More on the saving communities debate
Here’s another contribution to this debate – albeit from a privileged perspective…
Urban regeneration and the economic downturn
One of our annual highlights yesterday was the Royal Designers for Industry dinner. The winner of our Bicentenary Medal and keynote speaker was Tom Bloxham of Urban Splash. When we told Tom he had been given the award we asked him to speak on how urban regeneration might be affected by the economic downturn. That was last July when things seemed difficult but not nearly as bad as they look now.
Tom didn’t hide how tough things are now in the property sector. But he expressed the hope that in times of austerity good design would be seen as an even more important virtue.
Let’s hope he‘s right but, in fact, as I intimated in my earlier blog on Virgin Trains, the recession could drive producers and consumers in two directions. On the low road, sellers will try to screw every penny out of us as they seek to keep their head above water, while consumers will go for the cheapest option. On the high road, sellers will do everything they can to retain the loyalty of customers while buyers will be much more discerning, making sure that they spend their limited money on quality products made to last. The outcomes will in large part reflect the nature of different markets and sets of consumers. Those with a monopoly will try to screw people (as in Virgin Trains), poorer customers will have little choice but to go downmarket.
Our actions as individual consumers will have unwanted collective outcomes. As Anne Ashworth comments in the Times today, we may not think now we will bemoan the loss of Woolworths but we will feel differently when our run down high streets are full of boarded-up shops. In some villages – for example Blockley in Gloucestershire – the combination of an imaginative business strategy and a commitment by residents has seen the local shop not just saved but turned into a thriving social business.
Tom says that fewer people can buy his flats but more people want to rent them. In this way he can continue to design and build great homes. Many businesses will need to look to fundamental changes in their business model to survive. In doing this, there is a case for producers and consumers to work together to get through the bad times. We need to create the spaces for communities to talk over the tough choices we face over the next few years.
Civil society – its unexplored potential
Notwithstanding my Kerry Katona like mood swings, I find myself increasingly convinced that the economic downturn is going to be very, very bad; so much so that our lives and our country will never be the same again. Even if we have seen the beginning of the end of the problems in the financial sector (and there is still a huge amount of leveraging to unwind), and even if the economy starts to pick up slowly towards the end of next year, we then face severe cuts in public investment. On the one hand, this could kill off any recovery (as we now know, much of the job creation of the last decade has been in the publicly funded sector) while on the other, we will all suffer diminished public provision and many will face real hardship.
As the Conservatives inadvertently underline every day, there is no alternative; things are going to be grim. What we must do – the ‘we’ in this case being society in general and organisations like the RSA – is make better use of the under-used capacity which exists in society.
Innovation is very often precisely about this mobilisation of capacity. So, as I was saying to Leonard Cheshire Disability this morning, individual budgets for social care work in part because they tap into the previously unseen and unused capacity to manage their own lives and services which exists among social care clients and carers. Another example, which I heard in Leicester from a Fellow called Nigel Lothrop, is a successful scheme in which young people who have been in trouble or have dropped out of school clear and maintain the gardens of people unable, for one reason or another, to do it themselves. Using a time bank mechanism the young people then trade the hours donated to the gardens for time getting one-to-one tuition in the basic skills they often failed to pick up in formal education. Apparently, the scheme is proving too successful in that the barrier to it now is not the need for or supply of volunteers but the capacity of the local authority and third sector to manage the scheme.
If we are to improve the quality of our lives, protect the most vulnerable and strengthen communities we need these kinds of experiments to be taking place everywhere. However much capacity we are going to lose in the private and public sector, it is dwarfed by the unexploited potential of civil society. Mobilising this capacity should be a priority for policy makers and a new raison d’etre for the RSA Fellowship.
Cultural theory – it’s back!
Regular readers will have heard me banging on about cultural theory – the idea that in all organisations there are certain fundamental ways of viewing the world which will be at play: egalitarianism, hierarchy, individualism, and fatalism.
If you haven’t already heard too much, or have never understood what I have been going on about, you might enjoy listening to one of our leading cultural theorists, Michael Thompson, in discussion with John Gray in an excellent Radio 4 programme yesterday. And, yes, I do admit to a family connection!
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Just a few minutes after I wrote this, I popped into Vauxhall station to buy a newspaper (I had half an hour to kill before giving a talk to the charity, Leonard Cheshire Disability) and, by an amazing coincidence, saw a classic example of cultural theory happening in practice.
Due to delays on the tube network, a queue had formed in the booking hall waiting to get into the station. On the left, people were patiently standing in line, but on the right (the exit) a small number of people had ducked under the barrier and forced themselves to the front, jumping the queue.
So the forming of the queue can be seen as a hierarchical response – we listened to the station controller and accepted the need for authority and regulation. Those ducking under the barrier represented individualism – the system wasn’t working, so it was ‘every man for himself’. As more people queue jumped, an audible murmur grew amongst those waiting patiently. By voicing their disapproval, they were expressing an egalitarian solidarity – a shared set of norms; they were the kind of people who queued and listened to instructions, and wanted to separate themselves from the disruptive behaviour of individualists. Of course most in this situation are simply fatalist – accepting that getting to work is a nightmare!
Pre Budget Report – Brummie reaction
Turn away if you don’t like swearing…
I love the West Midlands. This morning after my speech to the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust I popped into a New Street outfitters to buy a cheap suit for the RDI dinner tomorrow night. The assistant recognised me so we got talking about politics as I tried (successfully) to negotiate a discount. As is often the way in this part of the world other customers were soon joining in.
As I was leaving he shouted after me ‘anyway since the VAT cut we’ve been flooded with customers’. Call me gullible but I was genuinely interested to hear that the PBR has been such an instant hit. ‘Really’ I said taking a step back into the shop .To which he jovially replied to the immense amusement of the rest of the shop ‘have we f**k, you daft bugger’. Now, that’s what I call service.
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