atmosphere and feel of the place and thats what successful urbanism is about. But what if people like it so much they decide they dont want a shopping centre? Its accepted by Fabric and the city council that the garden is temporary and Westfield can take the site back at three months notice. But the opportunity is much bigger than the creation of a pleasant space for a year or two. The opportunity is to start creating an urbanism for everyone. The absence of big budgets enforces collaboration businesses, charities, schools, and artists are all helping to make the urban garden work. Bradford, like many other towns and cities, is chock full of opportunities to work together to create successful spaces. Last month a report from the Local Data Company put Bradford second in the empty shops league among major centres, with 24.64% of

Top: an impression shows Will Alsops revised plans for the centre of Bradford. Above: creative graffiti used to adorn the hoardings around the Westfield site

join the conversation about regenerations future

Here are three ways you can join in our debate about the future of regeneration: u Write a response: our feedback section (see pages 34-37) is a forum for your views or if youd like to make a more substantial contribution relating to this series, contact Julian Dobson at julian@newstartmag.co.uk u engage WitH us online: talk to @NewStartMag or @juliandobson on Twitter, blog your thoughts at www.regenfuture. org or www.newstartmag.co.uk/blog, or comment on other readers blogs u Co-Host an event: if youd like to partner us in taking this conversation forward at a face-to-face event, or would like us to speak or facilitate a discussion at an event youre putting on, please get in touch email julian@newstartmag.co.uk

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Planning for change: why we need to think differently

Town centres across the country are suffering from long term changes. The acne of empty shops is not a temporary phenomenon, though the recession hastened it. The combination of people having less money to spend and spending more of it online will permanently change traditional centres. Research for the British Council of Shopping Centres earlier this year found assets worth a total of more than 10bn at risk from economic recession, the withdrawal of public spending and long term changes in shopping habits and town centre uses. Investors such as pension funds, who have seen town centres as a valuable long term aspect of their portfolio, are facing serious losses and write-downs. Capital values are unlikely to recover in the short term and rental values are at risk from continuing decline. With pressure on public agencies growing, towns and cities must look to their own people to provide solutions. Rethinking shop and office space for new and start-up businesses at low rents is one option. Another is to turn marginal retail areas back into residential use; by repopulating town centres, we help to support the retail and leisure functions that remain. Housing demand is high but home ownership is increasingly difficult for those without wealth. This opens the door for housing co-ops, urban community land trusts, shared ownership schemes and open market rented accommodation. Other spaces could be used for cultural and educational activities, making central areas more attractive for new residents and animating previously dead places. Vacant plots, instead of being boarded up, can be turned into pocket parks or temporary community gardens. We also need these changes because of environmental challenges. We may need to plan for a post-commuter economy where people will live closer to their work to minimise transport costs, and where more journeys are by foot or bike. Towns and cities will need to be not only denser but greener, with a greater diversity of uses in the buildings we keep and creating useable, productive green infrastructure where buildings have become redundant. We will need to rethink the business park model of job creation, which encourages car dependency and drains economic activity from town centres. Theres also a strong case for localising the development process to maximise local job creation and reinforce local character. Rediscovering the vernacular of buildings is central to that using locally sourced or traditional materials where available and appropriate, encouraging local property firms rather than letting contracts to the usual big names, and fostering diversity and innovation in design. How should this new activity be financed? Again, we need to look to the resources we already have. The pension funds and institutions that own much of our town and city centre property have a vested interest in preventing its value from falling, and need to be engaged in thinking about how we can create long term value. The public sector will remain an owner and manager of assets, despite government encouragement to sell or transfer, because it will not be able to realise maximum gain if a sluggish market is flooded with surplus property. Local authority pension funds and reserves could play a vital role in supporting local investment and development; their managers too need to become part of the conversation about placemaking and to understand the impact of their investment decisions. Nabeel Hamdi, professor emeritus of housing and urban development at Oxford Brookes University, describes the practice of placemaking as being about making the ordinary special, and the special more widely accessible. That requires a change of culture and an acceptance that whoever we are, the place where we live or work is our problem, not someone elses. Those who understand this soonest are most likely to create the thriving towns and cities of the future.

