Without the state

Do it yourself

In a recent talk,  Edgar Cahn, the founder of the Timebank movement described two economies: the monetary economy and what he describes as the Core Economy. The first is monetarized and has 2 major components: the private, market economy & the public purpose economy (government & philanthropy). The second is not monetarized and includes family, neighbourhood, community, civil society. It has been estimated that at least 40% of economic activity takes place in the Core Economy and is not reflected in GDP

That economy, the Core Economy, uses a different production model and a different distribution model from the Market Economy

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There is no family that I know where someone holds up a drumstick and asks: what am I bid for this – or divides the mashed potatoes based on the market value of the tasks performed (walking the dog, putting the garbage out.)

In a study of Chicago neighbourhoods  extending over more than 15 years, Dr Felton Earls found that the biggest single influence on the health and well-being of both individuals and neighbourhoods was the capacity of local people to act together on matters of common concern – whether improving a piece of derelict land or dealing with rowdy teenagers on a street corner. The term he coined for this is ‘collective efficacy’, a rather dry sociological term for an important concept.

More on Dr Earls here. A colleague working on the same project is Professor Robert Sampson. You can read more about him and directly access many papers here.  

I don’t think anyone would dispute that successful community action of the sort described by Professor Earls adds value to the community and hence to the lives of the individuals in it, even if that value cannot be monetarised in any formal sense (although perhaps there is some impact in the form of property prices). What does this mean for community action? Edgar Cahn draws an analogy between this sort of activity in the ‘core economy’ and your PC operating system. When Windows fails,  no amount of fiddling with your word processor will restore your PC to health. So with society; when the core economy fails, no amount of experts – whether planners, police or politicians – can restore it. Massive professional service programmes, huge redevelopment schemes with capital investment for physical reconstruction may appear to be highly successful but almost always fail to deal with the real issues of the core economy. In Cahn’s language, what is needed is to rebuild the operating system.

What does this Core Economy do? What DOES any economy do? It produces and it distributes.

So what does this economy produce and what does it distribute?

Infants, Children, teenagers and peer groups, families, care for seniors.
It produces safe vibrant neighborhoods, community, democracy, civil society
It produces love and caring and coming to each other’s rescue and sharing 24-7.

If Cahn is right, what does this mean for action in the community and by the community?

Most of us at some stage will have come up against accusations that the community groups in which we work are ‘un-democratic’. I know I have, many times. While I suppose it is the nature of politicians generally to want to do things, there is too often general mistrust of any group trying to do things for themselves rather than waiting for the local Council. This is more serious than simple petty mindedness. It impinges on the legitimacy of community-based action – action by and for local people.

We can examine what is really going on by considering a simple example. When an organisation like say Marlborough Area Development Trust acts, what is going on? In what way is that action different when the appropriate District Council takes it? (The choice of organisations is purely for illustration purposes - please don’t draw any conclusions from my choice.)

There may of course be differences in the quality of the action and there may also be different choices made in the first instance – in other words local authorities may choose to act in different ways to local development trusts. However, common sense would surely say that for a given course of action there is no intrinsic difference caused by that action being taken by different organisations. So – is there anything in the idea that action by the local authority is in some way more ‘democratic’ than action by a community group? My belief is that there is not. Simple accusations of lack of democracy are almost always special pleading in favour of a competing organisation. The only valid criticism would address not the structure of the organisation, but what it does.

Is the possibility of a local community group getting it wrong, enough to give local authorities a monopoly of action in these areas? This isn’t idle philosophising. Local Government over the past 40 years has been subject to greater and greater control by central government, to the point where it could be argued that they are no longer ‘local’, but simply agents of the national state. In the circumstances therefore, does so-called ‘local government’ have the capacity to act in ways that meet the needs and aspirations of local people? Even if it does, if local people are willing to act for themselves, does the state – local or national – have a legitimate case for stopping them (assuming the action proposed is otherwise legal)?

Over the years there have been many who have argued for both positions. Some base their argument on the premise that the free market is a better tool than government for the delivery of services. Others argue from a perspective of social justice or equity, that the market will not meet the needs of those unable to pay and the intervention of the state is needed to redress that imbalance. It seems to me however that what we have now is neither of these cases. We have a market that is heavily regulated and controlled, while government increasingly tries to apply a market model in areas like health with conspicuous lack of success and a forecasting model to areas like housing and retailing with similar failure.

