So Dundee is looking to get an outpost of the V&A museum, housed in a\u00a0 new \u00a342 million building – with a business plan that suggests it could feature local strengths in illustration, comics, animation, interactive media and computer gaming.\u00a0 So much for\u00a0 jam, jute and journalism.<\/p>\n
It appears to be part of a longer term strategy that the city has been following based on the thinking of Richard Florida (The Rise of the Creative Class).<\/p>\n
Florida suggests that urban regeneration depends on a city attracting enough of the right kind of people – the creative class – to create businesses and jobs.\u00a0 And the way to attract the right kind of people is to have the right kind of buildings – good housing stock, excellent public parks and other amenities. At its hearts appears to be a belief that if a city is failing it is because it does not have enough of the right kind of people.<\/p>\n
This is an expensive strategy, and there is a real risk that it widens the gap between the haves and the have nots.\u00a0 There is a reliance on trickle down and a hope that some of the magic pixie dust of these creatives will rub off on the locals.\u00a0 And even if it doesn’t? Well they constitute a ready made supply of willing labour for the creatives – its better than nothing<\/p>\n
I got to visit Dundee several times in recent years as I helped the Sirolli Institute to set up an Enterprise Facilitation\u2122<\/span> Project in the City.\u00a0 The project had a relatively modest investment requirement. \u00a0 The investment was in building social capital, a group of local people who believe in the potential of local people and the power of enterprise as a process and a discipline to help them to transform their lives.\u00a0 They recruit and manage a person centred coach whose sole job is to facilitate the hopes and dreams of local people.\u00a0 To hep them make progress on their projects on their own terms.\u00a0 It is based on a belief that the City already has all of the resources that it needed to manage its own regeneration.\u00a0 It is an approach that recognises that the best hope for a good economic and social future lies in the long term development of local people – not in attracting outsiders and depending on them to deliver a better future.<\/p>\n Yesterday I got the chance to visit UrbanBiz in Leeds.\u00a0 They have a small, poky office on the main road through Chapeltown.\u00a0 Poorly designed and basically equipped; it is hardly a ‘signature building’.<\/p>\n Yet it was jumping!<\/p>\n People waiting to use computers, to talk with advisers to make something happen for themselves.\u00a0 The centre may not win any design awards – but it is convivial.\u00a0 It is ‘of the people’.<\/p>\n Regeneration does not depend on buildings to attract outsiders.\u00a0 It depends on the engagement and sensitive but powerful facilitation and co-ordination of local people. On the development of social capital.<\/p>\n Losing the fixation with buildings and others – and knocking a couple of noughts of regeneration budgets (the people focused approach is so much cheaper) might just be the way forward.<\/p>\n