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Observations on Regeneration

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When we base ‘regeneration’ on realising rent values in areas where the poor currently live, but the rich want to, we push poor people out. We don’t solve any problems we just re-locate them to areas where escape from those problems is likely to be made even more difficult.

My best efforts to ‘make a business of improving people through enterprise and effort’ have resulted in endeavours like Progress School, Elsie, Innovation Lab, Community Conversations, Enterprise Coaching and so on. All of these are designed to be accessible to anyone who is looking to make progress for themselves.

The sad truth is that we have wasted millions on telling people that their future lies in self employment and entrepreneurship without ever taking the time to listen respectfully to who they are and what they want.

I have yet to see a regeneration programme that is centred on a respectful engagement of, and response to, individuals who are seeking to make progress without making prior assumptions about means.

I have yet to see a programme that takes seriously the need to help individuals build networks to make lasting changes in how they operate (these networks provide the bedrock for that holy grail we call community).

I have yet to see a programme that recognises that the poor are in every neighbourhood.

I have yet to see a programme that accepts this is long term work. I do remember an RDA director saying that we should not expect too much from an £80m public investment in a Leeds regen project because we are only 15 years into the project….but this is not a defence that is generally accepted!

Our communities are full of ‘outsiders intervening’ and I see this as a major problem. Professional ‘experts’ shipped in to sort out the locals. If people don’t want to be helped we should leave them alone.  And we should only work where we are invited; where individuals really want us to help, because they have seen the value of our work. And how many of the mainstream providers offer services that are valued by those they are purporting to help? Very few in my experience.

We do know how to make progress on this stuff and the approaches are affordable and replicable. The key barrier to their development is that the beneficiaries of these approaches have little power, financially or politically, to compete effectively with the mainstream regeneration lobby. Those that influence investment in regeneration are those that control landbanks and their professional service firm partners. Just look at the sponsors of any regeneration conference or local enterprise partnership ‘summit’ and you will see who can afford to invest now to profit later. And they wont be talking about person centred approaches to change. They will be talking about building infrastructure and moulding people to meet the needs of employers (they call this ‘the skills agenda’).

And they wonder why our communities are not more enterprising!

Is it possible to reap a dividend from the success of others? I have much sympathy for the idea. However the journey to ‘break-even’ is often a long one, certainly months if not years. More likely decades before any consistent ‘dividend’ is generated. Few of us doing this work can afford to defer our payments for that long!  If you want a quick return on your investment you work with those that already have money and have the shortest journey to break even. Peter Jones and Doug Richards and their ilk are not daft in who they pitch their enterprise products to.

In the current system it is almost impossible to realise any value from working on the enterprise agenda with those that most need our support.

What Is Leeds Like?

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This is the title of a new photography competition being run by Leeds City Council.  The public are invited to submit their snaps that capture for them what Leeds is like in 2011.

And the prize for What Is Leeds Like?  The council and its partners may use your images in a report and in any other publication they wish, to portray the city.

On the one hand I admire the enterprise.  No doubt, strapped for cash, they can’t afford to commission a professional, or even to buy some of the existing great product of the Leeds photography community.  A quick search on flickr for Leeds 2011 produces over 28 000 images.

But  it feels a little one sided…

Is there a qualitative difference between professionally commissioned and briefed city portraiture and the chocolate box approach of a ‘send us your snaps’ competition?  Is there a danger of de-professionalising photography?  Or is it just another creative industry that needs to wake up to the fact that we are all creatives now?

So what could the council do that would meet its requirements for low/no cost but high quality photography and provide a meaningful and powerful platform for Leeds photographers?

So, Leeds photographers, what would you value as a prize in such a competition?

UPDATE

Delighted to see the Beyond Guardian Leeds have launched an alternative  photo competition through which I hope they can really attract attention to some great Leeds photographers.

West Riding House – another story of win/win in Leeds?

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West Riding House in Leeds

I met yesterday with a tenant of the ‘affordable’ West Riding House, an iconic 1970s office block in Leeds City Centre, which I believe is owned by Moorfield (a UK ‘real estate’ investor, developer and private equity fund manager, with some £3 billion currently under management) and Holbeck Land .

It caught my eye because several organisations I know have recently moved in, some of whom are extremely cost and value conscious.  The building has become ‘affordable’ because it is cheaper, I am told, for the owner of the building to encourage occupancy at a low rent in order to avoid paying business rates on an unnoccupied building.  A nice win/win.  The owners save a few bob  and the organisations get refurbed office space in the heart of the city centre that usually they could never afford.

Except of course there are losers.

Other landlords (generally owners of more modest estates on the edge of the city and in the doughnut of despair) are losing their rents; the communities in which these organisations used to be based are losing much needed trade.

And the Council are losing out on the rates, presumably.

When, and if, the economy picks up and office space becomes more valuable these new tenants will probably have to move back out or face increased rents.  I just hope that the buildings that they have left behind are still in a reasonable condition.   And if they have fallen into disrepair as resources are sucked from the suburbs into the centre, never mind, perhaps we can negotiate an asset transfer project to bring them back to the community.

I am sure for many tenants the decision to move into West Riding House is a simple, straightforward and commercial one, driven by their business aims and intended social impacts, and their ability to exploit short term notice periods.  For others it must have been a much more difficult judgement.

In these hard times we all have to do what we can to get by.  But we need to understand how the system in Leeds, and every other city, can suck resources into the centre and leave the fringes further marginalised.

