Regeneration ain't about sustainability or community. It's about people.

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Something of a curate egg from Julian Dobson over at Living with Rats - a set of slides on regeneration that are challenging but sadly contradictory. Most worryingly though - given the reality of life in our modern day slums - Julian focuses on the touchy-feeling, greeny, sustainability, no-growth stuff that will to precisely and absolutely zero to help the poorest folk in our society. Here's some comments to the first six of his slides - I have been restrained.

Slide 1. The idea that we can infinitely add more to what we currently have underpins most 'regeneration' strategies.

After about ten years involved in regeneration and a period studying the past 40 years of regeneration strategies it seems odd that the same knee-jerk, anti-growth position opens up these slides. A cursory look at the primary regeneration investments since the early 1990s – City Challenge, SRB, Neighbourhood Renewal, New Deal for Communities – tells us that this isn’t the case. The focus has been on what Steve Hartley, then Chief Executive of Bradford Trident, called “making the place normal”. While there were job creation schemes and business support these made no distinction between types of business or between the private, public and not-for-profit sectors. Bluntly, it is untrue.

Slide 2: Our response to the financial crisis of 2008 was to prop up what we had. The banking system now is not fundamentally different to that of 2006.

I agree with the essential observation – that the response to the current banking crisis has been to save the banks (and the bankers). But what do we mean by ‘sustainable’ in this context – seems to me that the Obama (and Osborne) position of separating retail and speculation plus seeking smaller banks is more sensible than trying to reinvent economic theory with well-meant words and some reddish-green ideology. And one thing that should be made possible is for setting up a retail bank to be much easier – barriers to entry were one contributor to the crisis. Without schumpeterian renewal (a party colleague got into trouble for talking about creative destruction so I won’t) banks – and indeed other institutions including government – become ossified, become a problem not a solution.

Slide 3: To create new ideas, is it sensible to start in the old places? Was Google invented in a reference library and if it had been, what would it look like? We need to think laterally and creatively and stop being proprietorial about ideas.

Good words but is it meant? Show me the epochal, world-changing innovation that came as a result of government initiative? There are none – government doesn’t do creative, creative is scary. Government does “how big a piece of elastoplast do you want, sir?” The big changes – the massive innovations – have been in the private sector. And that is where future innovation will be driven from – unless, of course, you cut it off early by following the ideas implied in ‘slide one’!

Slide 4: We need to think too in terms of the natural lifespan of ideas, economies, and institutions. A process of growing, flourishing, maturing, expiring and recreating is something that adds vitality and vigour to our social, physical and economic fabric. Shouldn't we think of regeneration as the process of nurturing and assisting that constant change?

Now we’re getting silly. The “natural lifespan of ideas” – you mean that suddenly the ‘idea’ of freedom or philanthropy or equality suddenly ceases to have relevance? Or is it the idea of ‘evolution’ or ‘gravity’ that stops working? Maybe this is a call for creative destruction – for recognising that times change, that things are not set in stone. But did you say that in 1985 when they started the second round of pit closures? Did you say that in 1990s Birmingham as they watched their manufacturing industry move to China? Probably not. The sentiment of this slide is with us – people are getting used to the end of ‘jobs for life’ and for the personal responsibility that goes with that situation. But there’s still many who think the job of regeneration is simply to stop change happening – at least while it affects me!

Slide 5: There's a difference between that organic, assisted process and the directed, programme-driven forms of regeneration we've seen in the last three decades. The role of institutions should become one of nurturing and supporting what already exists and enabling it to grow, not one of constantly imposing grand strategies and plans.

And what precisely “already exists” on Seacroft Estate in Leeds? Or for that matter on a hundred other estates across the country? A culture of benefit dependency. A world where drink, fags and sex set the boundaries of life and the person in work is an exception rather than the norm. What are we nurturing here? What are we giving to these people? Have the schools done their job or are the teachers just a combination of childminder and prison warden? We – politicians, press, ‘experts’ – get shown round regeneration schemes. You’re being fooled – this is the East German tour not a real picture of the problem.

Slide 6: That means rethinking our approach to funding programmes, targets and accountability and creating new, hybrid organisations that bring together those who have a common interest in improving places and communities. Nobody has a monopoly of ideas and nobody should have a monopoly of implementation.

Much though it pains me to say so, we need to stop thinking at all about programmes, targets and schemes. Rather than sinking further into the collective groupthink we should consider the individuals – the young girl with three kids from two fathers, the lad who can write his name and recognise McDonalds but not much else, the thirtysomething bloke who has spent six of the past ten years in prison and the rest of the time waiting to go there, the obese 45 year old grandma so addled with drink she barely knows her own children let alone the grandkids. Schemes, institutions, programmes – all the superstructure of regeneration does nothing, has done nothing, for these people. The problem isn’t special programmes but the mainstream programmes of education, health and social care. Oh yes, plus a dreadful, debilitating, divisive and stifling benefits system. And we fund programmes to increase “benefit take-up”!

Lets be clear, I make my living from regeneration – just like a load of other comfortably off, intelligent, caring people living in nice places. There’s lots of lovely conferences, debates, seminars, workshops and sharings of best practice. And mostly it’s just an excuse to talk – little better than me sounding off on my blog here.

But let’s be clear. We have failed. Yes, you, me, Julian Dobson, Nick Falk, the Prince of Wales, Michael Heseltine, John Denham. We’ve failed. And we are going to fail again. And again. And again. Until we remember that salvation comes one soul at a time. Until we remember that people aren’t just some spit in a pool called “community”. Until we put an end to groupthink – to the crazy collectivist idea. To fancy dan chattering class nonsense like “sustainability” or “socially useful jobs”.

Until we give that girl, that lad, that bloke, that grandma some hope, some reason to do something different with their lives. A reason to smile, work, detox or slim. A reason to live not just exist.

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