There is suffering in life, and there are defeats. No one can avoid them. But it’s better to lose some of the battles in the struggles for your dreams than to be defeated without ever knowing what you’re fighting for.
Paulo Coelho
Living the ‘Vida Loca’ in Leeds?
Interesting things have been happening down at Granary Wharf in Leeds over the last few years. It is a part of town I did know well. Some 25 years ago, when I was doing my Certificate in Education, I surveyed the site for its field trip and educational potential for teaching geography, history, science, environmental studies, design and biology.
But these days the area is hosting a very different crowd to my Fifth Formers with clipboards and quadrants.
With the development of City Inn, Candle House and a car park under the once vibrant dark arches the area is becoming another beautified waterfront development where those with access to cash can choose whether to invest or spend. Both City Inn and Candle House offer spectacular views and the latter at least is a genuinely interesting piece of architecture (not that I am qualified to comment beyond my own personal aesthetic).
Once the enormous ‘wem‘ that is the Southern Entrance to Leeds Station gets built I am sure that we will have yet another riverside development to be proud of. The perfect infrastructure in which the magical process of regeneration can happen. New life breathed into a barren wasteland by a consortium of socially aware developers, architects and planners with low carbon credentials and a commitment to community consultation.
What is not to like?
Let’s assume that things go well. Retail spaces around the dark arches fill (once again) with quirky, well capitalised, independent retail and hospitality businesses. The ticket barriers in the new southern entrance are a delight to use and lead to a train system that is clean, efficient and reliable. The new apartment blocks fill up with resident’s who sustain sufficient incomes to pay their rents and mortgages. Dozens of jobs are created for residents of the ‘southern rim’ with ‘high grade concierge’ and similar skills. Taxes are paid and redistributed. Surely everyone is a winner? And no doubt this development will be presented as phenomenal example of regeneration in Leeds at MIPIM further fuelling the cycle of regeneration.
But even in this optimistic scenario who benefits from the development of the city? Who makes money? Who has access to opportunities to broaden their capabilities and develop successful careers? Who gets to play in the new waterside development? And who doesn’t?
Perhaps this video offers some clues?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ee-g-8J0NOE]
‘at least they’re honest about their vision of Leeds, and the intended beneficiaries’
Remarkable the control software gives over building surfaces, colours and textures yet public places are only populated (apparently) by shiny, happy and skinny Caucasians.
Now don’t get me wrong. I am not anti development. Nor am I anti business. And some of my best friends are architects, planners and property developers. They are ‘good’ people, using their talents to the best of their abilities to build a better city. Just like most of us. They play an important role.
But I do see a pattern of investment in regeneration that prioritises physical development and pursues shortcuts to increased GDP based on the importation of ‘talent’ rather than a genuinely inclusive investment in ‘proper’ education. For me regeneration starts between the ears of the people who live in a community. Not between the ears of a well meaning planner. And it is not about engaging locals in the visions of the anointed – but rather finding ways to engage the anointed in the many, disparate and personal visions of local people.
(I know we are investing lots in re-developing our schools. We now have academies in yet more new buildings. We are getting more young people than ever 5 grades A-C that educationalists and politicians promise will provide some kind of magic key to the kingdom. But our schools and colleges continue to fail large swathes of the community.)
I don’t know what gets me more fired up – watching Sports Relief portray as some kind of failure of morality and civilisation children in developing countries both going to work and school, or the fact that we, here in the UK, now have millions of people NOT in education, training or employment. Physician heal thyself. It’s not as if we have magic solutions to export!
I do think we have got the balance of our regeneration investments badly wrong.
That we rely too much on ‘placemakers’ and imported talent to make our city work. That we spend too much on strategic planning and not enough on responding to the real barriers that prevent people from developing their capabilities. We may not be Mother Glasgow but perhaps we too are clipping wings?
In the second city of the Empire
Mother Glasgow watches all her weans
Trying hard to feed her little starlings
Unconsciously she clips their little wings
…
Among the flightless birds and sightless starlings
Father Glasgow knows his starlings well
He wont make his own way up to heaven
By waltzing all his charges in to hell
Perhaps it is time for a more inclusive, person centred and responsive approach to development. Where development is not so tightly wedded to GDP but instead to a freedom to develop our capabilities. To develop our abilities to live the kinds of lives that we want to lead.
Or perhaps we should just keep on ‘living the vida loca’ and hoping that we can make it last.
Scroobius Pip Insights on Community Development
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEitrZU-nCw]
Plans Unveiled for Tower Works – Curb Your Enthusiasm?