shops vacant. One street, Rawson Place, is almost entirely empty despite being pedestrianised and having a range of public realm improvements. Many of the imposing Victorian wool warehouses stand empty; the Little Germany area, once a regeneration success story, has stagnated. The local authority cant be expected to deal with all these issues at once. Its questionable whether there will be strategic development funding after regional agency Yorkshire Forward goes. Businesses have their own difficulties to manage. But the fabric of the city and its people are assets. The opportunity, in Bradford and elsewhere, is to involve the widest range of people into finding new uses for places and buildings that dont function as they should, and to link these into the long term vision for the city. Money is tight, but not non-existent. A lot can be done at minimal cost. Removing street clutter to make streets more pedestrian-friendly is inexpensive. Using empty shops as performance or exhibition areas has been tried and tested by organisations such as Meanwhile Space and the Empty Shops Network. Improving tatty shopfronts can be done through a combination of incentives and planning enforcement. Areas that look dirty or run-down can be given extra attention by council cleansing departments. To achieve such improvements public agencies need to observe, listen to local people, and be open to experimentation. A new and sustainable approach to

regeneration needs to be built on an urbanism thats for everyone and by everyone. The idea of co-production of public services, where users help to inform decisions and spending priorities, needs to be extended to co-production of the urban realm. The legal boundaries between private and public space need to be viewed flexibly to acknowledge that successful places are created by everybody, not just by experts on behalf of the end users. Some of the most compelling urbanists would never use that description of themselves. Take Alison Drake, from Castleford in West Yorkshire. The architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner sniffily concluded that Castleford had not a single building of note; but while he was ready to write off the former pit town, Alison and other local people werent. Their library and market hall may not have impressed the critics, but they were part of the towns fabric and heritage. Alison succeeded in persuading Wakefield Council to add Castleford to Yorkshire Forwards renaissance programme, and with the help of Channel 4 presenter Kevin McCloud brought the town to national prominence. Successful urban places need to find and treasure people like Alison Drake. They are people who care about their home towns and want to see them improve. They may not have technical expertise, but their understanding of place needs to inform the experts and vision-makers. And the hard times that force us to collaborate may also force us to do things better. New Start | October 2010 | 33

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A different role
We all like testimonials from people of influence. So the Social Enterprise Coalition displays no fewer than three quotations from prime minister David Cameron, singing the praises of social business. The great institutional innovation of our times, he called it in 2007. The previous year he talked of mainstream businesses delivering public services with a distinctive focus on quality, serving the community, and employee pride. Last year he declared: We need to give more power to civic institutions like social enterprises, because we desperately need your innovation to tackle social breakdown. That message has continued loud and clear as the coalition government has developed the theme of a Big Society. But social enterprise doing well by doing good has been flavour of the month for more months than many of us can remember. Back in the 1990s Liverpools Furniture Resource Centre was leading the way, providing work for longterm unemployed people in refurbishing furniture which was then sold to social landlords to help new tenants furnish their homes. The simple but powerful proposition was that you could meet a triple bottom line of social good, financial profit and environmental responsibility providing a new and potent model for businesses, voluntary organisations and public services. ENTERING THE MAINSTREAM And theres no doubt social enterprise has, in a relatively short time, become an important part of public discourse as well as a significant player in the mainstream economy. According to the Social Enterprise Coalition, there are 62,000 social businesses in the UK, employing over 800,000 people and contributing 24bn to the economy. And, since no comprehensive data appears to have been

Social enterprise could be at the heart of new approaches to regeneration, says Julian Dobson. But shouldnt we see it as a way of transforming businesses rather than just changing public services?
amassed since 2007, there may well be many more by now. Yet last year Claire Dove, chair of the coalition, was still describing social enterprise as an under-reported and undervalued part of the UKs business landscape. Her comments came in her introduction to the State of social enterprise survey 2009, which pumped out an upbeat message: social enterprises were recessionbusters, twice as confident of business growth as traditional small and medium sized enterprises. Twothirds were profitable, with a further 20% breaking even. Seven out of ten reinvested profits for social good or for expansion. But mixed among the positives were causes for concern. In particular, they are dependent on public sector business 39% reported that more than half their income came from providing services to central or local government. This year the vulnerability became more apparent. Businesses trading with the public sector are at a growing risk of insolvency: a recent report from ResPublica, The civil effect, argues that while the biggest companies are profiting substantially from government outsourcing, smaller ones are suffering. Quoting accountancy firm Wilkins Kennedy, it says the number of public sector suppliers to go bust rose by nearly 50% in the first six months of 2010, with 168 firms in the health and social services, education and defence sectors going under. And for some time there have been high profile

