Posts filed under 'places'
Inequality and public services
Rebecca Nash writes:
‘Public facing’ and ‘academic’ are two personal attributes that often don’t go together. But the IIPS was fortunate to host this rare breed at a breakfast briefing this week. Professor Danny Dorling both conducts groundbreaking research on patterns of place and social change, and makes sure it gets covered by the media (here and here and here.)
Danny’s presentation at the IIPS was on the evidence of the strong links between poor public services and local inequalities – part of the IIPS’s ongoing conversation about what role research and public services play in improving people’s lives. Worrying as much of his evidence is, his talk was also a hopeful call to action. Despite the correlation between local deprivation and poor services he argued two points: First, if we take a look at recent data from The Futures Company, there is public will for social change and social action - and permission for radical change. Second, government has the tools to improve things on local levels and to stop inequalities from continuing to spread on a national scale.
BMRB Social Research’s Head of Methods Joel Williams argued that research can support the policy and service delivery changes that Danny urges – and looked at some different research methods. He identified new research strategies for the places that most need them: for example, opening up administrative data bases in their original forms, targeting surveys in areas with the greatest variety of life outcomes, local authorities working together on common policy interventions, and more facilitation of local area modelling by those conducting national surveys.
Danny’s assumption that government could provide most of the solutions was challenged by Professor Paul Wiles, Head of Government Social Research. He raised questions about the persistence of long-term, local inequalities, and the way in which these shaped long-term social and cultural perceptions of poorer areas. In short, there are limits to government power and policy making, especially in the face of other powerful agents of change (communities, families, the housing market, and more).
Big questions about government, community, and public and social capital at 8.30 in the morning. But as we only begin to see the effects of economic crash, these issues are only going to get sharper over the coming year - or more.
The picture shows Diego Rivera’s mural, ‘Contradictions between Rich and Poor 01″. Sheffield University’s ‘Changing UK’ report, co-authored by Danny Dorling, can be downloaded as a pdf from here. The IIPS is a co-venture between The Futures Company and BMRB which develops and promotes the use of citizen insight to support the transformation of public service delivery in the UK.
Add comment 4 December 2008
Grant Park’s tipping points
Editor’s note: Walker Smith, who runs The Futures Company’s Yankelovich division in the United States, has sent a long post reflecting on the 40-year context of Barack Obama’s Presidential victory this week. The conventional wisdom is that blog posts should be short and pithy. But we think that from time to time it’s better to give an argument the space and time it needs to unfold. Walker’s short essay is one of those occasions.
Walker Smith writes:
Barack Obama’s victory on Tuesday night was not unexpected. Three weeks out, political pundits knew that Obama had a lead that has never been overcome in modern political history. (Horse race political junkies will enjoy my favorite campaign resource, www.fivethirtyeight.com.) The real drama came an hour later when Obama took the stage with his family to honor this historic moment in his moving victory speech.
Chicago’s Grant Park, the scene of the victory rally, is a beautiful, expansive park bordering Lake Michigan that to this day still stirs up grueling memories for Baby Boomers like me, of the police violence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The question that hangs over Barack Obama’s election is whether it really does represents the end of a 40-year cycle of deep political and cultural division, even though his electoral victory was built on effective party-political organisation rather than cutting across party-political lines.
1 comment 7 November 2008
Learning to be a city
London Freewheel rolls down the Mall
Andrew Curry writes:
It was European Mobility Week last week, and London marked it with its second ‘Freewheel‘ event on Sunday. Quite a large area of the city centre (St James’ Park and the Embankment from Charing Cross to Tower Hill) was closed to motor vehicles; there were marshalled rides from feeder points around the city; and Sky Sports provided free hi-viz vests to anyone who wanted one. And during the course of the day around 50,000 cyclists turned out, helped by fine weather.
It brought to mind the idea that successful cities have to be both ‘magnets and glue’ (the phrase is Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s). Magnets are the events and buildings which make a city prominent; glue is what makes people stay there. The first is high profile, the second more about locality and liveability (good parks, good schools). The first tends towards the spectacular, the second towards the participatory.
