Wednesday, 14 November 2012

Power points

Phone chargingI’m a bit late catching up with this, but it’s too good to pass over. Atlantic cities ran a piece by Will Doig about how New Yorkers got access to electricity to power their portable devices in the wake of hurricane Sandy:

‘In Midtown Manhattan, where the lights are still on, residents have strung extension cords out to their stoops.’

I’m surprised there weren’t more examples of civic mutual aid and self-help; perhaps they just remain undiscovered.

The article goes on to ask whether city councils might not do more, hurricane or no, to facilitate access to power sources – crediting New York, in passing, with having installed ‘42 electrical outlets throughout Bryant Park, making it the first fully-wired public park in America’.

So let’s turn to the comments, one or two of which reveal the tortuous brainlessness of the anti-public-service, Don’t-Tax-Me mentality. Some respondents feel the idea that a city’s authorities might help citizens to help themselves, by sorting access to electricity in a crisis, as unacceptable. No doubt they will reach for their guns in defence of the freedom not to help or share. These are real human beings, it seems, and probably have been educated:

‘Free fuel for our cars next?? Hell, let's be BOLD and just make EVERYTHING free, and available to everyone, all the time, without limits of any sort. Yeah, that's the ticket. Utopia, baby!’

According to one link provided in the comments section, it costs just 38 cents per year to charge an iPhone. Their convenience as devices for people to support one another in time of crisis is obvious. America’s real crisis is the proportion of people who do not understand collective value, being quite possibly in denial about state provision from which they have benefited.

I witnessed this quite graphically in New York once with friends, when we saw a fire engine jammed in traffic, siren blaring: no one made the slightest effort to move out of the way, presumably determined that a publicly funded service meant for someone who was just unlucky wasn't going to delay them in their individual progress.


14 Nov 2012 09:26:43 | Mobility and change

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First international convention of neighbourhoods bloggers Well, two of us anyway, sometimes you gotta start small. Canadian Diane Dyson, who blogs at Belonging Community, was passing through London and it was a great pleasure to meet up for a coffee and a conversational wander round parts of the City of London. I’ve long admired Diane’s thoroughness in her blogging and the determined linking of community development practice to policy options. I’m also a fan of the way she combines informed insights into a range of different themes – education, crime, health, housing, planning and so on. What chance the residents and practitioners of Toronto value what she offers? We talked about settlements and housing and private-public space; the attitudes of media and politicians to poverty, about philanthropy and the need to reassert poverty issues in the income inequalities agenda. We talked about the notion of ‘social claustrophobia’ – apparently a new and ill-chosen term for social detachment, which I’ve commented on often enough; and the need for policy to appreciate the importance of recognition as much as engagement at neighbourhood level. At one point we came round a corner to discover this scene: a London bus draped with the banner of the Worshipful Company of Parish Clerks, which as I’m sure you already know has been serving the City churches since 1274. Don’t call it a beadle-bus – there is honour in a civic group that can trace its history to the fraternities and guilds of late medieval England. For my overseas guest, this was a wonderful, coincidental example of civic tradition, mutual support and collective enterprise, and eccentricity in the English establishment. We had stumbled on back markers during the last preparations for the parade of the Lord Mayor’s show. As if our conversation needed any prompting.
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The unruly element (it's just a shot away) If you ever feel you need reminding, against the general steady flow of filtered public opinion, that maybe the past wasn’t entirely devoid of anti-social behaviour – or that when anyone got a little boisterous it might not just have been high spirits – try this short interview extract (at about 17:20) with a not quite obscure popular music combo from a bygone age. (Six days left to listen). The band in question had their kit trashed at a gig. Note the diffident, cultured accents, non-judgemental mild fascination at the episode, the interviewers' phrases like ‘an unruly element,’ and the question which begins ‘You must have been in some wild scenes before…?’ Wait, there's more. An account (at about 40:33) of some chap in 'bright purple velvet trousers... gaily embroidered collar and cuffs' - think Malvolio - reflecting that 'one perhaps doesn't ask for responsibilities... Perhaps one is given responsibilities when one is pushed into the limelight...' Thank you beeb.

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