Above: a hoarding at the Social Enterprise Coalitions annual Voice conference last year carries the events main talking point

How it could be different: The Great Transition

In The great transition the New Economics Foundation sets out a blueprint for a sustainable economy. It argues that a high growth, high consumption economy cannot continue if we are to live within the earths environmental limits. Its recipe for sustainability does not get rid of the market economy, but insists the market economy must change. It calls for prices to reflect true environmental and social costs and benefits, so goods and services with a high environmental impact or negative social consequences would be more expensive. It also argues strongly for a better balance between the public economy of local and national government services, the market economy and the core economy the unpaid work such as social care that underpins the social fabric. From this rebalancing would emerge forms of co-production in which local citizens join the state and businesses in defining what contributes to local wellbeing. Alongside this there would be a great localisation in which economic benefit is shifted from multinational firms and their shareholders to local businesses and communities, combining the local decision-making that is at the heart of the governments approach to localism with local self-sufficiency wherever possible in essentials such as food or renewable energy. The great transition, http://neweconomics.org/publications/publications/great-transition

casualties as well as national success stories among social enterprises: Sheffield Rebuild in 2005, Ealing Community Transport in 2008, Secure Healthcare in 2009. Rapid expansion, dependence on a few large clients, and sudden changes in market conditions can all turn a profitable social enterprise into a marginal or failing one. So is the triple bottom line a realistic prospect or are we becoming victims of our own rhetoric, hoodwinking ourselves into believing theres a magic formula that produces healthy communities as well as healthy profits? To consider whether social enterprises could be a key ingredient in the glue that creates great places, its worth reflecting on just what we imagine social enterprises are for. Talk to many who run them, and youll receive a strong message that social enterprise is a better way of doing business. These are entrepreneurs who want to achieve social good, to use the businesses they are in to change the world. Often they fit the image politicians and the media like to promote about business the Dragons Den world of bold ideas, buccaneering investors, go-getting individuals reaping the deserved rewards of their risk-taking. With, in the case of social enterprises, a cherry of social benefit on the top. SIMILAR WORDS, DIFFERENT GOALS But listen to the politicians and policymakers and the stories arent quite in line. The rhetoric of enterprise is the same, but the objective is different: rather than

Civil companies: a new breed of social enterprise?

We recommend a new power of civil association be granted to all frontline service providers in the public sector. This power would allow the formation... of new employee and community-owned civil companies that would deliver the services previously monopolised by the state... The new civil company would be structured as a social enterprise, with the scope and flexibility to allow a number of different governance structures in the light of local conditions... Governed neither by the public state or the private market, this new civil association would localise responsibility, direct agency and promote ethos. It would do this by spreading the ownership of publicly funded provision, revolutionising public service delivery for the benefit of all. Phillip Blond in The ownership state

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putting the social into enterprise, they are there to put the enterprise into social. As David Cameron put it in July this year: Weve got to get rid of the centralised bureaucracy that wastes money and undermines morale. And in its place weve got to give professionals much more freedom, and open up public services to new providers like charities, social enterprises and private companies so we get more innovation, diversity and responsiveness to public need.

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Innovation, diversity and responsiveness to public need sound and are good things. But for government, social enterprises have become part of a narrative that equates state provision with bureaucracy and inefficiency, and private enterprise with reduced costs and better service. Social enterprise, it seems, may be a way of having your cake and eating it. Skim through the plethora of reports on the future of public service commissioning and youll find social enterprises hailed as part of the answer to virtually every social problem. Phillip Blonds The ownership state, which has been seminal in the development of progressive Conservatism argues for a model in which services are provided by social enterprises led by frontline workers and owned by them and the communities they serve. These new social businesses would exchange economies of scale (which are all too often illusory) with the real economies that derive from empowered workers and an engaged public. He calls for public sector workers to be granted a power of civil association to create hybrid enterprises formed by public service staff and citizens (see box, previous page). ENTERING THE MAINSTREAM Its not only at the conservative end of the political spectrum that such thinking is emerging. The New Economics Foundation has long advocated the concept of co-production, in which citizens join providers and commissioners to shape local services in ways that meet local needs. Social enterprises are seen as a vital part of that mix. Since 2008 the right to request has been available to NHS employees working in primary care trusts. This has enabled staff to set up social enterprises to provide services previously provided directly. In Kingston, south London, 500 community nurses now work for an enterprise called Your Healthcare, running contracts worth 20m for the local NHS. The coalition government is expected to extend this right to staff in local authorities, along with community groups and private companies. Interestingly, it will be known as the right to challenge language that is more suggestive of an underlying belief that local authorities are not running public services in the public interest. This isnt to infer that social enterprises couldnt or shouldnt run public services where they could do a better job. The New Labour administrations did much to promote social enterprises in this way; the coalition government is doing so with the added spur of budget cuts that force service providers to look for new moneysaving ideas. But the danger is that social enterprise will be squeezed into becoming agents of privatisation with a social conscience. They will be seen as competitors in a cut-throat market for local authority and public service contracts who can deliver social good as well as greater productivity, but most will be at a disadvantage in comparison with the highly capitalised, cash rich 24 | New Start | November 2010