What’s interesting is the way in which London has used cycling to promote both. There have been the magnet events such as the stages of the Tour of Britain and the Grand Depart of the Tour de France. Freewheel, in contrast, is glue - a social day out. But it turns out that a lot of the skills which are needed overlap. The roads closed off last Sunday were almost the same as for the first stage of the Tour of Britain earlier this month. The marshalling skills are similar.
As well as wanting to stage events such as this, cities have to learn how to do it. London has scaled up over time (the first time it closed off city centre roads for cycling it shut down a small area around Whitehall). It’s part of a successful pro-cycling strategy which has seen cyclist commuter numbers double in the capital over the last five years.
Freewheel photos (c) Peter Curry 2008
1 comment 26 September 2008
Liverpool Street freeze
The Liverpool Street Freeze was a few weeks ago now, but Denise’s post somehow got lost in the machine. Better late than never.
Denise Hicks writes:
Flash mobbing and its variations, such as ImprovEverywhere, have been around anecdotally for years now, but I’d never participated in one - believing that it was the preserve of the select few. Although there was an air of irreverent young trendies about the Liverpool Street Freeze, what surprised me was the inclusivity and breadth of the nature of participation. Alongside the BAPE-clad creative types with oversized headphones sat elderly women in mid-page turn of their daily paper, city types with briefcases stopped in mid-swing and construction workers pre-coffee gulp.
Preceding the Freeze was a strange sense of the anticipation of performance, but years of training on the underground have helped to perfect the art of being motionless and devoid of expression. As I stood, there was a strange sensation of being connected to the many people around, all with the same purpose and associated anticipation and sense of breaking the rules, doing something different, and yet you’re still anonymous to one another. It’s refreshingly uncomplicated in a world of hi-tech and complex ‘connections’.
While it would have been more poetic to end the four minutes as subtly and as nonchalantly as we’d begun, the Freezers couldn’t resist acknowledging the sense of achievement with a round of applause. Even for those of us who believed it should have ended in silence, leaving the viewers dumbfounded, we were secretly sharing in the celebration that for four minutes, we’d turned just another day into an extraordinary day and given hundreds of people something to talk about.
Add comment 3 June 2008
Dubai and the cities of the future
Andrew Curry writes:
I chaired a session this week at the Building Futures ‘Futures Fair‘ at the RIBA in London at which Reinier de Graaf, of the architectural practice OMA, talked about the development of Dubai - and some of its implications. The city has grown (been grown) from nothing in 15 years, and every significant architectural practice in the world, OMA included, is building something there. de Graaf described the city as a “multitude of competing theme parks”, as the “monotony of the exceptional”. He added that “there are as many billboards as buildings, and the billboards hold the promise of the finished city”.
The city is - famously - building out into the sea, and before long more than half of the population of Dubai will be living on sea rather than land. This isn’t because of a shortage of land, for there are miles of desert inland. de Graaf observed laconically:
One prefers to make projects in the sea, because they are more expensive and more difficult, and therefore more marketable, because one markets their difficulty.
But this isn’t just a story about urban ostentation. The development of Dubai followed a long-term decision by the Emirates to reduce its dependence on oil, and the last year in which oil contributed more than half of national revenues was in 1985. The three property companies which are building Dubai are each half-owned by the UAE Royal Family, and the men who run them all hold positions in the Emirates government. Property is now one of the Emirates’ biggest exports, and its property companies are now building in all of the fastest growing cities in the world, from Morocco to the Philippines. As Reinier de Graaf noted, ‘the Dubai model’ represents a challenge to our received wisdom that democracy represents the best guarantee of economic prosperity.
1 comment 17 May 2008
Something more permanent
Emily Pitts writes:
I took this shot of the back of London Bridge station recently - something about the way the light was falling, illuminating the bus and the signage on the station, caught my eye. The woman standing by the van looks so dated! It was a surprise to find a hint of something more permanent than the hordes of tourists outside the London Dungeons each day and the dull chrome geometry of Foster…
Add comment 26 April 2008
