9. NEW ‘WORKHOUSE’ PROGRAMME HERALDS RESUMPTION OF ‘JOINED UP GOVERNMENT’

April 1^st 2016

Not since the heady days of early new Labour has there been so much interest in ‘joined up government’. I was enjoying being a member of the Government’s ‘Joining it Up Locally’ Policy Action Team, that was sponsored by the Social Exclusion Unit on the Cabinet Office, which fed into the Government’s National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal, and Modernising Local Government programme. The product of all this enthusiasm and energy was a range of powerful joining up mechanisms…the Local Strategic Partnership, Sustainable Communities Strategies, spatial planning, placemaking, placeshaping, Total Place, Total Capital, (…and more, much more.)

Talking to a civil service acquaintance yesterday, I learnt that today marks the launch of a unique Whitehall initiative to join up a raft of policies relating to welfare and housing. Making use of funding streams available to councils through s.23 Local Government Act 2003, and the various Community Rights Regulations (relating to Chapter 3 of Part 5 of the Localism Act 2011), parish councils and other qualifying community led organisations in England and Wales will be able to take local action to ensure that people out of work can be provided with work and a home.

I tracked down a spokesman from the new cross departmental team, WorkHouse, who told me, “For too long, it has been a stain on the government’s record of fairness that there has not been any coordinated action in this area of public policy. We need to ensure that people without work should not be prevented from re-entering the labour market as a consequence of unfairly occupying or underusing a publicly provided home. We will ensure that parish councils and other well-meaning community organisations have the resources to provide new forms of very basic accommodation, access to healthy meals, linked to a requirement to work.”

Information about the employment aspects of the initiative, already known colloquially amongst ministers, I understand, as the WorkForce programme, shows that the value of the accommodation and food will be the equivalent to the Living Wage, so the new programme will be cost neutral to the taxpayer.

Initial capital and revenue funding will be available via the Local Government Act 2003, which provides a general power for Whitehall departments to directly fund councils for any activity not covered by other legislation. The Community Rights Regulations allows property to be designated as Assets of Community Value, and requires property owners to consider bids from community groups before selling on the open market. It also contains a measure that requires local authorities to exercise their powers of compulsory purchase where the local community benefit is aligned with national policy priorities. “We expect communities to want to take advantage of this new initiative, especially through the take up of neighbourhood plans, to create what we are calling ‘work-houses’, to ensure that their community becomes more self-sufficient, resilient and sustainable. Community Right to Build Orders will be ideal to create this new form of housing for the 10% or so of local populations not making their fair contribution to society.”

A Treasury contact confirmed that “the Chancellor sees this an important measure to improve national productivity.”  Joined up government at last…phew!

8. SEPTEMBER 21st 2015: ‘A’ IS FOR....UM?

My Churchill Fellowship report “Property, Justice and Reason” is published here, by the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust. A slightly reordered version for academics is available at Academia.edu
If you want to discuss the contents of the report, you will find my contact details in the report.

It's been a momentous week since the election of a new Leader for the Labour Party. The negative reactions, both within the party and from other parties, and from the commentariat are respectively disgruntled and condemnatory. What they all fail to get is the message behind both Corbyn’s appeal in the UK, and the extraordinary success of another ageing socialist in the US Presidential race: Senator Bernie Sanders giving Hilary Clinton a terrible fright.

The message is that we want a politics that is about us, the citizens; we don’t want a politics about you, the politicians. We want you to represent us to the state, not use your position to represent the state to us. We can all question aspects of the policies of Corbyn and Sanders, but we cannot ignore what these two men stand for in the renewal of political life.

People voted for Corbyn primarily because they wanted Labour to realise that the way it does its business has to change. That’s a message for every political party and every politician.

So…more advice for Labour? Surely not…too much has been written already. Even so, I’d like to add one more idea. It’s sounds easy but, in fact, goes to the heart of what Labour needs to do: supporting individual and collective autonomy to achieve the wellbeing of all, for the common good.

Many Labour politicians understand political agency as being primarily about them; their own personal autonomy and capacity, and that of the professional political class, to bring about progressive change through their direct actions. They have strong role models in recent leaders of the party. These will, almost by definition, be technocratic fixes; often important and necessary, but unlikely to be about systemic and cultural change which requires the contributions of many.

They seem particularly blind to the idea that their agency in relation to some problems is limited, not least by time: the duration of political administrations and their own political trajectories. A good example is neighbourhood regeneration, which is the task of a generation, and needs to be accomplished primarily through the agency of communities and civil society institutions, which can carry through what individual politicians or even whole parties clearly cannot.