How it could all be different: The Scott Bader Commonwealth

E F Schumacher, in Small is Beautiful, quotes the case of one company that he suggests offers a better way to do business. Northamptonshire-based Scott Bader Co Ltd, which makes resins and polymers, had been going for 30 years when its founder, Ernest Bader, turned it into the Scott Bader Commonwealth a company owned entirely by its workforce. What that did was change a traditional firm, accountable to its shareholders, into one that could balance doing well with doing good. Rules were put in place to ensure the company would continue to be run on the principles espoused by its founder. It would stay relatively small; if it needed to grow, new firms would be set up on a similar basis. The maximum wage would be no more than seven times the minimum. Directors pay would be set by the Commonwealth in other words, by the firm as a whole. No more than 40% of pre-tax profits would be kept for the use of the workforce (the rest being earmarked for reinvestment and taxation) and this would be split between bonuses and charitable donations. Lastly, there would be a ban on selling any of the companys products for war-related purposes. All very idealistic, but does it make good business sense? Bader created his Commonwealth in 1951. Twenty years later it was still going strong, making healthy profits, distributing generous bonuses and donating thousands of pounds every year to charities. Today, despite its low profile in the social enterprise fraternity, Scott Bader is a global concern. It still prides itself on a standard of corporate social responsibility that goes way beyond the CSR spin of many bigger companies. Because its owned by its employees, it cant be taken over which gives it a resilience traditional private firms lack. Employees who become members of the Commonwealth agree to a set of principles that include working unselfishly for the mutual wellbeing of all, using the companys resources to build a better society, promoting Scott Baders founding principles and common trusteeship. Each member is a trustee of the company, and the firms governance structure has recently been updated to reflect its status as a global organisation. The company continues to make profits, and to donate to local and overseas charities. It believes that even in hard times for manufacturing industry it should keep making such donations a far cry from the FTSE 100 bosses who, according to the research organisation Incomes Data Services, saw their bonuses rise by an average of 34% in the year to June 2010. Schumacher described firms like Scott Bader as small islands of sanity in a large society ruled by greed and envy. Perhaps if our efforts to bring enterprise into disadvantaged areas drew more from the Scott Bader model than from The Apprentice and Dragons Den, theyd prove more successful. Details: www.scottbader.com/global-corporate.aspx

Above: David Cameron at Voice 09 in Birmingham place among those charged with delivering public services, the social returns from the mainstream economy are likely to be minimal. If social businesses dont have a voice in chambers of commerce or the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), if theyre not seen as participants in and commentators on the wider economy, how can they expect to be anything other than marginal? Its understandable that social enterprises tend to cluster together, taking part in their own trade fairs and conferences, talking among themselves and to government about the best forms of support for their sector. Its what any industry does. But businesses also club together the big ones much more effectively than the small to influence government policy and economic debate. Where are the social enterprises in these forums? How are they influencing the thinking of the CBI or the Institute of Directors? Given the background and culture of many of their leaders, who have begun life in the community or voluntary sectors, these may feel like uncomfortable networks to be part of. But the risk is that unless they critique and debate business ethics and practice from a business perspective, their hugely important contribution to ethics and practice will be ignored. Earlier this year Will Hutton, founder of the Work Foundation and chair of the Commission on Ownership, offered a coruscating assessment of the state of British business at an event hosted by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. The prime interest of the directors of FTSE 100 listed companies was to make personal fortunes, he said. Top firms human resources directors were in catatonic gloom about the avarice of their CEOs. Fairness is capitalisms indispensable value. Firms properly organised are moral propositions, he argued. But thats not the view of most people who run them. Will Hutton spoke of remoralising our forms of ownership to balance shareholder value against social value. Social enterprises could, and should, have a vital contribution to make to that debate, leading the way in modelling different approaches to business that provide real jobs and skills for people on the margins of the workforce and society. To listen to our political leaders you might imagine the banking crisis never happened, and the nations current indebtedness had been caused entirely by reckless government spending on social welfare. It has been a remarkably effective political sleight of hand, but the underlying problems that led to the recession of the last two years and the spending cuts we are seeing now have not vanished and many of them lay in amoral, self-serving approaches to business. To provide genuine and sustainable local economic regeneration, we must put the social back into business.

