Localism and other fairytales

The forthcoming Localism Bill is being speculated upon left right and centre. If the delays in publishing it are a cynical drive by the coalition to divert attention away from a myriad other hot political potatoes then it is almost working. The proposals will have far reaching influences upon the way local decision making will take place in our local areas, our interface with local authorities and require a level of community cohesion, joint mindedness and a commitment to working for the common good......no wonder debate is raging.

However, way back in 2001 when New Labour published its "Strong Local Leadership, Quality Local Services" it spelled out that “By removing restrictions and requirements on planning, spending and decision-making and providing new powers to trade and charge, we will free up councils to innovate and deliver tangible improvements in the quality of services and effective community leadership.”

Sound familiar? It’s not the first time policy has been recycled, repackaged and resold?

Many are seeing the proposed relaxation of planning permission and increase in local decision-making as a traditional Tory assault on the planning profession reminiscent of the “jobs locked up in filing cabinets” sentiment of the Thatcher days. A further trip down memory lane would elicit such gems as “been spending most my life living in a NIMBY paradise” “Me & Mrs Jones (and her fat brown envelopes)” and “an unscrupulous developer ate my greenbelt”.

Except these are the things people are complaining will happen under Localism. Is this really all that public planning debate really amounts to still? Who is to blame for this cynical and stereotypical outlook on what planning is about and for? Why is it that people only engage with the planning system when they are thoroughly browned off, want to complain or officially object? How did it become such a deficit model?

Planners? Well, what have we as a planning profession done to alter the perception of us as process monkeys seduced by the resounding kerrr-thunk of the “REFUSED” stamp? For most local people the planning process is a mystery, shrouded in tiny fonts, aggressive institutional-speak, over-the-top bureaucracy, inability to see things without the safety blanket of policy and a funfair of forms. Is this fit-for-purpose and in the public interest? No. It alienates people and divorces them from their local area by sticking up all manner of opportunities for them to go: “it’s just not worth it.” That is not good enough.

Councils? Councils are in the proverbial rock and a hard place; refuse development and they risk stifling any chance of local recovery; so under pressure to let development through it risks chucking hard-won goals to weave strategic, balanced and consultative planning frameworks out of the window. RSS’s have gone, LEPS are coming, LDF’s and AAP’s sit alongside outmoded UDP’s and the landscape is getting very crowded......oh and with less resources. But committee meetings are death by typeset, unsociable hours and go on forever. Why would anyone ever want to sit through that?!

Central Government: to quote Greg Clarke “The current sum of circulars, policy statements and so forth is bigger than the complete Works of Shakespeare, and not nearly as entertaining. Guidance on this scale flirts with the absurd: there’s no way a practitioner can keep it all in mind. “Thanks for your concern, but actually I know many a planner that prides themselves on being able to do this! It didn’t all arrive overnight. Some of us write, research, study and argue it out in court not to mention implement it on a daily basis! These people are also unlikely to be person reading your lovingly laminated planning notice in 5pt arial tied to a lamppost at the dark end of the street.....

Developers? Ah planning, the whipping boy of the development process and then some. Got an issue with your development – got to be something to do with planning! Why can’t I develop what I want, where I want, with what I want and not ask anyone what they think and then just walk away when I’ve got my magic number? Planning is a necessary evil guarding against unfettered development and irresponsible land use. It’s not perfect, is open to abuse and has many holes but it is there for a reason – to protect local areas and local communities from being rode roughshod. Developers need to engage with communities in ways that avoid the adversarial and that means real dialogue and real relationships.

Us? Afraid of putting local decision-making on planning in local hands? It’s as if you expect local people to just be in it to screw each other, self-promote, thwart everyone else’s happiness? It’s not like we are tone deaf when it comes to design, woefully narrow minded and petty, always moaning and never thinking beyond the garden fence? Well, there are a lot of people who are interested and do care but don’t have the time, resources or skills to participate. Or they did once and they were roundly patronised and ignored. Or this is the umpteenth time I’ve been asked to do this now why will this time be different? It will only be different if we make it different.

OK I’m playing devil’s (pro-bono) advocate but it seems to me that we are all culpable. As a planner I would naturally say that it is for the planning profession to step up to the plate and change perceptions of us just being about fulfilling a process and more about enabling it. Communities, councils, developers, activists, businesses, organisations all have a role to play in that process. The real question is what will a planning system look like without planners?