I have been working recently with a talented and resourceful estate community, who devised their own long term regeneration plan. (See pp 43-7 of Academia.edu version of my report - link above). It proposed a unique and innovative partnership institution to bring together the community, the council and wider civil society organisations. The estate has been in municipal ownership for 40 years, and is commonly regarded as the most challenged estate in a ward with the borough’s worst indicators of poverty, especially health and life expectancy. Yet, it has never had a strategic regeneration plan led by its owner, resourced with the financial and social capital for it to be carried out over a 20-30 year period, which is how long it would take.

The community offered the council the opportunity to build 170 new permanently affordable homes built, as infill on the estate; nearly five times more than the council itself had thought possible. Not unreasonably, the community wanted something in return; the opportunity for them to get the estate off its knees, where it had been for decades, and turn it into a wonderful place to live for the whole community. Just building new homes could  never be the whole story.

The community’s reward for their presumption in developing their own plan is to be condescended to, described as ‘willing souls’ in internal council emails, and publicly ostracised by their councillors. The council will take the housing gain offered by the community, but will do the regeneration ‘their way’ and to their timescale. It has taken them over two years from the publication of the community’s masterplan, to do nothing except argue over who is in control.

By way of explanation, the community’s plan has recently been criticised by council officers in the local press as requiring ‘too much autonomy’ for the residents. Excuse me? Can you have ‘too much’ autonomy? When did councils assume powers to determine how much autonomy we may have in our lives: that is we, the citizens, who perhaps unwisely but nevertheless freely use our autonomy to vote our fellow citizens into positions of power?

Sir Michael Marmot and every public health professional in the world will tell you that the lack of personal and collective autonomy is the greatest single risk factor to health and wellbeing. Undermining the autonomy of this community, its anchor organisation, and the people who have worked to sustain it, built up over two decades, as is now happening, is an act of political vandalism: the very opposite of the principles of the Labour Party’s own Policy Review.

De Tocqueville writing in Democracy in America in 1835 warned that “the parent state keeps its citizens in perpetual childhood. Its power is absolute, provident and mild; it is well content that people should rejoice provided they think of nothing but rejoicing.” That’s a warning that applies to all political parties. For example, the Chancellor is alleged to have claimed when introducing the Help to Buy policy in Cabinet in 2013 “Hopefully we will have a little housing boom, and everyone will be happy as property values go up”. A brief and illusory pleasure for a very few...

But De Tocqueville also asserted that “the health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens”; and many citizens of all ages are no longer content with the patronising 'the state knows best' attitude, or to be fed the bread and circuses of rising property values that are, in fact, impoverishing us all.

Citizens want to build homes that are genuinely and permanently affordable, related to what people actually earn, and want to take them out of the speculative land market, especially in London. Politicians should follow the lead of these brave and rational citizens, and support them to do something that the political class would never dare to suggest itself, even though the need for it is glaringly obvious.



Sweet Politicians, the ‘A’ word is neither Aspiration, nor Ambition, nor even Austerity...but AUTONOMY.

Courtesy Phil Reynes Colorado Indymedia

 7. APRIL 12th 2015: LAND – “THE MOTHER OF ALL MONOPOLIES”

- POLLUTED OR FERTILE GROUND FOR A POLITICS FOR THE COMMON GOOD ?

My Churchill Fellowship report “Property, Justice and Reason” is published here, by the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust. A slightly reordered version for academics is available at Academia.edu
If you want to discuss the contents of the report, you will find my contact details in the report.

 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Even if you've never played Monopoly, you'll know what the game is about: borrowing heavily to buy up as many properties as you can, renting them out for as much money as possible, and then seeing who can win by impoverishing the other players first…putting them on the streets, or permanently in jail. Starting to feel a bit uncomfortable?

What you almost certainly will not know is by whom and when it was invented. Not by Charles Darrow, as he and Parker Brothers (now Hasbro), the producers of Monopoly, like to maintain, in 1932, but Lizzie Magie, a stenographer, living in Washington DC, thirty years earlier.  She was concerned at the growing inequalities of income. She was a fan of Henry George, the economist advocate of Land Value Taxation, and she used the game which she launched in 1903, to introduce progressive ideas into middle class American families, suddenly enthused with the new craze of board games. In a new book. “The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury and the Scandal Behind the World’s Favorite Board Game”, Mary Pilon tells the full and torrid story of the game's progress to becoming a worldwide phenomenon. Originally called The Landlord’s Game, Lizzie invented two alternative sets of rules: the monopolist and anti-monopolist version. In the anti-monopoly world, wealth created by one player was shared with everyone else. You can see why it didn’t catch on...to our great loss.