Meanwhile Time

All over the city there are similar examples of landlords agreeing low rents that allow ‘unusual suspects’ access to resources that they usually could never afford, to do exciting projects that would probably never get off the ground in better economic times.

The key question for me?

Strategically are these projects just about meanwhile time, merely setting up a low cost ‘holding pattern’ until ‘normal’ levels of economic activity resume?  Or are they ‘hotbeds’ in which we can incubate a generation of new social and cultural entrepreneurs who will help Leeds make a real transformation?  Time will tell of course, although those that own the assets are pretty clear about the ‘meanwhile’ nature of these arrangements.

With the recent Resolution Foundation Report suggesting how the poor have ‘missed out’ on the benefits of economic growth over the last 30 years, I can’t help but think in the medium term, unless we are careful, this is a phenomena in which those that are used to winning will get to win again.

Danone Think Tankery

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Last week saw a trip down to London to join a dialogue with

  • Myriam Cohen-Welgryn, Danone Vice-President Nature,
  • Laura Palmeiro, Vice-President Nature Finance,
  • Bernard Giraud, Vice-President Sustainability and Shared Value Creation and
  • Laurence Foucher Danone New Media Manager.

The Danone team were joined by

There was no clearly mapped out process or agenda relying instead on getting some interested people into a convivial setting and seeing where the conversation went.  In both cases I suspect that some real learning accrued on both sides.

Once again Danone showed an incredible openness in sharing with us some of their projects and challenges relating to food security, poverty alleviation, health and sustainability and showed how several projects had moved on from our last round of discussions with them.  Highlights for me included investments from their 100m Euro ‘Nature Fund’ to support the development of Cooperatives of  Ukrainian Farmers to supply the high quality milk required to keep the Danone Production lines in full swing.  Danone invested in milking equipment to be shared by small farmers through the cooperative structure and animal welfare standards and husbandry.  These investments were made with no requirement to tie framers into contracts with Danone.  Also Danone say that paying these farmers cooperatives a fair price for milk ensures the long term stability of supply which is more important to them than any short term profits that might be gained through price squeezing.

I was also intrigued by  their research into the fatty acid content of milk and how this can be correlated with the production of methane allowing accurate offsetting of methane production based on the actual methane production of each herd.  Now I am not an expert on off-setting and have a lay persons suspicion of how much can be achieved through this methodology.  Can we possibly plant enough mangrove, mangoes and other carbon fixing crops to ever truly offset production?  The whole conversation about carbon trading was one that left me a little cold.  I am far from convinced that putting a price on carbon is really the way forward.  Especially now that it can be speculated upon.  I am of the school that thinks the next great bubble to burst will be the carbon market….I hope I am wrong and am certainly no expert in this field.

But perhaps most impressive part of the conversation for me was around needing to re-connect consumers to the production process, the reality of farming and food production.  A simple realisation that for Danone, and the rest of us, ‘Nature IS our business’ and simple tools for ensuring that this realisation is that the heart of innovation in the company.  So for example they are using a wonderfully simple compass to provide a test for new developments:

N = Nature – will the development respect nature?

S = Social – will the development lead to improvements in society?  Fair wages, good governance etc

E= Economic – will the project work economically? (I was impressed by Danone’s willingness to flex their normal investment rules to allow projects that would only work with a more generous interpretation of ‘payback periods’)

W= wellbeing or health – the Danone mission is to improve health for the greatest number of people through food.  If the project does not fit the mission then it will not move forward.

My guess is that this compass will be well understood throughout the business and used to assess new business developments and ensure that balances and tensions are effectively managed.

It is a strange phenomena for me to rub against a corporate whom I like, respect and trust.  Generally I am always lifting up the carpets looking for where the dirt has been hidden.  And still questions remain for me at least about the bottling and distribution of mineral water in rich countries (Danone are behind both Evian and Volvic I believe).  But whenever I meet Danoners – be they ‘top brass’ or ‘frontline’ I am always impressed by their passion, openness (‘we have many challenges and we don’t have the answers but we will experiment…’) and commitment to co-invention of ideas and thinking through conversation.

I am already looking forward to the next conversation…when we hope to get some more skeptics involved

 

 



There is Another Game in Town….and she is called Elsie


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You might be forgiven for thinking that traditional ‘economic development’ is the only game in town.  Shopping centres, arenas and enterprise zones, vocational education and training producing a workforce to meet the needs of employers.


This kind of stuff has been the mainstream of economic development for as long as I can remember.


But there is another game that WE can play..


One which relies less on ‘attracting’ talent and wealth from outside and more on developing the passion, aspiration and skills of the people that already make up our communities.  It works with what we have got, starting from where we are.


It relies on the ability of local people to support each other, with knowledge, skills, networks and wherever possible custom.   Instead of looking to buy ‘star players’ to join the team we instead set up an academy, a place and a process in which we can explore our potential and find the people and other resources that we need to move our projects forward.


This is where Elsie comes in.


Leeds Community Enterprise Accelerator (Elsie) is a project designed to build the capacity of ordinary people in the Leeds community to shape their own future according to their own hopes and aspirations.  It starts with what we have, and works with what we have got.  The project needs you to get involved.  It runs on a ‘pay what you like but free is fine policy’ so cost should not be a barrier to getting involved.


So, please, if you want to see another game in town when it comes to developing an economy that serves our community have a look at Elsie and get involved.