Planners have to manage a wide variety of diverse and often conflicting issues, seeking the best outcome that marries the local with the global and represents wide interest whilst also thinking strategically and decades into the future. That is a craft and a skill and should not be undervalued and undermined. We need to be vocal and assertive about this and the need for sound planning rigour to underpin any transfer of power and decision-making to communities. Without it we could be counting the costs and consequences for a long time. Planners are not the vanguards of doom (mostly).

Localism could make a difficult and convoluted process even more so. Or it can provide an opportunity to offer clarity to local people, restore trust and faith in the planning process and profession, allow proper engagement between developers and the people they will be affecting and finally......treat community as client instead of receiver.

Or.....maybe that’s just my fairytale.

wild hackney tonight!

the first meeting of the wild hackney project is being held tonight and we hope you can join us to talk street art. we have had some great responses from street art blogs across the world, artists, writers, the media and local politicians so we are all fired up and ready to demonstrate some localism. 6.30, Fellows Court Community Centre, Weymouth Terrace E2 8LR - the Council have already agreed to review their policy and now it is up to us to get in there and get our hands dirty.

photo from scottburnham.com

Psychotherapy for places

Last week Cameron unveiled his plans to create a Happiness Index (Happinex?!) which will measure environmental and psychological wellbeing alongside GDP measuring economic health. The Happinex will include measurables and data which will be collected and analysed at various spatial levels from post code to whole cities but what will it tell us about the experience of a place compared to another? What makes a happy place?

On the other hand unhappy places (with high crime, unemployment, poor housing etc) continue to persist despite continual investment in them and all places will be made less happy by cuts to investment and services. What happens to the people that live in them and the future of those places? We need an approach to managing the negative impacts of these cuts that considers the human vulnerability of places to change. This has to happen at a local level or the Happiness Index could lead to vulnerable places being even further disadvantaged on the basis of their position in the index.

All places and areas despite their socio-economic standing will experience a material decline in their quality of life and well-being as a result of government cuts, but places that are already struggling face grim prospects. It is possible that the HI could make it even harder for those areas that are struggling to attract investment and support in the future. Therefore we need a means of guaging the level of vulnerability of places to cuts and how we can manage the negative impacts of this.

The resource invested in making places happy is minor compared to the money needed to intervene in unhappy places: to turn them around, change perception of them, and bring inward investment. The term “Feral Places” (Dr Tim Williams) has been coined to describe a place where, despite countless levels of investment and intervention it remains a problem place (high crime, unemployment, reliance on benefits, poor quality housing.) Is that because intervention has failed to tackle the “happiness” factors?

Herein lies the problem: government, developers and investors are NOT place-makers – they put kit in space. Places are made by people and their varying and uniquely local attachments to place; people are profoundly affected by change happening in their place – i.e. closure of employment centres, rise in house prices etc, which in itself makes development and regeneration process not just a physical one but actually more of a psychological process.

As we have said in other posts, we believe place is the spatial "self" and like the human self, places are vulnerable to change and negative impacts. This manifests in symptoms of decline, abuse and neglect. If places are to remain or even become happy in a climate of austerity and cuts then we must look at places as assets that require the same support, help and analysis that people need.

Places need to be examined in a way that tells us how it has got to where it has, what has gone wrong, what makes it hard to move on, what it is for, where it is going and what it needs to grow – psychotherapy for places.

Over the coming months we will be developing the idea of "Psychotherapy of Places" into a tool for helping places and communities understand, cope and respond to the coming cuts and remain resilient. As well as speaking to people living in vulnerable places we will also meet emotional geographers, psychogeographers, psychotherapists, artists, psychoanalysts, writers and filmakers, community workers and young people to understand what it means to experience and identify happy and unhappy places.

We want to look at cities and places in a completely different way - as living personalities that can be developed, grown and strengthened and appreciated for what they are - warts and all - in the face of change and challenge and able to fight back!

Let's have some urban love!

the signal project

In doing some research for wild hackney we came across the Signal Project, a professional street art organisation that creates large scale public art and runs graffiti workshops. They are involved in the Stockwell gallery project which got some publicity in august as a hub for street art with strict curatorship from artists including Solo One. One of the many great ideas we have come across in looking at ways for Hackney to rethink graffiti management!