In Churchill's ‘People's Land’ speeches for the  two general elections in 1910, he called land the 'mother of all monopolies' and was happy to explain to the electorate how unconstrained land price had the capacity to damage society and the economy, and undermine basic freedoms. Twice the Liberal Government was elected that year with a mandate to deal with the land question. As with the demise of the anti-monopoly version of the Landlord's Game, the entrenched self-interests of land owners prevailed.

As if to make the point made by Churchill and Lizzie Magie, the Wriglesworth Consultancy this week published a comparative survey of investment returns over 20 years, in which buy-to-let landlords have made a return on (borrowed) capital of just under 1400% since 1996, compared with the next best return on Gilts of 233%. Buy-to-let returns rely on sucking huge volumes of cash out of the productive economy, simply because they can, not because it makes any economic sense. Four decades of ineffective and short-termist policy making on housing and land has created the perfect conditions for the ‘mother of all monopolies” to be the playground of the opportunist profiteer. Imagine any politician saying today, “We wish to make the land less of a pleasure-ground for the rich and more of a treasure-house for the nation:"…let alone a Prime Minister, as Campbell-Bannerman did in 1905.

Even so, as I was sitting on the plane to Boston at the start of my Churchill Fellowship, exactly a year ago today, I still had a generally positive view of what I might discover in the USA, based on my experience of how public policy and the working of land and housing markets normally interacted. I did believe that eventually markets do come back into some kind of balance with the public interest that politicians usually strive to achieve, and which the public feels is reasonably acceptable, if never perfect or permanent. The extreme highs and lows in markets that still exist seven years after the credit crunch and housing market crash of 2006-8, and the deepening social and economic inequalities that have followed, was stretching that expectation, but had not fully exhausted it.

By the time I finally reached my apartment that night, via a public meeting in Jamaica Plain, South Boston, I had seen at first hand the result of taking such a benign view of the behaviour of land and housing markets. (You can read about it on page 61 of my report.) In a ‘hot market’ like Boston, as in many other successful or ‘over-successful’ cities, the ordinary citizen has become merely the necessary medium for local and global financial institutions speculating in prime and soon-to-be prime real estate Whilst an actual person is needed to sign a mortgage contract, or a tenancy agreement, after that we are the essentially inconvenient collateral damage of their rent-seeking interest. As long as they have a contract that ties them to the property, what happens to the occupier is of no consequence to them.

The financialisation of land and housing markets, and the transformation of real estate into a global commodity has been normalised through the entirely legitimate actions of politicians, banks, landowners, professionals, and ordinary citizens who have quietly acquiesced at their own effortless enrichment through commodity speculation; sometimes sleepwalking, or with eyes tight shut and pretending not to see, but often uncomprehending. Until very recently, and still in the eyes of too many politicians, only a rising housing market is a market in good condition that is also good for the economy and the nation.

In every place that I visited in North America, I saw this story being enacted in what the US economist Thorstein Veblen called, over a century ago, “the great American game…an enterprise in (land) ‘futures’ ’’[1], originally applied to the development of country towns, but now being played out on a world-sized pitch. I also saw its obverse, the abandonment of neighbourhoods, when the gamesters decided they had had enough.

It would have been easy to be depressed and overwhelmed by the power of global finance and the unwillingness or inability of the state to wield power in the wider public interest. Instead, I focussed on what I also found; the indomitable determination and perseverance of citizens, often using community land trusts, to take their own actions against these powerful forces, in the face of which politicians seem powerless. These citizens and their new institutions hold the promise of what could be achieved if politicians could only harness the energy, goodwill and integrity of their citizens to roll back the damage being done by the financialisation of our land and housing markets.

Far from criticising governments on the details of their housing policies or the absence of them, therefore, my report talks more about the need for a different kind of politics to achieve ‘the common good’. There is a substantial literature and continuing debate about what the ‘common good’ might be. That is rather the point. The common good is not an absolute good, but it is about the involvement of everyone to talk constantly about what it should and could be: constantly up for negotiation.