professional outsourcing companies. This limiting of their field of operation will inevitably limit their vision. They may have much to say about how social and public services could be run and delivered; they will make useful contributions to think tank pamphlets and policy documents. They will continue to talk about social justice. But their impact on the wider world of business affairs may remain negligible. A BROADER VOICE It is here, if were looking for a future for regeneration, that social enterprises can and need to make an impact. If conversations about social return on investment only take

join the conversation

Here are three ways you can join in our debate about the future of regeneration: u Write a response: our feedback section (see pages 26-29) is a forum for your views or if youd like to make a more substantial contribution relating to this series, contact Julian Dobson at julian@nsplus.co.uk or Austin Macauley at austin@newstartmag.co.uk u Engage with us online: talk to @NewStartMag or @juliandobson on Twitter, blog your thoughts at www.newstartmag. co.uk/blog and www.regenfuture.org, or comment on other readers blogs u Bring a conversation to life: email Julian if youd like him to speak or facilitate a discussion at an event youre putting on

New Start | November 2010 | 25

real regeneration

real regeneration

Keeping sight of our roots

Regeneration has a future despite current appearances but it needs to reconnect with what gives people meaning and rediscover the soul of towns and cities, says Julian Dobson
Ruskin famously said there is no wealth but life. The failure of the early 21st century has been to consider that wealth exists in everything but life: property, finance, careers, spending, measurements of economic success. That failure infected the last two decades of regeneration, and now much of the associated monetary wealth has gone. Alongside it has gone a genuine wealth of knowledge, learning and understanding. The demise of regeneration as a government priority may have left the property industry 26 | New Start | December 2010 and consultants high and dry, but it has also brought an abrupt end to many organisations that thought imaginatively about quality of life and quality of place. The national narrative on regeneration has been reduced to a single paragraph in the recent local growth white paper. Its worth reflecting on that paragraph to discover what it does and doesnt tell us. Here it is: Outside London, the Homes and Communities Agency will continue to have an important role at the request of local authorities

and under local leadership by providing expertise on housing and physical regeneration. Regeneration should be targeted on areas most in need of support. The Agency will work through new local enterprise partnerships, integrating business and local government needs and building on the collaborative approach in working up Local Investment Plans. The approach that will be put in place is built around the following strands: handing more power to communities to drive regeneration; supporting places to generate investment and enabling communities by providing the tools to decide what happens and where; and bringing its resources to bear for the benefit of local areas. What that tells us is that regeneration is no longer a national concern its for local partnerships to handle. We have some bland but worthy statements about targeting the areas that most need support, and handing more power to communities. As national policies go, its better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. What it doesnt give us is any sense of excitement or vision. The idea of civilised cities that ran through Richard Rogers Urban Task Force has evaporated. The passion for social justice advocated by urbanists like Anne Power is absent. Even the enthusiasm for community action that marks out the standard-bearers of the Big Society is missing. It could be a deeply dispiriting note on which to end this series on the future of regeneration. Throughout 2010 New Start has championed regeneration as the means of recreating home for disadvantaged and neglected communities in difficult times. Weve written articles and blogs, held round table events, produced a manifesto setting out key principles for the future. On the face of it, all that and more is being swept away in an avalanche of spending cuts. What will be left standing when the 81bn of savings announced in the comprehensive spending review take effect? One answer is not much: economic development, physical regeneration and social action programmes and projects across the UK are falling. But there is another answer: we will still be standing. By we I mean those who are determined to create a better future for the places they live in. The needs that led to the programmes of recent years have not gone away; the recession and the destruction of the public sector edifices created under New Labour are multiplying the demand. Those for whom regeneration was a passion rather than a career will find ways to keep doing what theyre passionate about. But how do we do it in a climate where money is scant, government lacks interest and many localities lack leadership? The key to regeneration to creating places that people will want to call home for themselves and their children

