Our latest Action Pointer – the 6th in the series considers the prospects for community leadership when the covid-19 pandemic has passed.
Also published this weekend is an Easter message – We rise to play a greater part – an appreciation of FR Scott’s villanelle as sung by Leonard Cohen on his 2004 album Dear Heather.
To all our readers we wish the very best possible Easter and hopes for a better year to come.
There’s a moment on any epic journey – a brief moment, maybe of self-doubt – when you pause (mid-sentence, perhaps) to wonder exactly where you’re headed.
This week’s pause, this check, comes just as we approach the midpoint of the KYP series – four done, five to go. Time, then, to check the plan, time to summon energy, time to pull together and push on. Time, maybe, for a small course correction?
KYP – ‘Knowing Your Place’ – was always an unlikely blog series but from the outset it had great structural underpinning. Most of the episodes had been well rehearsed – albeit with different headlines – and needed only an injection of current relevance for a new audience.
With just one exception the planned topics were neatly summarised three years previously in the concluding chapter of Brain Gain – a book that captured more than a decade of learning through the Intelligent Community Forum.
The single exception is a key indicator that has since crept far more clearly onto the community agenda – largely, it should be said, through the work of the Rockefeller Foundation and their 100 Resilient Cities network. It might once have been argued that Resilience was but a subset of a longer-standing ICF Key Indicator – Sustainability. However, headline tones get burdened by baggage – a peaceful green is not on the same wavelength as urgently-flashing red and blue lights of public safety.
When the Intelligent Community Forum gathers in London next June, their 2018 root theme, Humanising Data, will no doubt be coloured by recently raised awareness of data privacy issues and the impacts/consequences of ‘artificial intelligence/ignorance’ – but in our KYP series the blog-prep for Sir Nigel Shadbolt’s input is still two weeks away.
For readers remaining mystified, links to the series so far are listed below. At the outset, the central question, the question that is bringing so many brilliant speakers and community leaders together next June, was deceptively simple: Why do some places thrive whilst others decline?
I’ve checked the waypoints. We seem to be on course, but the next five weeks is a long journey. Still to come in this series are thoughts on local Advocacy (Who do we think are?), Open Data (AI in city infrastructures), Innovation Capacity (Pacemakers for Place-makers), Sustainability Engagement and finally Resilience. Fortunately, ICF is inherently collaborative and, with inputs from summit speakers, the driving can be shared.
By the end of May, homework complete, all delegates – whether from the UK or the other side of world – will be fully prepped and prompted to probe the great gathering of expert speakers and community leaders at the ICF Global Forum.
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Notes:
Brain Gain, Bell, Jung and Zacharilla, Intelligent Community Forum, ISBN: 1499228023
Knowing Your Place – that place you call home.
The series so far:
3 Where Have All Our Flowers Gone?
Part 5 – ‘Who Do We Think We Are?’ is scheduled for publication on 2ndMay.
Local Fabrics [part 1 of a nine-part weekly series]
Why do some places thrive whilst others decline?
How can we shape the future of our communities — the places we call home, the places where we work, the places where we relax?
This nine-part guide to knowing (really understanding) the fabric of communities will explore those questions.
Questions of local prosperity and wellbeing are now far more prominent for many reasons — not least because so much more is known about the huge diversity of local economies and the very different needs and priorities of people who spend time in them. Awareness of these complex local fabrics — each one woven differently — prompts questions over the adequacies and limitations of centrally-driven top down policies.
The flood of new local insights stems from better data and deeper analysis. The realisation (or rather acceptance) that national pictures do not adequately describe the UK economy is a challenge for Whitehall. Tabloids may decry post-code lotteries. Funding formulae handed down from Whitehall are bitterly contested. Local leaders campaign for greater empowerment — some even arguing for ‘city sovereignty’. And, in the Brexit context, questions of national, regional and local identity and belonging are under the spotlight.
International relationships and high policy arenas may seem way out of reach and, for many people, it’s the stuff closest to hand that is important in any quest to ‘take back control’. In this series, therefore, the focus is entirely on local communities and what can make them healthier — prosperous, engaged and sustainable — in a world where the free flow of data demands careful application.
Great cities may be keen to adorn themselves with ‘smart’ technology to further hone their inner workings. Old mechanistic approaches to economies are, however, being supplanted by thematic models — exemplified by Kate Raworth’s ‘Doughnut Economics’ and Marianna Mazzucato’s ‘Entrepreneurial State’. These describe, safe places for policy makers to intervene on socioeconomic issues without straying beyond ecological boundaries. The new economics are also delightfully cross-sector with themes cutting across the old silos that fuel so much of central policy and ‘industry’ regulation.