Maurice Glasman, the Blue Labour peer, offers a helpful starting point for thinking about the politics of the common good: “John-Paul II described politics, following in a long Aristotelian tradition, ‘as a prudent concern for the common good’. A common good between young and old, capital and labour, immigrants and locals, Christians and Muslims, city and countryside, faithful and secular. This is how solidarity needs to be rethought, and its appropriate vehicle is a politics of the common good that is built upon resisting the domination of capital and the state by local and decentralised democratic politics. The Common Good is discovered between people and returns their agency. Such a politics is a vocation, it has all the characteristics of labour. It is definitive of our humanity and can cause great suffering, frustration and tension. In all its forms, however, it is better than the politics we have now.” 



The printed patent drawing for a
game board invented by Lizzie J. Magie.
Image licensed under Public Domain
via Wikimedia Commons

Glasman and other members of the ‘Together for the Common Good’ Steering Group, a mix of secular and religious organisations, aim to start a national conversation about the meaning of the common good. We need practical examples of what working for the common good looks and feels like. That is what I hope to illustrate through the nine narratives that make up this report. The need for politicians, professionals and the citizen to find new ways of working together for the common good is as urgent as ever.


When Lizzie Magie invented her game, with squares offering $5 for ‘Absolute Necessities – Bread/Shelter/Clothing’ and respite at the Poor House, she could not have imagined that all these offerings are still needed a century later in the richest economies in the world. Maybe if her anti-monopolist version of the Landlord’s Game had survived, generations of young people and their parents might have learnt that there is another way.

 

[1] Veblen. T (1923) Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times, cited in Hudson. M (2012) Veblen’s Institutionalist Elaboration of Rent Theory, Paper at the Veblen, Capitalism and Possibilities for a Rational Economic Order Conference, in Istanbul June 2012.

The picture that forms the background to this blog was taken in 2012 in a district of Istanbul being socially and economically cleansed of low income households to make way for a new upscale district of shops, offices and high end apartments.

 

 

 

 

 

 

6: NOVEMBER 7^th 2014 - “COMMUNITIES FAMOUSLY HAVE A REPUTATION FOR ASKING FOR THE EARTH!”

This blogsite is not open for comments, but please contact me on smdhill@gmail.com if you would like to continue the discussion.

So said the chief executive of one of London’s largest housing associations, at a conference yesterday on estate renewal in London. ‘So unlike ‘normal’ people, or me, who are so selfless to want less than the best for themselves,’ is the speaker’s implied message. In forty years of working in housing and estate renewal, I have never met these unrealistic ‘communities’, but I have worked with many wonderful citizens, who give years of their lives to be the voice of their community in regeneration, for free, while all around them are paid handsomely.

I’m sort of speechless…with rage…at the duplicitous condescension and double standards implicit in this statement, that are sadly more common in the world of housing ‘providers’ than they ought to be. ‘There, there, we know what’s good for you. We take the big decisions, but we’ll indulge you in the layout of your homes’, as indeed the speaker then outlined. Different bath fittings? You can have them. Thank you.

I’m doubly upset, of course, as this assertion was a direct challenge to me. The conference chair invited me to make an impromptu contribution to this panel discussion. 'Are there examples of estate renewal being used to achieve good outcomes that benefitted estate residents, the surrounding community, the local authority as well as the development partners: for the common good?' My advocacy for the merits of ‘coproduction’ clearly fell on one pair of deaf ears. I would only say in support of my view that it is based on the experience of working on 127 estate renewal projects in my professional lifetime. (I only know this number as a prospective client once challenged me ‘Well, how many estate renewal projects have you actually worked on?’) In my top ten schemes that achieved this elusive goal of the common good, every single one was the result of coproduction, in which power and responsibility was shared equally amongst citizens, the council and commercial and social housing providers. No exceptions.

The fact that such condescending and damaging ideas still have any currency is due to the fact that they are shared and given house room by some local authorities. As one senior planner once told me: “My housing colleagues would always say how difficult it is to get people from the community to agree what they want. They don’t really know. The best that they [the officers] hope for is that they [the community] end up thinking that it [the council’s proposal] was their own idea.”

Thankfully on the evidence from the floor of the conference, this is an attitude held by a diminishing number of councils. The conference concluded with London’s Deputy Mayor for Housing praising the virtues of the 200+ home Brixton Green community led housing project at Somerleyton Road, and echoing the call throughout the day for ‘The Holy Grail …affordable intermediate market housing’…exactly what Community Land Trusts have been delivering, unsung and sometimes resisted, for over a decade.