One technique of planning large human settlements developed in the past hundred years has been the device of establishing ‘projective need’. This means guessing the future physical and social requirements of a community or city and then basing present spending and energy so as to achieve a readiness for the projected future state. In planning schools, beginning students usually argue that people’s lives in time are wandering and unpredictable, that societies have a history in the sense that they do not do what is expected of tehm, so that this device is misleading. Planning teachers usually reply that of course the projected need would be altered by practical objections in the course of being worked out; the projective need analysis is a pattern of ideal conditions rather than a fixed prescription.

But the facts of planning in the last few years have shown that this disclaimer on the part of planners is something that they do not really mean. Professional planners of highways, of redevelopment housing, of inner city renewal projects have treated challenges from displaced community groups as a threat to the value of their plans rather than as a natural part of the effort of social reconstruction. Over and over again one can hear in planning circles a fear expressed when the human beings affected by planning changes become even slightly interested in the remedies proposed for their lives. ‘Interference’, ‘blocking’, and ‘interruption of work’ – these are the terms by which social challenges or divergences from the planner’s projections are interpreted. What has really happened is that the planners have wanted to take the plan, the projection in advance, as more ‘true’ than the historical turns, the unforeseen movements in the real time of human lives.

“The Uses of Disorder”; Richard Sennett 1970

This quote is taken from a book published in 1970, but is still relevant today. It applies moreover not just to what we conventionally call planning in the UK, but to all those other areas where the state attempts to predict what will happen in order better to work out how they – which means we – will pay for it.

This doesn’t mean that these predictive methods are invalid or wrong. However, at the root of such predictive thinking is an idea of perfectibility that runs counter to all we know of human behaviour. We will never have enough information; we will never have enough money to do everything. Expecting the state nevertheless to act as if it can do just that is surely dangerous. Civil society is built not on political prescription or ideology but on the day-to-day interaction of people, individually and in groups. A society built on the precept ‘they should do something’ is unhealthy and in the long run, unworkable. It implies a willingness to accept the imposition of a pattern of life on individuals and a lack of willingness to take responsibility for our own lives and for those dependent on us. As the poet John Donne said,  ‘no man is an island’. There is inevitably a need for collective action in society, but that collective action must be taken in the light of an acceptance of our own responsibilities.

Originally written for an e-newsetter I produce.

Semi-privatised empires | Joe Public | Guardian Unlimited

Link: Semi-privatised empires | Joe Public | Guardian Unlimited.

What I was witnessing - this has been the history of housing associations in recent times - was the progressive alienation of public property and the creation of a sort of semi-privatised empire dependent on public funds without any of the accountabilities or safeguards forced on the public sector itself. Foundation trusts in health are a parallel.

This is a point also made recently by Laurence Demarco

Community controlled housing associations (CCHAS) are increasingly establishing parallel Development Trusts as vehicles for wider community enterprise activity.  Such diversified CCHAS provide a powerful model of Anchor Organisations with the impact to empower communities.  The governments housing green  paper 'Firm Foundations' fails to appreciate this potential and deliberately favours the role of the larger housing associations without local identity.

Charivari revisited

Apropos my earlier post, it occurs to me that the hysteria surrounding the alleged presence of paedophiles on some housing estates that erupted in 2000 is yet another example of this phenonenon. As the paediatrician in South Wales found out however when her house was vandalised, this form of behaviour can be seriously at odds with reality.

I'm not suggesting the sort of stupidity that confuses paedophilia with the work of a paediatrician is endemic in the population. Nor am I suggesting that paedophilia is anything but the odious crime that it is. However, couple the hysteria whipped up by one or two irresponsible newspapers, with the desire to control and direct others - which I believe is widespread - and you do have a dangerous mixture.

The politics of space

“We shape our buildings and afterwards they shape us”

Winston Churchill addressing the Commons in the chamber of the House of Lords on October 28, 1943.

I have always been interested in how we affect our physical surroundings – not just the appearance but the processes at work. Some of that explains I suppose my fascination with the work of Christopher Alexander.