Conventional economic analysis and management is rooted in vertical sector silos, geospatial metrics and demographics. The more-qualitative themes that create local fabrics and bind communities together are the cross-cutting place-making threads shown in figure 1.
Each of the horizontal threads will be explored in the next eight weekly episodes of this place-based series.
Because all places are different these themes will have variable relevance for the community that you know best — the place that you call home. But the activities and priorities that create these threads are all indicators of community cohesion and future prosperity.
The UK economy is only the aggregate of local placed-based activities. Any sense of national cohesion depends on the strength and design of these local fabrics.
These indicators are not new — they are distilled from years of observation. They are at the root of ‘intelligent communities’ and derive from the long-term observations of a global think-tank that gathers annually to celebrate forward-thinking communities.
The episodes will be published weekly throughout April and May 2018 with the full set complete before the Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) next gathers in London to ask again ‘Why do some places thrive whilst others decline?
Institute for Management Services appoints new president to take fresh approach to UK’s productivity transformation
IMS – the very British Institute for Management Services – seems to have been around forever. And the terribly British problem with productivity continues to puzzle, despite decades of effort, a long train of government ministers and grand policy initiatives.
The IMS appointment of a presidential successor to Dr. Beeching, HRH The Duke of Edinburgh, Monty Finniston and more-recently a couple of Lords, might seem unlikely to make much difference. Except for one small thing – the least noticed and least understood strand of the UK government’s new Industrial Policy : Place-Making. Embedded in the latest policy iteration is acknowledgement that local economies are very diverse. Different places have different needs and priorities. They are not served well by ‘one size fits all’ policies based on national averages. Bristol is very different to Bolton.
With the legitimization of ‘Place-Making’ – entirely new channels are opened to the incoming productivity president. Recharged city leaderships are massively motivated energy sources rooted within local economies. Their ‘city sovereignty’ perspectives reflect a new determination to properly manage the shocks and stresses of fast-growing communities.
The energy of new city leaders is undeniable. They wear coats of many party colours. Who better to convene new programmes that could ramp up inward investment, attract talent, grow their local knowledge workforce and get to grips with the chronic mediocrity of digital infrastructure. In contrast, Whitehall has just celebrated the ‘achievement’ of 95% UK availability of connectivity that is not super, not fast and not broad – and wonder why more people don’t buy it?
Leastways, that’s the story so far. The UK’s productivity wake-up call could herald a new policy balance – more grass roots than top-down – but much will now depend on finding space in local leaders’ overcrowded place-making agendas and the resources to fuel their empowerment.
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It may not have been the first such example but the pre-2015 election consensus around long-term infrastructure planning was certainly a ‘learning moment’ for Westminster. The lessons have not been lost – despite the divisiveness of ongoing policy power struggles.
The case for removing infrastructure from knockabout political games was, eventually, grasped by Party leaders despite their decades of devotion to partisan debate. Endless arguments and prevarications get in the way of well-considered solution investment whilst the people, emulating Doogle, shake their heads sorrowfully and mutter ‘What a way to run a railway’.
Even building that infrastructure consensus was hard fought. Never mind that the life cycle of governments was far too short for serious investment. Never mind that the lobbyists were routinely exposed as short-term market manipulators. Never mind that the complexities of major projects didn’t fit into 78pt tabloid headlines. It was no small wonder that anything was ever achieved in the febrile atmosphere of Westminster party politics.
But opening an escape hatch requires broad recognition of some impending disaster.
With today’s launch of the White Paper on Industrial Strategy it is timely to review the Green paper comments from industry and academia. The Policy Lab led by Kings College London (KCL) observed, ‘It is difficult to sell a big change to the entire country without a sense of crisis’ and went on to ask whether ‘a burning platform exists to launch the industrial strategy from?’
Last week’s budget scene-setter strived to embed ‘productivity’ as a central motivating focus but was that sufficient to establish a ‘war footing’? The KCL input was as positive as possible – suggesting unity around securing a ‘peace dividend’ ‘as the country moves through this time of profound change and heightened disruption’. They didn’t dare suggest that Brexit was itself a sufficiently severe and imminent unifying threat – a diplomatic caution that serves to underline the long road between rhetoric and reality.
Getting consensus around infrastructure planning set the scene for further calls to remove contentious arenas from everyday politics. Writing in the December issue of Prospect magazine, Diane Coyle’s candidate for cross-party consensus is Economic Strategy.
