Wednesday, 17 February 2010

Village facilities: putting it all together

Marram green I like the sound of this... Thanks again to Regen and Renewal, for this account of a new development on the Suffolk coast which combines sheltered housing for older people, a public library, cafe, parish council meeting rooms, social rented flats and homes for sale.

From the Regen and Renewal project review:

The communal areas here are central to the building. I could see that the residents used them to come together to have a chat. It's great that the cafe leads into the library, and these areas can also be sectioned off, which makes them more versatile. The break-out areas are full of natural light. The scheme successfully blends the need for older people to maintain independence in their own home with the need to avoid insularity. They can have privacy but they can also talk to people in the library or the cafe, which means these areas become hubs for the community. There are a number of opportunities for residents to communicate with the outside world.

17 Feb 2010 05:47:47 | Neighbourhood relations, Older people, Space and place

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It'll all end in tears The London Olympics, a grotesque folly if ever there was one, is throwing up more regeneration issues than it should. Regen and Renewal reports a study by the London Assembly’s Economic Development, Culture, Sport and Tourism Committee (aka life the universe and everything) with concerns that deprived local residents could miss out on the legacy of the Olympic site. Now there's a surprise. The report highlights a string of no-brainers for the legacy. Like this for example - the sports facilities in the park should be made available for community use and, wait for it, new homes built on the park must be suitable for, and available to, local people - not just wealthy people moving on to the park. I know we're dealing with people in suits here, but why does it require a study from a separate and doubtless expensive committee to come up with these not-exactly-revolutionary suggestions? I guess the problem is that the regeneration industry is so preoccupied with the physical world it is trying to dominate, and people are a real nuisance. Just a thought to be added to my recent blurted critique of regeneration.
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Empowerment is a good thing, so what am I not happy about? You can't get away from empowerment. There are conferences and workshops and training going on all over the place. I'm not signed-up to many lists, but my mailbox is peppered with invitations and blurb about empowering citizens / communities / residents, in relation to housing / health / safety / environment / education / motherhood / apple pie. Fifteen years ago we wouldn't have believed it could happen, ten years ago we might have aspired towards it. Now empowerment is fashionable. I think there's an industry self-generating a lot of activity and I'm suspicious. This is not to denigrate the work of many who are delivering from experience lots of sound learning points to people who appear to need them; nor specific policy events which in themselves may be wholly valid. But a culture accumulates; and there is a precedent. Round about 2003, the field of social inclusion and new technology became counter-productively transformed when government started putting up huge chunks of funding without much thought about what was needed in local situations, thus attracting many who were willing to spend it for them without the burden of values or the inconvenience of insights into the nature of exclusion. I've been outspoken about that before, once or twice. Part of the difficulty is that many London-based suits don't speak to people who have the dirt of estate life under their fingernails, unless for a photoshoot and through an interpreter. They meet together in London events to problematise the issue as 'out there', thus ensuring that they do not see themselves as part of it. One of the consequences is that any action to be taken becomes the subject of organisational management (control) rather than local networked response. There's also an increased risk of professionalisation, leading to the situation where some designated people can 'do empowerment' and the rest of us can't, which makes no sense. Perhaps I'm getting too cranky in my old age, but I can't help suspecting that the processes that I identified the other day, which assimilate, appropriate language, insist on consensus and manage dissent, could in due course absorb the theme of empowerment itself. Now there's a perverse irony. What words would we feel able use for empowerment if its meaning were confiscated?

Kevin Harris

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