The world in the 21^st century is overwhelmingly urban and it behoves us to make that world one in which our children and grandchildren will want to live. On 17^th October I went to a conference at the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment. The topic was “The Politics of Place” – more particularly why even when there is agreement about the sorts of places we like to see, we are apparently still incapable of building them. Of course the answer to this one will depend on where you start. The ‘right libertarian’ will argue it is all because we have too much interference in private property rights by the planning system. Get rid of that and all will be well.

One of the speakers on the day, Benjamin Barber, had some interesting things to say on that theme, in the context of an analysis of the spatial implications of democracy – and vice versa. His analysis is much more than a nuanced version of the simplistic cause and effect link espoused by the likes of Alice Coleman and Oscar Newman. He sees public space as an indispensable requirement of democracy, going back to the agora of the Greeks. According to Barber, the corruption of public space can be linked to the deterioration of democratic process and to the growing restrictions we can see on free speech itself.

He identifies five forces/trends at work – suburbanisation, commercialisation, privatisation, bureaucratisation and simulation. Of course references to commercialisation and privatisation will give those who believe the answer always lies in private property rights apoplexy, but bear with me.

Barber’s arguments about suburbanisation are I think the weakest – at least in a UK context. The US suburb is more likely to be totally dominated by private car use, many will have no footway/sidewalk and very few will have any amenities. Any sense of neighbourhood in the historic sense is lost and since all journeys are by car, the chances of random encounters are much reduced. The idea that people fled the city at least in part because of its isolation is belied by the fact that in most of the suburban US, the same isolation now exists but without the city amenities.

These characteristics do exist in UK suburbs, but not to the same extent and probably developed over a more limited time period. Places like Swindon, which grew rapidly on the back of appeal decisions that allowed massive housing without associated amenities are not typical of British suburban housing. In London for example most prewar suburbs were built around the railway and the tube system – Betjeman’s beloved Metroland. Even so there are still large areas of housing in the UK, often built by the public sector rather than the private, where the same lack of economic and cultural diversity prevails.

Barber also cites what he calls commercialisation. To an extent this seems to fall from the US system of zoning which very precisely delineates the nature of the uses allowed in a given area, but without attempting as the UK system does to allocate numbers or control growth levels. As a consequence, US cities and metropolitan areas a surrounded by vast tracts of housing zoned purely for a single house type on given plot sizes, usually much bigger than would prevail in the UK. The zoning system segregates uses much more comprehensively than the UK system does with the outcome a dispersal of uses across geographically large areas. Where people do come together it is largely in malls which are private and where the owners often seek to limit access by those commercially undesirable. Teenagers and the elderly have been excluded or moved on by mall owners since they simply don’t spend money and take up valuable space that could be given over to consumers.

Where cafes exist, they are in vast food courts, with false variety and set up for rapid turnover. Lingering over a cup of coffee while chatting up the local girls/boys is positively discouraged in such places. Commercialisation of the public space on this scale destroys the opportunity for public life. The paseo or promenade, the Sunday stroll, isn’t allowed to happen in a private mall since it serves no commercial purpose. Indeed many of the activities in Christopher Alexander’s ‘A Pattern Language‘ that he places at the centre of living in neighbourhoods, would be impossible or likely to be prohibited. In some malls even sitting is prohibited except in approved spaces.

This leads to Barber’s third trend, that of privatisation. The growth in gated communities in the US is spreading to the UK[i]. Where access is not directly closed, housing is often designed to exclude not include the casual visitor. Gated communities make real our secession from the public space that begins with the use of mobile phones/iPods/Blackberries. These tools, valuable in themselves, encourage us to treat public spaces as if they were private, impoverishing public life in the process. There is the story, probably apocryphal but describing an essential truth, of a group of teenagers chattering happily as they sit on a wall in the street. It is only when drawing closer that we can see they are all talking not to each other but on their mobiles. Commercialisation and privatisation also privatise us – we begin to see ourselves not as citizens, as inhabitants of a polis, but as consumers.

The process of bureaucratisation is I suppose self explanatory – professional judgment begins to cut into democratic life. Health and Safety concerns are for example entirely professionalised. As a consequence the citizen again becomes a consumer – this time of professional services - not someone exercising judgement on their own behalf and in their own right.