Writing as a member of the independent Industrial Strategy Commission, Diane concludes that, ‘There must be a commitment, across party lines, to strategic management of the economy, monitored by an independent body analogous to the OBR. The strategy must go far beyond a few eye-catching sector deals and be aimed at long-term challenges, such as decarbonising the economy and delivering health and social care for an ageing population’.
That plea for cross-party consensus was echoed again last week when 90 MPs repeated calls for removal of the Social Care/NHS policy complex from the political maelstrom. The BBC reported, ‘The letter argued that only a cross-party NHS and social care convention – a forum for non-partisan debate – could deliver a sustainable settlement for these services where conventional politics had failed to do so.’
What may have started with independence for the Bank of England and the creation of the Office for Budgetary Responsibilities and a seemingly endless list of ‘arms-length’/independent regulators seems now to have become the model for a new hands-off school of government.
That withdrawal, however, is a prospect that now seems far more likely to succeed at a local level closer to the people and their communities. An alternative ‘escape hatch’ for conflicted macro-managers is to back-off and devolve issues to regional/metro and local governments where attending to the great diversity of needs can help untangle the centrally knotted issues. The other great advantage of letting go is that local political discourse is far more inclined towards the consensual and the emergent White Paper is certainly not short of placed-based aspirations.
The UK is, arguably, the most centralised of all advanced economies. Sadly, subsidiarity is often and erroneously painted as some dark and suspect EU concept but as any parent with teenagers will know, there comes a time when youngsters must be let go. So it is with Mrs and Mr Whitehall – the offspring must be trusted to provide the energy for the entire family’s next generation.
And I wrote all that without using the F word.
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The London-based Centre for Cities does exactly what it says on the tin. They advocate for better recognition of the economic and societal strengths of the UK’s major conurbations.
‘Cities’ according the Centre for Cities, ‘do not follow the national economy – they ARE the national economy’ – and their diversity demands that each of them have different priorities to meet the needs of their citizen and business communities.
This diversity of needs and priorities stands in sharp contrast to Whitehall’s grasp of the economy. The UK is, measurably, the most centralised of all developed nations.
Even with limited sub-national devolutions beyond England and the cautious local empowerment of Metro Mayors and City Deals within, it is clear that in so many spheres of our regulated regime, we have a complex challenge – an inability to align centrally planned resources with local needs.
None of that is news. The debate, like some slow-brewing tropical storm, has been building over the last three decades – centrally evidenced by the RSA’s City Growth Commission and today (rather more locally) illustrated by the energy around Bristol’s brilliant ‘Festival of Ideas’. And this locally-driven rebalancing energy is also evident across many UK cities – at a pace, intensity, creativity and engagement that leaves Whitehall Departments in the shade.
This renaissance – the emergence of inspired local leadership and willing communities – is also a cultural expression that positions exponents at some distance from the tired dogmas of national political parties across the spectrum.
Critical impatience is, for example, articulated by Metro Mayors, regardless of Party affiliations. The Centre for Cities noted the marginalisation of these local champions at recent Party conferences and, this week, the C4C lead story is a repeat of a powerful post-election view of paralysis in parliament with a call for MP’s to support local initiatives.
I’m not a disinterested observer. I’ve written previously about Municipal Enterprise and the need to translate and apply the work of fresh economic thinkers like Kate Raworth and Mariana Mazzucato from national to more local perspectives. I’ve watched the brilliantly creative work of Knowle West Media Centre building community cohesion in part of Bristol and for several years I’ve contributed to the work of the US-based Intelligent Community Forum with its global network of around 160 cities.
Whilst our national politicians are looking elsewhere, the new localism is an unstoppable force. This is an energy that is likely be further bolstered by the Intelligent Community Forum’s 2018 Global Summit when civic leaders, CIOs and community developers from many of the world’s leading cities come to London next June to share their experiences. The current holder of the title ‘Intelligent Community of 2017’ is Melbourne, Australia. In recent years UK cities have rarely featured in the rankings but this year Knowle West was assessed as being amongst the Global Top 21 – a huge accolade for their imaginative creativity.
Let’s be clear (as politicians are fond of saying) communities are both economic and societal constructs – they embrace both the places where we work and where we live – and those of us who commute may belong to two or more.
In the gradual evolution of local empowerment, the creation of Local Enterprise Partnerships was supposed to have been a step along the way. No doubt they can claim some economic impact but for their wider communities these efforts pass largely unnoticed and, as noted in this week’s Economist, the divergences of well-being means that many feel they are being left behind. Rather than celebrate diversities the good citizens of less-prosperous places are more likely to fret about ‘post-code lotteries’ when austerity drives down public service standards. Fortunate indeed are those places that rise above party politics to embrace inspired local leadership. But this is a balancing act – local threads woven into wider regional fabrics.