Coproduction and affordable intermediate market housing are evidence of what citizens can do, and what they really want. This is their ‘asking for the earth’. This is their response to the obvious question that we all…that is communities and normal people alike…think about every day…and this is where my originally planned blog really begins…  

THE SCOTTISH QUESTION: HOW SHALL WE LIVE?
CITIZEN LED HOUSING AND THE OPPORTUNITY FOR A DIFFERENT KIND OF POLITICS OF THE COMMON GOOD

To mark the start of the two year Urban CLT Programme, in partnership with the Oak Foundation, I was asked, as a National CLT Network Board Member to share emerging ideas from my forthcoming Churchill Fellowship report ‘Property, Justice and Reason’. This blog examines why citizen action through CLTs should be seen as sign of frustration with the politics of today, and an opportunity to think afresh about the relationship between the citizen and the state. The next blog will look at how this could be operationalised in relation to the affordability of all housing and the use of public and private land for the common good.

A shorter and politer version of this blog on http://www.communitylandtrusts.org.uk/StephenHillBlogNov2014. The views expressed are my own, and do not represent the views of either the National CLT Network, or the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust.

This weekend the country will pause to consider the cost and the legacy of the First World War. Four years of fighting  and the post-war settlement at Versailles shaped the modern world as we now experience it. One of the casualties of that period, now forgotten, deserves fresh attention: the radical pre-war land reform agenda lost in the turmoil of modern warfare, but now reclaimed by citizens 100 years on.

 It’s 1907, April 20th: a large and well-to-do audience is assembled at the Drury Lane Theatre. They wait expectantly to hear what a young celebrity has to say:

“There are only two ways in which people can acquire wealth. There is ‘Production’ and there is ‘Plunder’. I have never used that word before. Production is always beneficial. Plunder is always pernicious, and its proceeds are either monopolised by the few, or consumed in the mere struggle for possession. We are here to range defiantly on the side of Production, and to eliminate Plunder as an element in our social system…

We have to face all the resources of a great monopoly, (land), so ancient that it has become almost venerable. We have against us all the money power. We have to deal with the apathy and levity of all sections of the public.”

Modernise the language, and this could be London and the South East today: extraordinary inflation and speculation in land and housing markets at every price point, driven by the accumulation of wealth by the already wealthy, a public policy definition of ‘affordability’ absurdly and incompetently linked to 80% or indeed any % of market value, and the acquiescent acceptance by existing property owners of their effortless enrichment by a market that has visibly damaging social and economic consequences for those not already on the ‘property ladder’, not to mention for the nation at large.

Our 1907 speaker is not radical Keir Hardie or Ramsay MacDonald, founding members of the Labour Party, but a very junior Liberal Minister, of a rank that today is never seen or heard, and would be of no consequence in the political hierarchy: a minor Under-Secretary of State…for the Colonies… Mr. Winston Churchill.

What would his elegant society audience have made of this broadside against…people like them? More to the point, what would we make of any politician who today delivered such a courageous speech in the national interest against the self-interests of his own property owning kind? Mansion tax is not in the same league as Churchill’s proposition: an economically illiterate and populist soundbite of a policy that will devour political capital and generate paltry revenues.

This speech was certainly not populist, nor an ‘off-message’ aberration, but part of a carefully researched and promoted set of political ideas culminating in the 1909 People’s Budget. The Budget contained proposals for a tax on land development profits, and for annual land value taxation: both considered essential to help eradicate the structural causes of poverty, not just moderate its effects. Later, as President of the Board of Trade, Churchill was to introduce the Minimum Wage and Labour Exchanges, also tackling causes not symptoms.

As Churchill set out in his campaign leaflet for the 1910 general election, ‘The People’s Land’: “It is quite true that unearned increments in land are not the only form of unearned and undeserved profit which individuals are able to secure; but it is the principal form of unearned increment which is derived from processes which are not merely not beneficial, but which are positively detrimental to the general public.” In 1909, the Liberal Government had already passed legislation to give councils powers to make new housing schemes, and to buy the land for them, at existing use value, thus eliminating any speculative uplift in land price.

These economically sound land reform measures were doomed. In the inevitable compromises to get the Budget passed with the land owning members of the House of Lords, they were abandoned. The war intervened and diverted the Liberal government from its extraordinary programme of social and economic reforms. It was an historic lost opportunity to create a long lasting public policy framework for stable housing and land markets. 

We are still living with the consequences. The present extreme structural inequalities in wealth distribution, caused by the absence of effective fiscal policies relating to property ownership of all kinds, are all there in Churchill’s analysis. Nothing has changed, except the development of extraordinary computing power to commodify any kind of property asset, opening the door to the culture of gambling that has turned development land and property into the world’s speculative commodity of choice.