Finally Barber described a process he called simulation largely arising from frustrated attempts to counter the other trends, but leading for example in the urban environment to the faux variety seen at places like the Disney Corporation’s Celebration and in much new housing development, where perceived variety is no more than wallpaper.

According to Barber the outcome is that the idea of a democratic public realm vanishes; the very idea of being a citizen vanishes; replaced by consumers and consumerism. These forces may operate in the name of liberty but in the end are destroying it by destroying the important distinction between public and private liberty.

Commercialism, supported it must be said by tax breaks and concessions from government, may give us an almost unlimited choice of car for example but cannot give us the same choice - often any choice - of public transport. Our choices when we have them are often themselves destructive – ‘Sophie’s Choice’. We don’t have a chance to set agendas; they are handed down by the political or the corporate state. Nor do we have the chance to open up lateral communication. While talking to each other is after all the stuff of civic life, the limits placed on speech and communication by these trends make this increasingly difficult. The exercise of free speech and the opportunities for dissent are closed down. Free speech is only possible in public spaces and when space is privatised free speech is thereby diminished and damaged. In the US judges have already decided that the local neighbourhood mall is not a public space and allowed mall owners to prohibit distribution of literature, protest or other forms of behaviour they decide they do not want to allow. As Barber put it “there is no Speakers’ Corner in the Malls of America”.

This link between the growth in private spaces and the declining opportunities for dissent that creates is not often so explicitly stated. It seems obvious of course but so long as opponents of state power limit their opposition to a simplistic call for more private ownership – don’t reclaim the streets, sell them – it seems unlikely to be properly recognised. In any event even the public spaces are being closed down. State ‘ownership’ of the street is being used as a device to prevent and suppress public dissent – and not just about the war in Iraq. Under section 132 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 it is an offence to organise or take part in a demonstration in a public place within the “designated area” (up to 1 km around Parliament) if authorisation has not been given by the Metropolitan Police Commissioner. When so-called public ownership still leads to the suppression of dissent, it become that much more difficult to argue against the alternatives. Even so we must find ways to do so.

(As far as I can tell much of Barber’s argument was drawn from his new book ‘Consumed’.)

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[i] It would appear that gated communities are not self-evidently attractive places to live. Existing research showed that motivations for living in a gated community are primarily driven by the need for security and a more generalised fear of crime. Importantly there was no apparent desire to come into contact with the ‘community’ within the gated or walled area. With regard to the specific impacts on crime only two studies could be identified. However, these indicate that sense of community is lower in gated ‘communities’ but perceived sense of safety is higher. While property crime went down violent crime was not affected. In some gated communities there was a greater fear of crime and outsiders more generally. – from Gated Communities: A Systematic Review of the Research Evidence

Yet another token post...

More stuff for Etsy, originally uploaded by ibanda.

Although I aim to post something everyday, I fail more often than I succeed. My excuse this last few days is twofold.

First I hope to be moving house soon and am therefore throwing away all those things that should have been thrown away years ago, which of course takes time away from blogging.

Secon, I am doing my first craft fair on Monday, so in between throwing stuff away, I have been making more stuff to clutter up the house! I wil let you know how the day goes.

A new Mutual Aid?

In the late nineteenth century the mutual societies, co-operators and trades unionists could have gone on to invent a welfare society in which more and more people governed themselves, employed their own doctors, ran their own schools and created a commonwealth of a country.

 

But they didn’t. They decided to go down the road which led to the welfare state. During the twentieth century this state came to do these things ‘for’ and ‘to’ people, just like an empire.

 

This worked for a long while. It fed the hungry, most of them, and housed the homeless, most of them. But we now know that it has turned out to be a well-intentioned but wrong choice.

 

Public housing now haunts us in graffiti-strewn, high crime, no-go areas. By the end of the twentieth century, the welfare state resulted in expensive, top-down, one-size-fits-all services which now fail to satisfy ordinary folk. We may be materially better off, but the quality of life is poorer. We are up a cul-de-sac.

 

One political answer to this risks turning down another cul-de-sac by saying the state is too powerful. It needs to be slimmed down, services need to be privatised and we should spend and tax less.