Yorkshire Forward have recently unveiled plans (again) for the regeneration of the tiny, but very well positioned Tower Works site in Leeds. A quick search of the YF site shows that this has been rumbling on since the land was acquired in 2006.
The usual PR froth is being spewed out – ‘mixed use development’, ‘Italianate Towers’, ‘Giotto’, ‘supporting creative and digital industries’, ‘Leeds as a major business centre’….’vibrant community’ etc. But haven’t we been fed this line somewhere before?
Original plans for some 145 000 square feet of office space have been reduced to 18000 square feet in the ‘first phase’. But this will put still more pressure on Holbeck Urban Village where, at a casual glance, occupancy (outside of The Round Foundry) is poor.
The re-development of Tower Works will be financed by a mix of public and private finance. The public element coming from Yorkshire Forward seems to be just shy of £20 million. The private investment will mean that only those aspects of the development that are most likely to provide a good return are likely to happen quickly. With Holbeck Estates going into administration it is not yet at all clear how any developer will make their returns.
Perhaps it is a time for a change of tack?
Currently we invest enormous sums of public cash in developers to sweeten deals sufficiently to enable them to provide an infrastructure that will attract the creative classes to Leeds. Tower Works, the new southern entrance to the station, Neville St refurbishment, Latitude, Wellington St, I could go on. Once we have got things just right, and our 15 year plans have come to fruition, then surely things will come good? Well, if it all works out well, perhaps, yes. Those with the skills and the finance to use the infrastructure might be able to accrue more wealth. And, if you still believe in ‘trickle down’ (probably Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy as well), then the economic benefits will also flow out to the poorer communities enabling the ‘gap’ to be maintained rather than widened. Perhaps the enterprise fairytale will have a happy ending this time. Perhaps…if we combine best case scenario with that holy grail of trickle down. Now I am all for optimism, confidence and positive thinking – but the realist in me says ‘Perhaps not’.
Worst case scenario? Developers, architects, public servants and planners get paid their fees and salaries and we get left with yet more low occupancy real estate. And I am not talking schools and GP practices. I am talking office space. Leeds is already awash with infrastructure – yet we intend to create more.
What would happen if we used that £20m to provide a serious programme of enterprise outreach education? (And before anyone says isn’t that what LEGI did, no they did not. They too put the money primarily into infrastructure at Shine and Hillside offering expensive premium office space).
What would happen if we provided high quality, sustained, long term and person centred community development work?
What if we taught local people the importance of bootstrapping, skill development and building social networks that pursued sustainable communities?
What if we helped them to create their own futures rather than enveloping them in the vision of the anointed?
Would our faith in the creativity, hard work and application of the people of Leeds be rewarded?
Of course.
Development as Freedom – Enterprise as a Key
Last night Nobel prize winning Economist and philosopher Amartya Sen gave an address with Demos and the Indian High Commission. Sen has spent a lifetime studying poverty, its causes and how it may be alleviated. His writing is dense, often supported with mathematical arguments. He is not an easy read. By his own admission he is a theorist and a researcher. It is up to others to put his research into practice.
So what does Sen have to say? How is it relevant to enterprise? Well here is my interpretation and, no doubt, gross simplification – tentatively offered….
- Poverty is fundamentally rooted in injustice – the problem is not that there is not enough – but that it is not shared
- The challenge is to give more people the power that they need to play a positive and powerful role in markets; This means accessible and relevant processes to develop individual capabilities and power
- Development is a measure of the extent to which individuals have the capabilities to live the life that they choose. It had little to do with standard economic measures such as GDP.
- Helping people to recognise choices and increase the breadth of choices available to them should be a key objective of development.
- Developing the capability and power of individuals provides a key to both development and freedom
- Development must be relevant to lives, contexts, and aspirations
- Development is about more than the alleviation of problems – stamping out anti social behaviour, teenage pregnancies, poor housing and so on.
- It is about helping people to become effective architects in shaping their own lives
- We need practices that value individual identity, avoid lumping people into “communities” they may not want to be part of, and promote a person’s freedom to make her own choices. Promoting identification with ‘community’ risks segregation and violence between communities
- Society must take a serious interest in the overall capabilities that someone has to lead the sort of life they want to lead, and organise itself to support the development and practice of those capabilities
- We should primarily develop an emphasis on individuals as members of the human race rather than as members of ethnic groups, religions or other ‘communities’. Humanity matters.
- We need to make the delivery of public education, more equitable, more efficient and more accessible
Clearly Sen is not arguing that everyone should start their own business. Entrepreneurship is on the agenda but not at the top of it.
He is arguing for enterprising individuals and challenging us to develop our society in a way that encourages and supports them.
Anyone for enterprise?