Check out the work of the signal project - http://www.signalproject.com/ and solo one's great blog 'say something beautiful or be quiet' - http://soloone.blogspot.com/

I am yours

The “Hackney Rabbit” was recently saved from the threat of eviction/obliteration from the side of Premises Studios where it had been a recognisable local character for over two years. The extent of public support and activism around saving the rabbit was overwhelming and strongly suggested that the Council’s policy towards street-art needs to change to reflect local attitudes and opinions.

However, more widely we think a new policy should also cover the bundle of informal “things” in our public spaces and neighbourhoods that often go unrecognised and unvalued by formal definitions/listings but contribute massively to local identity, uniqueness and cultural landscapes. These are things like old signs and clocks, original shop fronts and architectural features, patches of grass or “spaces in between”, local characters and fonts, mosaics and stonework etc etc.

By recording, identifying and valuing these things we can help to keep them as key features in our neighbourhood that contribute to what we mean when we say “I love Hackney” in the face of rapid change and regeneration – they are pieces of Hackney and we should value them!

Mend is working with Premises Studios and taking up this campaign; using the positive local support and momentum developed from saving the Hackney Rabbit as a resource to develop a more relevant and responsive policy for our public realm. We will convene a public meeting (with reps invited from the council) to identity the things we value, define why they are important and develop key aspects of a new policy to take back to the Council.

This means taking a fresh look and reappraising what we consider to be assets and the cultural and creative value inherent in them. Some of the things people choose to value will surprise us and challenge our preconceived notions of what should and should not be in public space. Is this because we have grown accustomed to public space being full of instructions, information and guidance instead of a rich mix of experience, emotion and questions – things that prompt us to experience urban space and not just move through it like sheep?

In the 90’s Light & Smith likened post-modern urban space as sterilised sanctioned spaces that were comforting and predictable but altogether bland and unexciting – a comfy designer sofa; as opposed to modern urban space that was unpredictable and full of the messy richness and drama of everyday life – an awkward metal folding chair. But everyday life is messy and unpredictable and isn’t that what makes it so good?!

The informal stuff gets hidden and obscured by the layer of formality, sanctioned safety net of over-planned public space – a wonderland of the bits you live your everyday life in but aren’t supposed to see. The opposite of the emperor’s fictional new clothes; instead the emperor is wearing some pretty out there garb but we all pretend to just see the dissapointingly coy underwear?!

Countless councils across the UK, Europe and the US are re-examining their attitudes to formal and informal uses of space; embracing uses and activities that open our eyes to new ways of experiencing and appreciating urban space. In the US there is a wave of urban exploration or "recreational tresspassing" http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2010/nov/14/exploring-with-recreational-trespassers that sees people climbing huge bridges to get a glimpse of a new wof the city, exploring the hidden rivers under London through Victorian sewers, and seeing the beauty in urban decay; parkour/freerunning and its opportunities for people to touch, feel and bounce of different planes and surfaces, street-art and its movement away from the indecipherable tags and slogans of the 80’s and 90’s that told the public “this is for us, not you”........

To the Hackney Rabbit that says “I am yours, and for all of you”.

The first step in the campaign is a campaign slogan so please send through some suggestions and don’t hold back – be catchy and cheeky! Post them on here or if you would rather you can email me at: liane.hartley@mendlondon.org.uk

We will be in touch again about the campaign and details of the meeting, all are welcome!

all hail the hackney rabbit!

we were really chuffed to hear to Hackney Council have withdrawn their threats to paint over the rabbit on the side of The Premises Studio. Julia and Viv got over 2000 signatures to their online petition to save the rabbit and over their 2 week campaign got national and international press with support offered from local schools and businesses. Read more on their blog - http://www.premisesstudios.com/blog/

next step a new street art policy for Hackney?

mending in bethnal green

Today we are going to meet with the team at Oxford House in Bethnal Green. Oxford House is a community and art centre with a great history in the area as it was the first 'settlement from Oxford University established in 1884. Back then Oxford House was built to be a home to graduates, tutors and those intending to enter the church so that they would experience first hand the problems of the city poor. Today it is a hub of activity, dance classes, art exhibitions and the Tower Hamlets futureversity (a poster from one of the films produced is on the right).

Bit of a hidden gem in the east!