 

This is superficially attractive. For while the range of needs which people have are diverse, public services have remained uniform. People's experience of the private sector is of choice. So they could be persuaded that introducing choice and diversity into the public sector by privatising it would work.

 

A better answer entails creating in the first century of the new millennium a modern version of yesterday’s mutualism, in a renewed civil society. This means a strong, but enabling state. Not fewer taxes, but spending them in new ways which empower and inspire people to take control of their lives, agreeing their own agenda for the action needed to drive up the quality of life where they live. The result will be a new compact between people and a modern state.

From an article in New Start Magazine by Dick Atkinson, drawn to my attention in the Senscot  Newsletter. (Subscribe here)

Dr Dick Atkinson is chief executive of Balsall Heath Forum in Birmingham. His book, Civil renewal: mending the hole in the social ozone layer, is published by Brewin Books, www.brewinbooks.com, price £18. Alternatively, tel: 0121 446 6183/2 or email: [email protected]

The hole in the house

normblog: The hole in the house

- and at the end of the course it really hits you that they aren't coming back!

Public sector innovation can work

A much more successful example of public sector innovation than the Dome was pioneered by the Irwell Valley Housing Association in the late 1990s. Traditionally it appears that 80% of staff time in housing is spent on dealing with 20% of the tenants either causing or in trouble. The other 80% of tenants got little attention.

Irwell Valley managed to break this cycle by setting up the Gold Service scheme This gives all tenants a standard level of service but allows for additional benefits if they stay up to date with their rent,

In order to qualify for Gold Service membership, residents must apply and satisfy some basic criteria. These are: 6 weeks clear rent account OR if in arrears, 12 weeks of continued rent payment plus any agreed repayment AND no other breaches of tenancy

If a member falls into arrears or breaches their tenancy in some other way, they will be suspended from Gold Service benefits. Here are just a few of the benefits:
- Up to £52 cash back over 1 year paid in the form of bonusbonds
- - Faster repairs service
- - Discounted home contents/personal possessions insurance
- - Discounted goods and services
- - Education and Training Grants
- - Gold Credit
- - Increased choice in improvement programmes

While the scheme apparently met with some opposition from traditionalists with “equalitarian” views, tenants seem to have loved it and signed up in large numbers. An evaluation of the project was undertaken and subsequently it seems forty to fifty other organisations, with over 1m homes, have adopted similar schemes.

While some may see the introduction of such consumerist approaches as undermining the public sector ethos, I am not one of them. Anyone receiving or using services provided by a public body is in a contractual relationship. This doesn’t have to mean legalistic imposition of contract law – in areas like housing such contracts will almost certainly be more effective if seen as part of a partnership. This is what the Gold Service approach seems to be about.

It would be interesting to see how far this approach can be taken. Could it be used for example to generate greater community involvement in managing our streets and open spaces? In a limited sense the Business Improvement Districts now being trialled in the UK are similar, although I suspect the motivation is more about generating additional revenue than increasing public and community involvement.

Affordable housing US style (perhaps)

A different take on affordable housing on the Cool Town Studios blog. I'm not convinced the same solution would apply in the UK, where houses are already pretty small, but good design does no one any harm! I not too the same distrust in the US of any suggestion of increasing density.

Strange as it seems, the US zoning laws are much more prescriptive than any housing allocations would be in a local plan in the UK. As far as I can tell many zonings in the US context would be impossible in a UK plan and would be ultra vires - single family housing on minimum plot sizes for example.

Affordable housing

A publication from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation puts the debate on affordable housing into context, clearly showing that even in the lowest price areas like Rochdale or Stoke, on average about 20% of households cannot afford to buy even the cheapest house available - and that takes no account of whether those houses would be suitable for their family needs in any case.

The study was undertaken by Professor Steve Wilcox of the Centre for Housing Policy at the University of York. It draws on house price data from Halifax Plc, and on data from the Government's Family Expenditure Survey, Census, Labour Force Survey and New Earnings Survey, to compute local household incomes.

The knee jerk response, that these problems are a result of artificial restrictions in land supply caused by the planning system simply doesn't wash in these circumstances. These are areas where there is no 'new land' and where creating land for housing by and large means clearance of existing houses. Even more importantly these are districts where across huge tracts no one wants to build.