doesnt lie in policies and programmes. Jaime Lerner, former mayor of Curitiba in Brazil, puts it pithily: The soul of a city the strength that makes it breathe, exist and progress resides in each one of its citizens. We must all be the regenerators now. This series was always going to end with a focus on the idea of the soul of a place. The impact of spending cuts forces us to look inside ourselves and our communities for the strength and resources to create the society we want. As an increasingly angry and radicalised generation weighs the future its been offered in the balance and finds it wanting, theres an urgency to the task of constructing alternatives that will offer meaning and motive. FINDING THE SOUL OF THE CITY In recent years cities and towns found it hard to resist the allure of branding. Just as a pair of jeans or trainers had to be infused with a fake personality, so cities and municipalities attempted to find an overarching story that explained what they were about. Yet for all the branding, the New Economics Foundations studies of Britains lookalike clone towns or The Idlers awards for crap towns resonated far more deeply in the public mind. Finding the soul of a town or city is different. It doesnt require anyone to sign up to a bland marketing strategy or pseudo-aspirational slogan. It involves identifying what people care about and connecting with the activities and concerns that provide meaning in their lives. It is about turning policies and strategies on their head and starting with the human. Jane Jacobs seminal study, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, got it right. A city that works is one where people can enjoy their ordinary lives in a multiplicity of ways, interacting with each other and with the urban environment and by doing so forming viable neighbourhoods, thriving economies and a sense of place. The soul of a city reflects the messiness and complexity of urban life, and regeneration that sticks and is valued needs to connect with and grow from that. You can find it by walking the streets of somewhere like Manningham in Bradford. To outsiders its where there were disturbances back in 2001; to those who delve into the statistics, its high on the list of most deprived areas. But it also has social capital networks that form around the mosques or the shops, the schools or the health centre. It has solid, good quality housing and few empty homes. It has numerous small businesses, and a well used community centre in the spectacular Manningham Mills (pictured left). It has Carlisle Business Centre, which helps local people move from unemployment or low paid jobs towards running their own businesses or social enterprises; it has the awardwinning Lister Park and the Cartwright Hall art gallery. It is a place with problems, but it is a place with much to celebrate though you might never know that if you didnt go there. Walking the streets is a start, but its one few council officers, strategists or planners ever make. There must be more, though. Understanding social networks is key too. Youll find the soul of a place in the community groups, festivals, cultural activities, faith organisations, sports clubs and business networks. What keeps people in a place what do they love, or where do they see opportunities?

Photo: Tim Green

t

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real regeneration

real regeneration

Seven steps towards regeneration with soul...

wider public to hold them to account. Back in 2007 Newcastle Council produced a regeneration strategy. Like many, it set out a longterm vision. But it did more than that. It was honest about the citys weaknesses as well as proud of the improvements that had been achieved, particularly in terms of cultural activity and the public realm. It was also emphatic in arguing that community benefit should be at the heart of all the citys regeneration activities. That provides a benchmark against which success can be measured, and one that should allow local people to do the measuring.

funding regimes are more concerned with ensuring the right boxes are ticked; this stifles initiative and flexibility. Excessive monitoring undermines effective partnerships, delaying decisions and creating a hierarchy in which the people with the greatest stake in the success of regeneration projects are regarded with greatest suspicion. The idea that people who live in disadvantaged areas are by definition less capable and less trustworthy must be challenged, particularly in the light of the ineptitude and mendacity that has characterised the actions of some of the most educated and advantaged in the world of finance and politics.

