Cometh the hour. There I was yesterday mumbling ineffectually about the need to defend the once-essential anti-professional ethos of community development; and today politely trying to field yet another earnest enquiry about whether my old organisation, Community Development Foundation, still has anything to do with community development. Meanwhile here's Jon Fitzmaurice of Self-help-housing.org on the Guardian's Joe Public today:
Self-help housing enables people to be active citizens, and it fights the culture of "someone should do something about that". It was once more common, but over the last two decades community development and regeneration has fallen into the hands of professionals preoccupied with management and measurement.
Yes, I saw it happening. And yes, I did protest - too weakly, or too forcefully? I don't know, but either way, CD will be reinvented from the bottom-up by people like Jon Fitzmaurice. Let's hope the others just get out of the way.