 

But Churchill forgot, as our 21^st century politicians continue to forget, that big political ideas are not just their prerogative. Politicians have to govern with the consent of the people; if they are wise, they govern not just with consent but with the citizens’ direct participation in political action.

In his architecture for social justice, Beveridge envisaged a welfare state of ‘private action for social advance’, that was never understood or adopted by politicians or civil servants. Governments of the left and right have never taken the bold leap of letting go of power to liberate the agency of citizens in tackling the wicked problems of modern political life. Governments have lost, because they have become victims of their own self-belief that they alone have the capacity to make policies or to do things for people. And the people have lost, because they can now see that their politicians don’t have the power to do anything that really matters in the modern world, except to fiddle at the margins with tax rates, public service contracts, or parliamentary expenses.



Brighton and Hove CLT looking at the opportunities for a

citywide citizen housing initiative with the City Council on

its urban fringe sites 

And yet, pressed against the hard face of a housing market that cannot offer what they need, citizens are taking action for themselves and reviving the radicalism that infused the Theatre Royal in 1907, and enabled the Liberal government to be re-elected not once but twice in 1910. To do this, they are turning to Community Land Trusts (CLT). In hot market areas, citizens are looking for homes in which the speculative value of land has been extracted and tamed. They want to live in homes that will also be permanently affordable to people like them in the future, at prices determined by what people actually earn. In cool markets, in cities with more homes than people wanting to live in them, citizens are deciding to stay put and are using CLTs to proclaim and reclaim the value of their communities. In both situations, these are the choices of citizens that the state could never make happen on its own,
and does not even dare offer. 

Granby4Streets CLT reclaiming the streets, Liverpool

For the local or national state, sharing political power with citizens is not a zero sum game. Using the agency of citizens to achieve what politicians cannot, does not diminish their electoral legitimacy. Instead, it enables them to get things done that they had never dreamt were possible.

The London Citizens’ London Living Wage campaign is now regularly endorsed and promoted by local and national politicians, but would have been undeliverable by mainstream political action. Through community organising, ordinary citizens created the space for political action. Generation Rent, also based on the principles of community organising, is mobilising private renters for the general election in over a 100 marginal seats where private renting is now the largest form of tenure to raise the voice of a group not often heard within the political mainstream.

Rural CLTs have already shown what they can do in housing markets that were damaging their communities. Citizens, land owners, councils and housing providers achieved together something that none of them could have done alone.

In urban areas, progress has been hard won. The battle for political airtime, resources and territory is much more contested. Amongst local authorities and housing providers, there can be puzzlement and even resentment that citizens should be trying to plan and deliver their own developments. “Who are you? Why are you trying to do this? We do this…we provide housing for you.”

Then, there is always that crucial question that might seem legitimate, but is often mistaken when used with the intention of undermining the legitimacy of citizens trying to provide for themselves. “What community do you represent?” where the word ‘community’ is being used to define ‘otherness’, and to diminish and marginalise the importance and validity of what is being attempted: those unrealistic and unreasonable communities asking for the earth, again.

So, the right answer to that question is ‘We don’t represent anyone. We elected you to represent us. We are just ourselves: the community, citizens, acting to house ourselves and lead a normal life, here in our part of the city.’ Citizens can unlock the radical changes that politicians may want to achieve, but would never manage alone. The agency of the citizen can empower the state to do the right thing for the common good.

The National CLT Network’s two year Urban CLT Programme, starts today. Eleven urban CLTs in towns and cities, in widely differing housing markets, all over England and Wales, will show how much more is possible when citizens take the initiative, and take back the rights to the city, and the right to live a normal life. Next year, there will be funding for a second cohort of nine more urban CLTs. 

To quote the East London CLT “Buy or rent a CLT home, and live a normal life, in a well-connected place with neighbours you know, free of unnecessary debt, and money left over for energy, food, clothes, transport, school trips and other stuff you can buy in shops, supporting your local economy and community.”

It doesn’t seem much to ask. How did it become so difficult? Think back to 1907…

“Plunder!”

5. MAY 8th 2014: MORE WISDOM FROM THE CAB



The Hat

I’ve just worked out that all these conversations have been prompted by questions about my hat! Champlain Housing Trust very kindly gave me a hard hat after my visit to them, as a ‘present’…which I have grudgingly carted around ever since, with it regularly getting in the way in cramped lifts, crowded buses, restrooms; but then I probably wouldn’t have had these conversations…

“I live in a trailer home about 9 miles out of town, and I’ve been doing this job, since I left the service six years ago. I was in the 82^nd Airborne…a volunteer paratrooper. I seen some action in a lot ‘o places you’ll have read about.