Step seven stand up for real regeneration Step three: instil creativity into everything
This is not to presume in favour of culture-led regeneration, but to recognise that creativity can create engagement among a huge range of people who, astonishing as it may seem, dont get too excited by numbers of jobs created or statistics about economic growth. Whether the scheme is a massive project like the 193m central library for Birmingham or a community garden, people wake up to whats fun and engaging. This is especially important in hard times we need to celebrate more when money is tight, not less. Identify what runs counter to meaningful, human-focused regeneration and oppose it. Regeneration practitioners those employed to do the job have tended to be reluctant to stand up for their values in recent years. From here on the voices should be strong and forthright. One issue that demands strong voices is welfare reform. The housing benefit changes run directly counter to everything we know about creating integrated, sustainable communities where residents have a stake in their neighbourhood and take pride in where they live. Forcing tenants to move out of council accommodation if they find work, or pushing them into rent arrears and poverty if they dont, are among the most counterproductive proposals yet tabled by central government. Its own social security advisory committee has appealed to ministers not to go ahead, arguing the changes would leave large families in serious difficulty and could result in rising rents as tenants are forced to compete for inadequate numbers of affordable homes. Communities that are transient accumulate problems. Childrens education is disrupted. Ill health goes unreported. Social capital is eroded as the networks that keep society together become dependent on a handful of people. The physical fabric of neighbourhoods becomes unkempt because nobody has a long-term interest in the area. As austerity measures take effect other decisions will impact on the fabric of society and the sustainability of neighbourhoods. Local cuts in support for voluntary and community organisations are already testing the capacity of our social infrastructure. Young people are questioning the value of education and skills when they come with a price tag of decades of debt. So as we seek new approaches that value and create a sense of home, that are serious about sustainability, and offer meaningful work and life chances to the poorest communities, we need to stand up for regeneration we believe in. Some government policies such as the recruiting of community organisers offer opportunities that should be seized. Other policies should be resisted. But we need to look beyond this parliament or the next. Now more than ever we need to develop and hold on to long-term aspirations for the places that are most disadvantaged. As central government retreats from any coherent vision or values for regeneration, its more important that the rest of us find ways to build for the future. These may not be auspicious times. But cycles of change and development can benefit from a winter a period of reduced activity where we can reflect and work towards a way forward. I and New Start look forward to being part of what grows back.
u Julian Dobson is a writer and speaker on regeneration and

Step four share inspiration and learning

Learning tends to be the first casualty when money is short. This is blinkered. Its more vital than ever that we broaden our horizons, draw on whats been done previously or elsewhere, and deploy those ideas and experiences to inform our own thinking. James Allison, a vicar with no experience of placemaking, was inspired by a visit to Holland to see shared space schemes in action, and came back with a vision of how a boring car park could be turned into a flexible market square for the former mill town of Mytholmroyd in the Calder Valley. The Guide Neighbourhoods programme shared learning around neighbourhood renewal, with local residents acting as mentors and consultants. If people arent encouraged and funded to see and learn from other places and people, they are likely to stay within the limits of their experience.

Step five devolve decision making

We have had two decades of decisions being passed up the chain, especially within councils where officers have sometimes been more concerned to watch their There are no quick and easy ways of developing approaches to regeneration that are thoroughly grounded in local interests, concerns and values. Thats the point. Doing it properly takes time and patience. But it can be done. Below are seven steps that should be at the heart of a human approach to regeneration. technical and professional expertise. It is time-consuming, but more likely to bring lasting solutions. And crucially it begins to address the issues of why people find themselves trapped in disadvantaged places and lifestyles, as well as what should be done about it. In this context its welcome that some ministers are promoting the ideas of Brazilian educator and activist Paulo Freire: lets hope they also take his views on the importance of siding with the powerless seriously. backs than help residents achieve their goals. The early experiences of the new deal for communities programme didnt help: local people were told big pots of money would be available to spend according to their own priorities, but funds frequently became a divisive issue. Building capacity and a shared vision needs to come first a lesson that may have to be re-learned if government reverts to 1990s-style competitive bidding for regeneration funds. The rhetoric of localism needs to translate into genuine resident participation in planning and governance.

Photo: Matt Murphy/www.blackcoffeeproject.com

Step one: listen intently

Theres a difference between consultation, as typically practised, and listening. Consultation starts with a series of options and seeks buy-in or, in more enlightened cases, critique and improvement. Listening starts with a blank slate. It seeks to identify peoples concerns, hopes, ambitions and aspirations and then build around them. It allows projects and ideas to emerge from the people, and then applies the 28 | New Start | December 2010

Step two: get the words right

Marketing and branding, understandably, provoke cynical reactions. Clear and effective communication is not the same as a soft sell. Those who develop regeneration programmes and strategies need to explain clearly what they are trying to do, because this allows the

Step six create a bias towards trust

This goes further than devolving governance it is to take a view that responsible people, given support and accountable structures, will act within the best interests of a locality and all its communities. Too many

communities. He can be contacted at julian@nsplus.co.uk New Start | December 2010 | 29