Archive for the ‘Locality’ Category
Social capital and genocide
Once again, Stumbling and Mumbling relays a potentially huge insight here, as part of a wider post on how pogroms of various kinds can leave a lasting mark upon the place that they happened in:
“When we compare the poorest with generic viagra canadian the richest nations, it is hard to conclude that social capital can produce less than about 90 percent of income in wealthy societies like those of the United States or Northwestern Europe.”
Those of us that think that the solving of very local problems (the lack of neighbourhood networks, recognisable legitimate and effective forms of governance, neighbourhood infrastructure, etc) have always nodded vaguely towards the concept of social capital, urging
people we talk to to find out a bit more about it. But Chris’ emphasis on the damage that is done when the middle class is decimated is one that I think raises questions about how far economic centralisation results in the development of local social capital being relegated as a priority.
Is it the case that a huge leap in national productivity and prosperity could be created if we could find a way of persuading the middle classes to live and work in the towns that they grew up in?
The importance of place – a personal mashup of Richard Florida and Wikinomics
I’ve just finished reading Who’s Your City by Richard Florida and, in short, it strikes me as intuitively about right. The essence of the book is that where you live is as important a choice as what your job is or who your partner is. Additionally Florida cheap generic viagra india argues that the creative economy is making the world more ‘spiky’ – that individuals in particular sectors cluster together and for the best career prospects you need to be where these clusters are.
Reading the book now has helped me try to structure my own thoughts about these matters. For the last two and a half years I’ve lived mostly in Brussels with plenty of time also spent in London for work. Now it’s high time that something changes. That might not necessarily mean a change of home city, but freelance web design and EU politics training based in Brussels is not working. I’ve not found the creative kick I need in the political web design arena here and the practical EU training is not as challenging or fun as it once was. I first blogged about these dilemmas in January – this post is a more detailed follow up. If I am to move it would be from sometime this coming summer.
There’s also a common misconception among friends about my work – because I do web strategy and web design plenty of people assume I can do the work from anywhere. Yes, that’s true, I can work from anywhere, but I cannot get work anywhere. Because the work I get is all thanks to word of mouth, via people I meet at events, colleagues of colleagues etc. I need to be based in a place where the market for political websites is strong and vibrant.
Designing your environment
Just a short observation, in the light of Matthew Taylor’s post about the RSA’s work in Chelmsford that is being launched today.
“….a vision for the town centre must be based on a rich understanding of how people see and use the area and how they might be willing to change that view if the centre itself changed. We need to explore what could the town centre’s identity could be, and from that answer to develop ideas for embedding this identity in the physical and social fabric.”
It’s interesting that democracy is often understood to mean an engagement in party / pressure-group politics, or the clash of ideas and opinions. Local authorities will shortly have a statutory obligation to ‘promote democracy’ – which we are expected to understand as voting in elections. It means a promotion of the work of councillors and our right to participate in their decisions (and sometimes, our ability to force things onto the agenda with petitions).
We are told that we have a right to be consulted more often in more creative and professional ways. In other spheres, we see decentralisation and even the very word ‘democracy‘ conflated with the promotion of local councils. The democratic innovations are often around ‘citizens juries’ or ‘participatory budgeting.’
Most of this is, of course, a good thing. But it seems to me that the most valuable expression of democracy is our ability to shape our immediate environment. Our streets, housing, hospitals, schools and so on. The one where every one of us has something valid to say, and has experiences of having done so. Where the process of shaping our surroundings has created conversational networks that we can return to in order to solve new problems. Where there is less of a legitimacy gap between the general public and the professional or the expert practitioner.
It’s the one area where we can be guaranteed to know things that the experts don’t. Where we can bring them great ideas that they would never dream of, and that we can add the caring dimension that – with the best will in the world – town planners and architects will never have.
There’s my argument in a nutshell: Town Planners. Architects. See what I mean?
The RSA are looking for a number of other local areas to work with them in this way – it’s a great idea, and one that I hope will shape the whole question of ‘democratic renewal’ more than it does currently.
Breaking the monopoly that civil servants have in describing government
Charlie Beckett has yet another good post up – this time, over at OpenDemocracy.
The point of Networked Journalism is that the citizen as an individual and as part of these organisations is now part of the production of news communications. The relationships offered by networked journalism offer the potential for increasing trust in that news communications. By extension it could go some way to restore greater faith in political communications, too, and thus even in politics itself.
If people can participate in something at all parts of the process, then they are more likely to take a responsible and considered stake. If networked communications can offer greater openness, transparency, relevance and control for the citizen then they will be more likely to engage with the substance of the content. They will also be more prepared to support and even invest in that process.
It reminds me of that Norwegian construct on e-democracy that I saw last year (the link has moved so this one will have to do: Public sector information provided by ordinary citizens and the original document is linked to here).
Certainly, the idea of breaking the monopoly that bureaucracies have over the provision of public sector information. The reason that the Slugger O’Toole website is so interesting is that it fosters a mostly well-mannered and constructive conversation about public life in Nothern Ireland. Generally, if you need to elicit any facts about Northern Ireland, you can ask for them in a comments-thread and get them more quickly than any FoI request.
A step in the right direction by local government information providers.
The idea of spinning that off into a wiki called ‘About Northern Ireland’s government’ is an interesting one – I suspect that it would be a better use of public money than actually building the websites themselves and paying civil servants to generate the content. Moving from where we are now to a situation where that could happen is, however, no small feat – but I think that the way that the Birmingham News Room is encouraging and resourcing citizen journalists to write about local issues is a major leap in the right direction.
A resident of Camden says to a resident of Cricklewood….
In other news, it seems that London is in the middle of a secessionist frenzy. My friend ‘Annie Mole’ has a lovely blog here that every Londoner should bookmark. Her latest post reports the possibility that Archway will be renamed ‘Whittington’, – Dick Whittington apparently ‘turned again’ just has he was passing Archway Tube.
A while ago, a campaign was launched to rename Arsenal tube station as well. Apparently these guys had some suggestions that were, like, TOTALLY unacceptable.
Of course, there’s nothing new about secessionism in London as this old documentary illustrates: