The RTPI is wrong, poor places don't create poor people

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Planners have, inevitably, a primary focus on matters geographical - or 'place' as the trendier ones like to call it these days. So I get it when the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) rolls out a slightly whining piece about place and poverty:

Trudi Elliott, RTPI chief executive, said: ‘Many of the root causes of deprivation and social inequality are bound up in the poor quality of neighbourhoods - places that have no employment and lack community amenities, are poorly connected or simply run down.

‘Good planning is the one tool in our hands that can make places increase people's opportunities and help lift them from poverty.’

The planners go on to complain that:

...national welfare policies place too much emphasis on the individual factors behind poverty—poor education, for example—and not enough on physical environment.

The problem is that the planners are wrong. Not completely - there is some small evidence linking environmental or physical environment to poverty - but almost completely. To use a famous example, people live in Easterhouse because they're poor, they aren't poor because they live in Easterhouse. And if we look up and down the country we will find similar places - in every large conurbation - where, as the last group of poor, often immigrant people move out, they're replaced by a new group of poor, often immigrant people. My wife's uncle, the son of Russian Jews, was born - in poverty - in Whitechapel but ended his life in Alwoodley a wealthy suburb of Leeds. There aren't many Jews left in Whitechapel but the place still has poor people - Bengalis, Somalis, Roma - living there.

Even where we are speaking of the 'indigenous' UK population, the truth about poor places is that they stay that way because they are places where poor people can afford to live. Whether a place has high levels of private rental property or concentrations of social housing, their poverty is sustained by people moving into those places not by those places making people poor. When Bradford Trident (based in Little Horton and West Bowling two of Bradford's poorest places) studied what happened during its ten year regeneration programme, what it found was that people who did well - finished school, got a job, were in a settled relationship - moved out of the area. They didn't go far - half a mile or so to Wibsey or Great Horton, for example - but they moved away. And the low rent, poor quality place they left behind was occupied by another generation of poverty.

So we should guard against the argument from planners that says they can somehow fix poverty by fixing places. Over the years from 1997 billions was invested in many of the poorest places - through 'decent homes' investment, through the Single Regeneration Budget and through the neighbourhood renewal programmes. And at the end of these programmes those places were still poor places - better places for sure with better schools, better access to health care and lots of community support programmes but still places where poor people go to live. The root causes of poverty, inequality and deprivation are not rooted in places or their physical environment but rather in those individual factors - health, education, lifestyle - that the planners dismiss.

The truth is that, as JRF showed a few years ago, the poorest places in England in 1968 remain, overwhelmingly, the poorest places in England today. Despite approaching fifty years of regeneration.

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Democracy is not enough.

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There are lots of people - from both the left and the right of politics - who like the idea of voluntary, shared or common ownership. In this they see an alternative to the centralising tendency of modern government. For some this is a starry-eyed remembering of past models and idea - the Rochdale Pioneers, the Levellers and mass trespasses on Kinder Scout. Here is a celebration of the co-operative and it still has a powerful voice on the left of politics.

Meanwhile, on the liberal right, we hear of voluntarism, of the charter city and the idea that local government isn't needed - collaboration, market mechanisms and, yes, co-ops will provide voluntary (that is without taxation collected by force of law) management of what we call 'public' services.

There is much to commend both these approaches - by rejecting the big government model they are people-based and, we hope, responsive to needs at the genuinely local, community level. Indeed, in the USA local government is far less constrained by the national political agenda and property ownership rules allow for private collaborative systems that wouldn't be possible under, for example, the UK's laws. The result of this has been the evolution of shared ownership models - co-operative and mutual.

Today some 63.4 million US citizens live in 323,600 places that are members of the Community Associations Institute - that's over 20% of the population living in places where many of the things we associate with local government are provided by a mutual association of members. And:

In a lot of places – probably in most – it’s a sort of government-among-friends, where rules are applied and interpreted with good faith and generosity, where neighbors cooperate on upkeep, and where buildings and communities look better and function better because of it.

Based, as these things are, on some sort of democracy - residents, as members, vote for management committees and these committees commission the services, maintenance and support that everyone needs - cleaning streets, cutting verges, managing shared services and often things such as collecting rubbish. These committees will also set down rules about other things so as to maintain the peace, tranquillity and ambiance of the place.

And it's here where the problems start:

But, in others, homeowners’ associations appear to have more in common with the Soviets than just a communal process.  Writing in The Washington Post, Justin Jouvenal recently reported on a knock-down, drag-out fight over a simple political yard sign placed by a couple on their property during the 2008 election season.  The association’s grievance, apparently, was that the “Obama for President” placard was four inches taller than the association’s covenants allowed. 

Democracy dictates that the collective - or rather fifty percent plus one of that collective - can impose rules (and when you join - buy the property - you sign up to those rules). Thus the row about the political placard. Indeed, the rule-makers in these places determine the 'right' image for the community and act to prevent residents installing solar panels and landscaping gardens:

“Imagine growing a lush, organic garden full of fruit trees and raised beds featuring edible flowers and vegetables. It’s beautiful. And it’s in your backyard. Your slice of heaven. Your respite. The place where you can get your hands dirty growing wholesome, nourishing foods for you and your family.

One day you stroll out to your mailbox to find a letter from your HOA telling you your garden is in violation of HOA rules. According to your deed restrictions, all fruit trees and edible plants should be grown inside a screened in patio. You face $100/day fines for each day that you refuse to tear up your fruit trees and remove your raised beds.”

This is not the action of some brutal uncaring landlord but the imposition of a mutual organisation - cuddly, sharing, democratic.

We discover that democracy isn't enough. It doesn't provide the protection allowing for that resident to do what she wished - plant fruit trees and vegetables in raised beds. The resident could protest, could try to change the rules - but in the meantime that mutual, collective organisation is fining her $100/day.

We are reminded that democracy isn't a guarantor of rights. Nor is democracy reasonable, sensible or flexible. On its own democracy wants to enforce conformity with the norm - or what the democrats see as the norm - and to prevent people putting plastic sharks in their roof or replacing a lawn with a water-conserving, drought-resistant garden.

The consequence of shared ownership is that the majority will dictate how that shared property is used. And if you're in the minority what you want is of no consequence. And that majority will impose its will.

Democracy is not enough.

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Poverty and place

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It's a fact that most of the world's absolute poverty is rural.

The largest segment of the world's poor are the 800 million poor women, children and men who live in rural environments. These are the subsistence farmers and herders, the fishers and migrant workers, the artisans and indigenous peoples whose daily struggles seldom capture world attention.

And we also know that migration from those poor rural areas to urban communities not only raises the income of the migrant but also contributes to economic growth. We are shown the dreadful squalour of shanty towns, favelas and slums and we assume that this is a worse life than that these people left behind in those rural areas. We are wrong.

So, in one respect this is correct:

We are often reminded today that, for the first time in history, there are more people living in urban areas than not. We therefore need to understand the power of urban placemaking in improving jobs, enhancing wellbeing, and bringing culture and education to a changing and diverse population of city-dwellers.

However, the author then seems unable to recognise that the creation of urban places by those migrants - however chaotic, disorganised and poorly serviced - is an act of progress. Or that the imposition of regularity on these places is as likely to destroy the creativity of that community as it is to reduce poverty:

An effective placemaking strategy requires the adoption and enforcement of regulatory frameworks at national level. As yet, however, there is no integrated approach of the kind that is needed, let alone a strong sense of policy leadership for placemaking in poor urban neighbourhoods.

Many people will know of - even recall - a past attempt at an integrated approach to urban place-making. We cleared slums, demolished back-to-back housing and built new places, often on the edge of the city near to open country and fresh air. And those new places failed. Every single one of them failed.

Not only was community broken by the change but the sense of ownership was broken. People lost their independence - even before the industries that sustained that independence passed into history - and became mere ciphers. Before long the idea of place and community was replaced by terms like "deprived neighbourhoods", "economically excluded" and "marginalised groups". Rather than see people as individuals we began to draw neat lines on maps and, in doing so, stigmatise everyone within those lines.

A while ago in Bradford, we looked at the impact of extra investment - in the widest sense of the word, 'regeneration' - on two types of communities: the predominantly Asian inner city and the largely white population of the peripheral estates. For very similar levels of spend it was clear that in the overcrowded, problematic inner city there were signs of change - better education results, higher skill levels, more new businesses and slowly rising earnings. Out on the estates there was no change, no improvement, a depressing catalogue of individual and communal failure.

The big difference? Those estates were a conscious attempt at place-making by the expert - people who knew better intervened, making sure there were open spaces, ight, big-roomed homes and with the key elements of physical community - shops, pubs and meeting places - in the middle of the new neighbourhood.

Down in the tightly packed terraces of inner-city Bradford, with families crammed into inadequate homes, with not much open space and with all the additional disadvantages of an immigrant population, things are different. There's still plenty of poverty and hardship but there's also a sense of community, of enterprise and of opportunity.

I don't really accept the 'place begets poverty' argument other than to observe that the use of changes to the physical environment - especially radical changes - run the risk of creating a short-term improvement at the expense of bedding in long-term poverty. Moreover, I believe we should worry at the desire - whether nationally or at the level of neighbourhood - to prefer stability over churn.

The danger is that poor places create inequalities that become ingrained in the psyche of a neighbourhood and of the people who live there. For many, the only solution is to plan their escape and to take what social and economic capital they have with them.

We should think about there being two types of poor community - places where there is poverty with enterprise and places where there is poverty with dependence. In the former, intervening to prevent outward movement would kill community dynamism whereas, for the latter, stability presents a chance to reduce dependence and promote enterprise.

The persistance of poverty in our country should be at the top of every political agenda - indeed, raising economic welfare should be the principle goal of every government - but we need to understand why that poverty persists. Above all we need to recognise that the route out isn't state-directed, ordered or controlled but lies through enterprise, personal initiative and in fostering an idea of opportunity and achievement, through the chaos of exchange and the excitement of the best urban places.

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If you can't be in the place you love, love the place you're in!

This weekend is Cullingworth's scarecrow festival. Not that this is important to you. Or maybe it is, perhaps you 'get' (as Mr Cameron would say) that place matters and how invented tradition is one of the soft things about a place that makes it magic.

And our attachment to a place matters more than you think. It's not simply some sort of pride or defencive reaction to folk who criticise, we're talking about real attachment here - about love:

We not only found out that resident attachment was related to solid economic outcomes for places, but that the things that most drove people to love where they live were not the local economy or even their personal civic engagement in the place (as one might expect), but the “softer sides” of place.

So what is that "softer side of place"?

It appears that what people most want out of a neighborhood is a place that is attractive, engaging, friendly, and welcoming. In every place, every year of the study, these factors were found to be the three most important to tying people to place. Why does this matter? As mentioned above, communities where people love where they live do better economically. The best-loved places were doing better in a measureable way.

This isn't about grand civic marketing campaigns replete with logos, embassies in New York and well-resourced teams of regenerators extolling the virtues of a place. Nor is it that grumpy "you can't criticise, you don't live here, that's our job" attitude we see from defensive residents of struggling cities. We're talking about a desire to love the place we're in - and when we love something it's an active emotion, it drives us to do things. To do the placemaking equivalent of buying our place chocolate and flowers or taking it to the movies.

That's what scarecrow festivals, duck races and reinvented traditions are about. It's us - the people who love a place - showing our love by doing things to make that place smile:

Love of place is great equalizer and mobilizer. In all my years of doing community practice, I’ve never seen a more powerful model for moving communities forward and enabling places to optimize who they are instead of trying to be someplace else. It is this message that frees people to love their place, and hearing that their love of place is a powerful resource is not something many residents (or their leaders) have properly recognized and leveraged. That’s why I think I often see tearful reactions in my audiences and hear heartfelt stories of personal relationship with a place after my talks. The message of attachment—that the softer sides of place matter—resonates deeply.

So, if you want regeneration - even if you're parachuted in from afar to deliver it - you have to fall in love, to remember those words that Steven Stills wrote:

Well there's a rose in a fisted glove
And the eagle flies with the dove
And if you can't be with the one you love, honey
Love the one you're with
You gotta love the one you're with
You gotta love the one you're with
You gotta love the one you're with

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Scroggling the Holly - invented tradition revisited

Christmas arrives in Haworth

We popped over to Haworth this afternoon to watch "Scroggling the Holly". I don't know whether this is a tradition dating back into the mists of time beyond memory or if it was the brainchild of some people who'd imbibed a little while discussing what Haworth could do for Christmastime.

In essence Scroggling the Holly is a little ceremony to welcome Christmas into Haworth. Like all the best traditions (even invented ones) it combines the church - and one supposes Christianity - with ancient pagan leftovers and a smattering of the modern. In the case of Scroggling the Holly we've Morris dancers providing a sort of sanitised paganism, the familiar pre-christian references to holly and ivy - culminating in turning the Holly Princess into an Ivy Queen! All this plus Father Christmas who joins the festivities from inside the church.

I guess none of this really matters or indeed has any deeper meaning than the symbolism of the season. The holly and ivy are rulers because they are still green in the depths of the coldest winter - a sign of hope in the dark and cold. But that is to apply a greater significance to a little celebration that serves to bring in visitors to the village on a winter weekend, helps bring together the community and provides a little bit of pleasure to a whole host of people. Hundreds who, if asked, would sniff dismissively at Morris dancing are caught smiling as a bunch of bell-bedecked middle aged men bash sticks and wave hankies to the sound of a squeeze box.

