Future places

In the first piece that I’m publishing as I try to publicly think about place, I want to use the hook of some recent work (The Future of Communities: Perspectives on power) to think about the future, and what we’re aiming for. How do we want to intervene in places to improve them?

My broad view is that there is a paradox at the heart of how we talk about communities, and this is resulting in the same debate being repeated. Those of us who talk about improving places bring two approaches to the problem which are often contradictory, and then get stuck. This “we” includes trusts and foundations, local government, campaigning organisations, membership bodies, consultancies and charities. It is organisations who want to intervene and improve, but don’t always know how to do it.

There is one mode of thinking that focuses on defining disadvantage or needs, campaigning for solutions, building evidence and changing the approaches of actors in communities. It is, typically, professionally and/or academically led. It keeps people at a distance.

Then there is another that is heavily value driven, and ends in statements like: ‘people in the lead’. It locates the imperative in action as being one of handing over power to define the activity that is funded or supported. It involves, empowers, engages etc.

These modes aren’t necessarily always in opposition, but they often don’t work together easily, and in my view ultimately prevent us from moving on. This is not news (or particular to this domain of policy), but it is worth repeating.

The research report was structured around five themes: poverty, transience, fragmentation, isolation and democracy. These were expressions of what people in communities talked about as holding them back. They are not so much a look to the future, but an analysis of the experience of the difficult present.

I couldn’t help but feel that these seems highly endogenous, which begs the question of whether there is one core issue that if solved will cut the Gordian knot (poverty?), or whether the nature of the problem means that these are not endogenous but dependent. Do they have to come together? I think that they do, but think that is only because they are experienced together. Poverty remains a different category.

In moving to the future, the report states that there are four things that are necessary for supporting communities: accessible space, financial support, community development support and skills and the will of other agencies to work alongside the community. The authors then look at the challenges of funding, the influence of the market and the loss of independence.

Are these challenges perhaps a more important lens than the five descriptive themes? They are more political and potentially more relevant to how we shape what comes next, but they are also more technical (and feel less about the places themselves). They are not rooted in experience, but in diagnosis.

And with that move to diagnosis, we’re back to our paradox.

The report says that it is essential that those wanting to support these communities consider the following lessons:

1. Respect communities’ experience, ideas and independence and work
2. Ensure support is proportionate to the needs of different communities
3. Agencies and programmes must work alongside each other

In essence, the report is trying to balance the two modes of thinking about communities and change, but I’m not convinced it gets the balance right, as I’m not sure it is possible.

When we say communities in this context, we mean deprived ones, and often quite small neighbourhoods. They are neighbourhoods with the negative, knot of issues. These negatives can be analysed and categorised. They are places that funders and governments want to intervene in.

When we look to understand, rather than just analyse, the tone of discussion moves away from negatives, and more towards assets and valuing lived experiences. It is much more about experience. The people who live in them become people that funders and government (perhaps less so government) wants to stand next to, to enable and support. Their views and priorities matter.

When I think about these two statements, I am acutely aware that a community might choose to do something which brings them together, and that people value, but that does not do anything about the initial problems of deprivation. The value-based approach is not always an obvious response to the problem. What if the creation of community enterprises and local social action is something that happens in certain communities by default? What if the knot of issues they experience means they are more likely to do that, but that it doesn’t change the fundamentals of the experience of deprivation that are defined in the report?

There are a whole range of reasons why you might appreciate needs and then hand over power for people to lead. But when I think about the future of communities, I wonder if we can do better than this asymmetrical diagnoses and response? I feel like we need a different way to help those who want to intervene, to both diagnose the problem, understand the place, and then intervene. The current paradox can create challenges between values and expertise. In my experience, many funders and communities have ended up getting lost or frustrated in it.

This report moves some of these questions on, but it doesn’t solve the core problem of power, because it continues two problems:

• The tried and tested approach of hedging where power lies in neighbourhoods, and what degree of power we are willing to not give away, to achieve change in places.
• The power we give through the value-based mode is located in the place alone. People who live in those places are not defined by that place alone. If they have no power elsewhere in their lives, it won’t be resolved.

In my view, therefore, the thinking about the future of communities has to acknowledge the value of the spatial scale for certain things, but also that if we want people to touch the edges of themselves and achieve genuine power over their lives, it can’t stop at the neighbourhood boundary.

The research

At the end of July, Local Trust published The Future of Communities: Perspectives on power. The research for that work was undertaken by IVAR, and it was funded by some of the legacy money that the Community Development Foundation gifted to Local Trust as it wound up. The purpose of that money was to help think about the future for the issues that CDF (and now Local Trust) cares about, and what empowered communities would look like into the 2020s.

Renaisi is a founding member of the consortium that helped set up Local Trust and are still involved in the running of the Big Local programme. I’m not going to talk about what Big Local is here, but Matt Leach, the CEO of Local Trust, wrote about some of the early lessons of the Big Local programme for our twentieth anniversary, and that piece is definitely worth reading.