But this is the best I can do right now. It’s quite different from when my pa came home after the Korean War. He could get a decent job, with enough pay to buy hi’self a house, pay for things for me and my sister, and such. Not now. I know a lot of normal folks like me, families too, who are just getting by, or, well they need stuff like food stamps, but often they won’t go for them. They’re too ashamed.

This ain’t the country I was brought up in, and I jus’ don’t like what’s happening to my country. This town used to be so busy with the tobacco factories. You’d smell tobacco everywhere in town. But that’s all gone, mostly abroad, like most of our manufacturing industries. They just went and nobody seemed to think there was anything wrong. Now, them factories are condos, artists’ studios, fancy restaurants, offices. They sure look nice, but…

Downtown is getting a lot of money, mostly for the good, but there aren’t jobs for ordinary folks like me. I only stay close as my old folks need someone nearby, but when they’re gone, what’s to keep me here. Being rootless in your own country is a mighty strange feeling.

It’s all about capitalism, of course. Now I wouldn’t want you to think that I don’t think capitalism is a good thing. It is. It’s been responsible for some important changes, but…well…there’s a very fine line between capitalism and greed. Isn’t that right?

Those executives of big companies have a fine opinion of themselves, and what they are worth, and the politicians seem to share that fine opinion. But they don’t seem much interested in investing in their own country. They looking after themselves OK, but the rest of us don’t matter much. When ordinary Americans start to think that, that’s a sad business.

As I said, I don’t like what’s happening to my country…to my life.”

Stephen Hill May 8^th on the airport shuttle at 4.30am from Durham to Raleigh Airport, North Carolina

4. MAY 4th 2014: THE WISDOM OF CAB DRIVERS

(In this conversation, I’m getting out of the way, and let the cab driver speak…as he did, for nearly 20 minutes after I told him about why I was in the USA…this is just what he had to say on the subject of banks and mortgage lenders.)



Banner at the offices of City Life Vide Urbana, Jamaica Plain, Boston

“B-A-N-K is a four letter word. They got you every which way, every aspect of your life. Mortgage companies, they’re a law unto themselves. They ain’t interested in you. They’re just in business for the stockholders, to squeeze the last drop of youse, and if you go bust, and lose your home, that’s just a bonus for them.

They was the first in the queue with the beggin’ bowl for the $700m bailout, to mend the crash that they had created! Obama, he didn’t really have a choice. It had to be done, ‘cos the banks they’re into everything. We just couldn’t do without ‘em.

People in my family lost their home. Notice came on January 1^st, be out by the 31^st. Ain’t nothing they could do. You think owning your home is a good thing, brings security and ease o’ mind. But it often just brings trouble, and you ain’t really any more in control of things than if you renting.

I own my home, and I’m lucky. I gotta bank that behaves itself, heh, heh. If I could afford it, I’d like a beach house to take the family, but when you see…who was that Enron guy…he had 12 homes. I mean what can you do with 12 homes? You can only be in one at a time. OK, allow the man a beach house, that’s fair; but that’s still 10 homes sittin’ empty. There are plenty o’ folks like him.

The mortgage companies, they’re so powerful, no one can touch them. They’re like the big pharmaceuticals, and the NRA!”

Stephen Hill, taxi ride from downtown Richmond Virginia, to Staple Mills Railroad Station May 4th  


Post Script from Sir Josiah Stamp, Civil Servant, Industrialist, and Director and President of the Bank of England during the 1920's:
"The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented. Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create money and control credit, and with the flick of a pen, they will create enough money to buy it back again. Take this great power away from the bankers and all the great fortunes like mine will disappear, and they ought to disappear, for this would be a better and happier world to live in. But if you want to continue the slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create money and to control credit."


 

3. MAY 1st 2014 - CHANGING LIVES FOR REAL

Just under 40 years ago, I met an academic from Nottingham University, who to my young eyes already looked a bit over the hill and with all the delightful eccentricities of someone who lived in another world. He had come to the north London council of Haringey in the summer of 1976 to try out ‘The Game’ on a unique experiment for then and now: council housing tenants were invited to volunteer to form a tenant management cooperative, and commission their own new build scheme to their own design for their own self-management. The then Housing Minister was Reg Freeson, for the Cooperative Party. It seemed an obvious thing to do.