Such occasions bring people together, provide an unspoken - perhaps hard to articulate - sense of meaning to a place. And are fun for young and old.

These invented, reinvented or discovered traditions are to be encouraged - scroggling the holly here in Haworth, a scarecrow festival in Cullingworth, rushcarts in Saddleworth, well-dressing in Derbyshire all provide a link to the past, play to the idea of community and provide a justifiable excuse to finish the afternoon with something else that's quintessentially English:

Almost a pint of Timothy Taylor's Golden Best

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My place - the essence of conservatism

Cullingworth

The other day I tried to explain my understanding – obviously vicarious – of David Cameron’s conservatism. At the heart of this was the idea of ‘putting something back’ – noblesse oblige – and the importance that we place on administration by the established institutions of society (and do note that it is society’s institutions we are concerned with not merely the institutions that are of the state). In doing this I pointed out that David Cameron’s conservatism was not my conservatism, that my idea of being a conservative was:

...founded on the idea of place, the principle of responsibility and the imperative of freedom

So I felt obliged and slightly urged to describe that conservatism a little further. So here goes – starting with the idea of ‘place’. I see an understanding of rootedness, of belonging, as the crucial distinction between liberalism and conservatism – liberalism’s essence is captured best for me in the words of Thomas Paine:

The World is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.

These are noble sentiments – my heart rejoices that men believe in the goodness of mankind and that all are equal. But the World is not my country. England is my country and this I cannot change however much other men may pretend differently, however boundaries are drawn. And more that this, the glorious South Pennines is where I live and love – Bradford is my place. I am not a Yorkshireman but I still feel the place – some while ago I wrote:

I look across Yorkshire’s green hills, listen to the birds singing and look at those things seeming timeless – the beer, the food, the walls and trees, the rounded vowels and, above all, that view that this land is ours to cherish. To understand what it means to be conservative, you have to grasp that this is everyone’s.

You will have your place – it may be some corner of a great city, it is perhaps a hill above the woods or even an old mining town fallen on hard times. But it is your place, where your life is lived, where your love is played out. Or rather you will have that place if you are a conservative. As ever, Kipling – the greatest of conservative poets – captured this in speaking of his place, Sussex:

God gave all men all earth to love,
    But since our hearts are small,
Ordained for each one spot should prove
    Belovèd over all;
That, as He watched Creation’s birth,
    So we, in godlike mood,
May of our love create our earth
    And see that it is good.
So one shall Baltic pines content,
    As one some Surrey glade,
Or one the palm-grove’s droned lament
    Before Levuka’s Trade.
Each to his choice, and I rejoice
    The lot has fallen to me
In a fair ground—in a fair ground—
    Yea, Sussex by the sea!

So find your place, live there, care for it, love and cherish it. Leave it as you would wish another to find it – not unchanged but better. Better for being your place. That is the essence of my conservatism.

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The truth of place lies in hearts not ruins

When Hugh de Morville, Norman baron built this little keep up in the hills of Westmoreland, it was forever. The King had granted him the lands and he built his home among those hills better to control and direct what went on. Yet today, having passed from de Morville hands - perhaps as punishment from the fates for his part in slaying Thomas a Beckett - the keep stands ruined, unused, guarded by just a gate plus a few sheep.

It was not for ever but for a blink in human history that this great man presided over his lands and his men. Today new great men preside - governing, ruling, directing, controlling. And like great men of the past they will be forgotten, their works will wear, ruin and decay - recalled only by travellers wondering why such a structure was built in such a place.

Hugh was Norman, spoke French and sat atop a pyramid of power in Westmoreland. But today, the local people don't speak French and aren't Norman. The language of England prevails, corrupted here by celtic words and places - nearby Pen-y-ghent, one of Yorkshire's three peaks proclaims this heritage. To understand a place we have to look behind the buildings, beyond the architecture - we must look to the people and into their hearts. There we will find the truth of place - as Houseman wrote:

In my own shire, if I was sad,
Homely comforters I had:
The earth, because my heart was sore,
Sorrowed for the son she bore;
And standing hills, long to remain,
Shared their short-lived comrade's pain.
And bound for the same bourn as I,
On every road I wandered by,
Trod beside me, close and dear,
The beautiful and death-struck year:
Whether in the woodland brown
I heard the beechnut rustle down,
And saw the purple crocus pale
Flower about the autumn dale;
Or littering far the fields of May
Lady-smocks a-bleaching lay,
And like a skylit water stood
The bluebells in the azured wood.