What marks out the new New Localism are signs of vastly greater local engagement – and with that higher-octane fuel the drivers of the UK economic performance and our social and cultural developments are very firmly in the hands of local communities and their place-makers.
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According to Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak (Brookings Institute) “Power is shifting in the world: downward from national governments and states to cities and metropolitan communities; horizontally from the public sector to networks of public, private and civic actors; and globally along circuits of capital, trade, and innovation.”
It’s not surprising that much of their evidence for this stems from the USA. More recently they have written (p22, Prospect, October 2017) “The emergence of ‘New Localism’ is partly due to the abdication of higher levels of government“.
Search on Google, however, for ‘New Localism’ and the top hit (Wikipedia) roots the term in the early part of the UK’s Blair government and the realisation of an ‘increasing understanding of the limitations of centrally-driven policy implementation’.
Cautious devolution and local empowerment has since featured Gordon Brown’s ‘Sub-National Economic Growth’ plans, Regional Development Agencies replaced by Lord Heseltine’s Local Enterprise Partnerships, George Osborne’s Northern Powerhouse, the RSA’s City Growth Commission, a variety of City Deals, half dozen new Metro Mayors and a new national industrial strategy that has space for Place-Making.
And yet, the UK remains one of the most centralised of all developed nations.
Even now, with a hint that Local Governments might once again be allowed to retain revenues from business property taxation (‘Business Rates’), there’s debate over the potential for relative inequities of city honey-pots and their less well-endowed commuter hinterlands – not to mention the latent heat of ‘post-code lottery’ outrage if any place dares to fare better than any another.
But we know that there is no national economy – only the aggregation of many local economies each with different demographics, different cultures, different business interests, different leaderships and different needs calling out for different priorities. More significantly, as the UK tumbles towards Brexit, cities and their communities have diverse cultural and commercial international linkages that impact on future prosperity here at home. Should we need to ask why some local economies and their communities prosper whilst others seem to wither? How can we have more prospering and less withering?
Central policy makers may desire national economic growth but that can only happen with the success of diverse local economies. So it’s not surprising that the Department for Business (BEIS) has strategically enshrined Place-Making, but as yet there’s very little flesh on those bones.
With the benefit of an 18-year world-wide study of what makes communities prosper, there are, it seems, some fundamental indicators but even these are evolving as we adapt to a more digitally-enabled era. Just as in business, enterprises that have not adapted find themselves in treacherous trading waters: communities, their citizens, employers and local leaders need to adapt. Sometimes it takes a crisis to spur action. Perhaps a more-mature approach lies in planning futures than reach beyond short-term electoral cycles.
To find the new New Localism – to flesh out the bones of Place Making and local economic/community development – Leaders, civic and commercial, should study the outcomes of on-going research.
In late October, the world’s Top 21 in the 2017/18 research cycle led by the Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) will be announced. By early next year those 21 communities will have been whittled down to just the Top 7. Then it will take a few more months of patient investigation and assessment to declare a worthy successor to Melbourne – the current holder of the title ‘Intelligent Community of the Year’. That announcement will take place next June in London in the company of mayors, CIOs, enterprise and civic leaders from communities around the world.
Between now and next June all the participating cities/communities will learn much about themselves and be readied to share their successes, to network their ideas, to inspire others, to find new opportunities, but also to learn how they might further adapt in this fast-moving world.
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See also http://www.gs-sg18.co.uk/about/www.gs-sg18.co.uk/about/smart-smarter-smartest and associated links.
We all know – or think we know – that Smart Cities are driven by Smart Technologies, but what about the people?
In much the same way as industries hype their products (Broadband, Superfast Broadband, Ultrafast . . .) so it is with entire cities.
Beyond Smart Cities we have Social Smart Cities (tackling poverty), Green Cities (very Circular), Resilient Cities (prepared for the unexpected) and even Compassionate Cities – caring about digital inequity and boosting Inclusion. And whilst the ‘smart tech’ systems and infrastructures are key to enabling all these variants there is still the human element – the citizens and their business that must live work and play in these communities.
All the place-based systems in the world still need to serve the citizen – not the other way around.
So enter, stage left, the ‘Intelligent Community’ with its fabric woven from all the usual economic sector metrics and demographics plus the threads of social wellbeing policies.
The question is: Is your city ready? You may be contemplating an impressive array of investment proposals to deal with Transport, Air Quality, Housing, Social Care – the list goes on – but will all those plans knit together to match your citizens’ and community needs?