‘The Game’ was based on a large scale map of an area, and small cards with hand written words or pictures describing all the ingredients of the everyday life experience of your home neighbourhood… dog mess, litter, local shop, park, beautiful tree, kids hanging around, nice neighbours, noisy neighbours, traffic noise and so on…and plenty of blanks for people to fill in other things that they liked or disliked about where they lived, and then what they would like to see.

As the room was set up, you could see the puzzlement of both residents and the professionals. A game? With childlike picture cards? What has this to do with ‘design’? But it hardly took a moment for one of the residents to speak up and tell a story about something that had happened to her, and then another story followed. ‘Now put your card on the map, and see if anyone else has had a similar experience in that place’, instructed the academic. In about five minutes, the room was full of noise and laughter, with cards piling up in hotspots where many had had a similar experiences, and odd outliers with a unique story that quickly built a comprehensive picture of all the ordinary and extraordinary things that happened in this place.

And that, of course, was the trick, the neatest simplest trick about ‘The Game’; everyone can tell stories. Lay people and professionals both tell stories in pretty well the same way. Telling stories about your life and where you live provides rich material that both binds future neighbours together with a shared story of place, and gives designers insightful information about the context for their design, as well a foundation for understanding their many clients.

At this time, Oscar Newman’s theories about ‘defensible space’ were gaining widespread currency amongst architects and planners. You might even see a design drawing with areas shaded as ‘defensible’ or not, as the designer perceived it. As part of the architect’s briefing, residents asked to go around other council projects to see what they did and didn’t like. Accompanied by the host tenants’ association, they delivered the most comprehensive critique of the designs as lived experience, describing not the theory of defensible space but what each part of an estate actually felt like in terms of security, safety, pleasure, danger and exposure.

Residents did not need design training or to learn the long words. Designers didn’t need to go into complex technical explanations. The telling of and listening to stories is the most effective form of communication; everyone is speaking and hearing the same language. Which is not to say that this language cannot also be challenging. ‘We don’t want this place to look like council housing’ was a priority requirement of the brief. But, working out what council houses did or didn’t look like proved a challenge too far: so we all agreed to leave it and see what happened.   

Part of the output of 15 simultaneous mini-neighbourhood
Planning for Real events as part of the East Brighton
New Deal for Communities programme October 2000 

Since this time, many similar games have been invented with more elaborate and ambitious scenarios, more beautiful cards and clever design ideas. They are OK, in their way, but they all miss the point of 'Planning for real', as ‘The Game’ soon became known. The point is not to provide a platform for the professionals to produce a ‘better’ more informed design, it is the way into a quite different way of working: the co-production of place. By making it together, the clients and the architect could see that design was not about achieving a finite realisation of all the clients’ expectations and wants; satisfying the ‘perfect moment’. Design became the starting point for possibilities, for adaptation to how the residents might want or have to live in the future. The physical and psychological occupation of space is the ongoing activity of ‘design for living’, in which most professional designers will only exceptionally play any part. That is a great loss for professional learning and the accumulation of greater understanding of what design is about.

 

The morning after the night before: trying to put the East Brighton map together again after community party, October 2000 

As the coop residents themselves said, when questioned again, as the scheme was ready to go for planning, ‘Why don’t these look like council houses?’:  “Oh, haven’t you worked that out yet? It’s not what they look like; it’s the fact that we made them.”

This eccentric academic was, of course, the wonderful Tony Gibson, who died just recently at the age of 94. His long life was filled with the games that he invented to help people navigate and make more sense of our complicated and sometimes difficult lives.

Back in 1976, I could not have been more wrong in every part of my initial assessment of him. He was forever young, and it was us who lived in another world, and him who enabled us to find a way to connect to each other in the real world of lived experience, and to experience our common humanity. His whole life was dedicated to the process of changing lives for real, and for the better. That experience changed my own ideas about what the real professional task was; not just about design or high technical standards. These are important, but the real question is 'how do we create more democratic places in which to live?'. There are plenty of economic and social consequences that fall out of trying to answer that question, and that is at the heart of this Churchill Fellowship research. I’ve thanked you before, Tony, but it won’t hurt to say it again. Thank you for a life changed.

Now he has gone, it feels quite scary. Maybe I’ll have to join the grown-ups?

Stephen Hill, May 1^st in Liberty Gardens, a community park created by the residents of the North Liberties neighborhood in North Philadelphia.