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Magic, dirty boots and being a conservative

Yesterday, Kathryn and I went on a meandering route in the glorious spring sunshine to Newby Hall near Ripon in North Yorkshire. Now those of you who know this part of the world will be aware of its wonderful scenery, its sense of being kempt, of being cared for. It's not just the great houses and gardens - Studley Royal, Harewood, Newby, Ripley - that are looked after but the whole countryside. And although that countryside has changed over the decades, those changes are subtle, human and accepted. The changes work with the grain and allow us to keep looking at the rolling hills, to glimpse rougher moorland at Ilkley and Blubberhouses and to enjoy the spring sunshine bouncing off the old red brick and softer millstone walls.

The freedoms and liberties in such a place are not the frantic rush of the market or the screeching of rights but a deeper, older freedom. The freedom of Old Hob:

"His dead are in the churchyard - thirty generations laid.
Their names were old in history when Domesday Book was made;
And the passion and the piety and prowess of his line
Have seeded, rooted, fruited in some land the Law calls mine"*

Being a conservative isn't about ideas, policies or philosophies. Being a conservative is about understanding the magic of place. Of looking out onto something loved, cared for and cherished knowing that this generation and the coming generation will continue to love, care for and cherish that place. It should be second nature for conservatives to care about the environment - not from some abstract, scientists' fear of the future but because of Old Hob - and tomorrow's Old Hob's too. Woodie Guthrie was wrong - this land isn't our land, at least not forever.

And being a conservative isn't about government - large or small - either. Indeed, Old Hob's story tells us that the masters change from year to year, decade to decade, generation to generation. But Old Hob and his wife, his brother and his children remain. What the conservative says is that government doesn't know better than Old Hob. Indeed, when it comes to that loved, cared for and cherished place, Old Hob knows a damn sight better what's right than any politician, planner or bureacrat.

The magic lies all around us - in the myths of history as well as its truths, in folklore, in song and in half-remembered tales. As Puck concluded:

"Trackway and camp and city lost,
Salt Marsh where now is corn -
Old Wars, Old Peace, Old Arts that cease
And so was England born!

She is not any common earth,
Water or wood or air,
But Merlin's Isle of Gramarye,
Where you and I will fare!"**

We can rant about government, cry foul as our freedoms erode, bemoan the passing of politeness and the singing of songs. But in the end our boots are dirty, planted firmly in the soil of some fine place. So slow down again. Witness the magic of where you live and love. And feel what it's like to be a conservative.

*From "The Land" by Rudyard Kipling
**From "Puck's Song" by Rudyard Kipling

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Wednesday Whimsy: Your Place, My Town, The Land

Beckenham Road (a long time a go)


Listening to the poignant evocation of Cornwall, “Cousin Jack”, I had something of an epiphany – recognition of why the spirit of place is so important to us. And why its emotion so often trumps rationality. I’m not from Cornwall, have no Cornish heritage and no Cornish connection of note – but the emotion of the song gets to me just as do the feelings in Springsteen’s “My Hometown” or even Billy Bragg’s take on Essex in “A13”.

If you write, speak or sing with passion about your town, your country, your hills or even your street, you will bring out those emotions – the associations with place, with roots, with where we belong. These are some of the most powerful ties and we never lose them even when thousands of miles from that place. The ties that make tough old New York cops stream with tears at “Kathleen” or “Danny Boy”. The ties that make me stop, catch my breath and think a little about the things that really matter.

For me Kipling is the great poet of this feeling and in “The Land” he summed it up about his native Sussex. Here are the last couple of stanzas:

“His dead are in the churchyard--thirty generations laid.
Their names went down in Domesday Book when Domesday Book was made.
And the passion and the piety and prowess of his line
Have seeded, rooted, fruited in some land the Law calls mine.

Not for any beast that burrows, not for any bird that flies,
Would I lose his large sound council, miss his keen amending eyes.
He is bailiff, woodman, wheelwright, field-surveyor, engineer,
And if flagrantly a poacher--'tain't for me to interfere.

'Hob, what about that River-bit?' I turn to him again
With Fabricius and Ogier and William of Warenne.
'Hev it jest as you've a mind to, _but_'--and so he takes command.
For whoever pays the taxes old Mus' Hobden owns the land.”


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