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The Regeneration Game – Builders, architects and developers

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Yesterday I asked the twitterverse:

Why does nearly all regeneration work in Leeds have at its heart buildings, architects and developers?

It produces some interesting, and necessarily brief responses:

Because Leeds is full of banks, and banks only sell money and property guarantees money. making bankers feel safe!

@councilhousekid

Buildings provide a container for loads of good activity, somebody has to make sure they perform effectively?

@lexmarksmith

People associate regeneration with the fabric of the city, not with people, even when it’s supposedly about making lives better…or maybe it’s because we need a tangible output from the investment rather than seeing regeneration as a process.

@LouiseEbrey

Your wrong! Nearly all regeneration work full stop is about buildings and architects – what else could politicians open?

@EnterpriseIain

Because that’s where regen grants are targeted? In infrastructure rather than people?

@gedrobinson

Didn’t you get the memo? Regeneration is a synonym for new building project 😉

@amcewen

because that’s where the cash is?

@philkirby

Definition of regeneration http://tiny.cc/sonul I really like the moral revival or rebirth definition. Real social change…

@BatleyGreen

Your thoughts?

Comments?

Dead Badger Does not Inconvenience Taxpayer…honest Guv’

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Every now and again news breaks of yet another ‘council gaffe’.

This mornings delight features a crew sub-contracted to Hampshire Council to paint white lines on the road.  The decaying carcass of a dead badger meant they had to avoid painting about a metre of road.

These things happen.  The street cleaning crew did not get there before the line painters.  No great outrage, just a mildy amusing article and accompanying picture.

No outrage until you get to the piece where the council spokesman said that the carcass would be cleared away and the crew would return to complete the white lines at ‘no extra cost to the taxpayer‘ because the contractor was working to a fixed price.  Now we can split hairs over the meaning of  ‘extra cost to the taxpayer’ but of course this sort of thing incurs extra cost and in most cases these will be built into the tendering price for the job.

I am not sure what it costs to get one of those crews out to paint just a metre of white line where a badger once lay dead – but my guess is it is not cheap.  The cost needs to be understood and feedback into the system so that it understands the costs associated with getting simple things wrong.  If fixed cost contracts mean that councils believe they can be less efficient because the consequences will not revert to the taxpayer we are in a very mixed up world.

Fiddling while Rome Burns…Again?

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As someone who remembers the Small Firms Service, Manpower Services Commission, The Training Agency, TECS, Business Links and the establishment of RDAs, I refuse to be overly exercised by the development of Local Economic Partnerships.

We know that they will have significantly reduced budgets.  We know that they will be led by some concoction of ‘private’ and ‘public’ sector with a seasoning of social enterprise for good measure.

We can be relatively sure that they will have considerable bureaucratic overheads – necessary to ensure openness, accountability and probity and that they will tie themselves up in the same debates about economic development policy that have raged with sterility for decades; picking winners, encouraging start-ups, clusters, sectors, creative classes, beautification, yada, yada, yada.

We know that they will be very heavily influenced by professions allied to construction and engineering. Planners, place-makers, architects, developers who can throw big money at making sure they retain the lion’s share of public spending even as the spending pie shrinks.  One just needs to look at the key ‘Partners’of the current Regeneration and Renewal National Summit to see the evidence.

We can also be sure that they will embrace a strategic, top down approach to economic development that pretends that economic development happens in a bubble that is disconnected from cultural and social development.  No doubt these too will get their own shrivelled strategic bodies.  The paradigm of economic growth as an unmitigated good will hold sway in the strange world of economic development.  Ideas of sustainability and steady state will not be seriously entertained (unless of course they paradoxically provide opportunities for growth).  Visions will be developed by the anointed, and most of us will see the world of economic development at best, ‘through a glass darkly’.

Facilitation is unlikely to get a look in.  Whole person approaches will be ignored (economic development will continue to speak to homo econimicus), co-creation is as close as we will get to responsiveness and bottom-up. And let’s be clear, co-creation as conceived by the state is nowhere near responsive and bottom up.  It still asks ‘how do we engage people in the agenda of the state’ and not ‘how do we engage the state in the agendas of the people’.  For me this is the ultimate deceit that lies at the heart of ‘Big Society’ and that needs to be carefully and thoroughly outed.

We can also be sure that those who actually live in the communities and give their time and skills to help make things better will be expected to do so for free as budgets for community development shrink and are increasingly targeted at problems (obesity, crime, drugs etc) that see humans as essentially degenerate instead of at the development of aspiration, hopes and dreams which see people as essentially good and progressive.

So I refuse to be exercised.  LEPs will evolve.  They will be largely ineffective in spite of the fact that they will be stuffed to the ginnels with good, committed, well meaning people.  And in a decade they will evolve again.  The sign-makers, website developers and letterhead printers will rub their hands with glee.

I will put my energies into supporting bottom up, responsive approaches that honour peoples humanity, that build social capital, that value the contributions of all, regardless of sector, ambition or potential.  And I will keep looking for genuinely innovative approaches to the thorny question of progress?

In practice this means helping others to develop initiatives like Bettkultcha, Cultural Conversations, TEDx Leeds etc (we are blessed with a resurgence of such civic endeavour in Leeds) that holds real promise to nurture something very exciting.

But I will also endeavour to provide some contributions of my own.  For me this means trying to develop Progress School and Innovation Lab as places to foster radical personal and organisational transformation.

And just perhaps we might be able to persuade those in authority to trust us, to support us, to help us.

Who knows?

Progress School…

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Just about to embark on a new venture in Leeds called Progress School, providing ‘pay what you can’ professional and personal development.  Progress School offers:

  • A confidential and supportive environment in which to plan your personal and professional development
  • Time to develop a vision for the ‘ideal you’ and to learn more about the ‘real you’ – how you are perceived by others
  • Recognition of strengths and gaps – those potentials that you have not yet fully realised
  • A learning agenda – identify what you need to learn and how you are going to learn it to bridge the gap between ‘real’ and ‘ideal’
  • Access to a network of fellow Progress School members who will commit to helping you learn
  • A chance to experiment – to try out new behaviours and skills – to see if they work for you
  • Develop new practices that help you make progress

Progress School is designed to offer you a flexible process to support your development.  The more you attend the more you are likely to get from it – but there is no curriculum to follow – just a process of reflection and action to engage with.

Interested?  Book Your Place…Now

Prices start from free….