One way of finding out – free of charge – is to nominate your community for assessment by the Intelligent Community Forum. Who knows, you may even be selected as one of the world’s Top 21 or Top 7 Intelligent Communities. Melbourne, Australia, went on this year to be acclaimed as the Intelligent City of the Year.
That achievement was announced in New York at the ICF Global Summit last June. Next year’s great event (with mayors, civic leaders and community developers from across the world) will be in June, in London – the first time in two decades that this very special occasion will be held outside of North America.
You could be there – and your community could find its place on the global stage.
Nominations before 13th 21st September via http://www.intelligentcommunity.org/nominations
DEADLINE FOR NOMINATION EXTENDED – now 21st September
For more information please contact David Brunnen or call 07714 325 657
Migration issues are rarely far below the surface in the current neverendum debate. Overcrowding is cited as an inevitable consequence of the migrant influx but no one questions the underlying causes of congestion.
To what extent are overcrowded cities and the pressures on services and infrastructure the result of our own homegrown policies over which we have complete control?
Parag Khanna in his new book ‘Connectography[1]’ observes the growth of megacities – increasingly coastal megacities – and, like the UK’s Centre for Cities and the RSA’s City Growth Commission, regards that growth as inevitable – a long-term trend towards the supposed richness of culture and economic efficiencies of scale. The drift within England from North to South and the consequential pressure on London and the South East has at least been recognized as in need of remediation – hence the Northern Powerhouse concept – but the remedy proposes further growth of great cities from Manchester to Newcastle via Leeds, and HS3 must go to the back of queue behind HS 2 nowhere near as important. The 2007 Treasury White Paper on subnational growth pointed in sensible directions but fell amongst the chaos of global economic calamity (and bonkers bankers) in subsequent years.
But what if our smaller towns and communities in the vastly greater hinterland were better enabled to be economically thriving without driving their citizens away to distant cities never to return? While we bemoan the pressure of overcrowded capitals do we spare any thought for the depopulation of vast tracts of land and market towns or the demands on road and rail travel for commuters who cannot find work near home?
This is our internal migration issue, the imbalance of rural and urban economies. It affects many countries – which is why you can buy a second home for next to nothing in rural Northern Spain or the middle of France. We read of massive effort and creativity being poured into solving the challenges of making megacities habitable. That’s no bad thing but let’s not kid ourselves; we choose to huddle together. That internal migration towards ever-more complex cities (mostly internally-displaced economic migrants) far exceeds any issue of a few hundred thousand refugees arriving from elsewhere.
Local Authorities can and should rise to the challenge. They may not have mayors like megacities have mayors but they surely know what is needed to bring the children (and jobs for the children) home. They understand the consequences of neglect. It is time for Municipal Enterprise. The issue that went away but now needs to come back requires a multi-year round of rural renewal. The investment will pay dividends – not least in the greater resilience of cities!
Discuss.
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[1] Connectography: Mapping the Global Network Revolution, Parag Khanna, pub: Weindenfeld & Nicolson, 2016, ISBN 978-1-474-80423-9
A theme paper for an Environment Management conference in Delhi has sparked debate about the underlying assumptions.
The paper characterises city dwellers as materially rich compared to rural citizens described as ‘poor’ – but then considers the prospects for lifestyle values that would position rural citizens as environmentally rich and city dwellers as increasingly impoverished.
The author’s intent is clear – to challenge delegates with a potential reversal of fortunes – but the problems with these characterisations are two-fold.
Firstly, we are well aware of material deprivations in cities, towns and villages across the land – economic inequalities cannot be fully correlated geographically. There is no doubt, for example, that rural areas may have a raw deal in terms of transport and digital infrastructures but it is, at the same time, far from realistic to assume that city-zens are much better served. If you really want a life off-grid then 1 mile downstream from Tower Bridge in SE16 may be just the digital desert you desire.
Secondly, it is mistaken to assume that rural citizens value being less connected. Some may well luxuriate in leafy glades surrounded by natural wonders and wildlife but making a living, having and creating gainful employment, being able to access medical care and education, and contributing to wider society are not absent from non-urban family agendas.
The key to reconciliation between different environments lies in the priorities given to issues of resilience. You might imagine that cities need, for example, stronger environmental efforts and rural areas need better digital infrastructures – but those are a generalisations; policies based on averages are ‘merely average’ and, generally, unfit for purpose.
Places and peoples are different and have diverse needs. The presumed-to-be unstoppable tidal flow of humanity towards major conurbations is as much in need of thoughtful management as migrations between countries. The leadership effort surely needs to be directed towards ironing out the relative risks and inequalities that prompt these migrations. Leaving them to grow and fester will surely only fuel future problems.
Groupe Intellex 