Spare us from Community Engagement
By Dave Clements | 17 September 2012 What is the meaning of community today, and how it can be meaningfully engaged with? While there is no end of projects tasked with engaging communities, whether this is a meaningful activity or not is a moot point. Indeed, if we stopped trying to engage communities they might actually have a chance to breathe. To my mind, although there may be some well intentioned projects out there, all things...
Ganging up on ‘Yoof’
Dave Clements | 23 February 2012 While they are, if claims coming out of last week’s summit are to be believed, to blame for the rise of al-Shabab in Somalia, the role of gangs in last summer’s riots was, at the very least, negligible. That much is acknowledged by pretty much everybody. It has even been reported that gang leaders called a truce during hostilities. Bless ’em. But still the government’s...
Not the end of the world, says Blair
Dave Clements | 16 February 2007 “The UK is the worst place to grow up in the industrialised world” screamed the headlines, following the publication of UNICEF’s damning report. Added to the coincidence of an almost simultaneous bate of shootings in South London, commentators with their own particular spin on events, and state enforcers with a peculiar grasp on reality, were each whipped into a frenzy. Not only did...
After the Riots: what makes a city?
Michael Owens | 17 October 2011 The riots affected many places that have been the focus for urban regeneration and neighbourhood renewal. It’s a bitter pill for those of us in the business to swallow, but our efforts may have contributed to the problem rather than helped create the solution. Despite all the ‘New Deals’, engaged stakeholders, and ‘empowered’ communities, a significant proportion of our communities were prepared to...
The housewife that changed the world?
‘The Death and Life of Great American Cities’ by Jane Jacobs; Random House, 1961. 458pp Reviewed by Alastair Donald | 31 July 2011 “From this house in 1961, a housewife changed the world.” When she died in 2005, the tributes and flowers on the pavement outside Jacobs’ former flat in Greenwich Village suggested the high esteem in which she is held by many designers who see her as having played a pivotal role in altering how we...
ESSAY: ‘The Big Society’ (or ‘Compulsory Voluntarism’)
Austin Williams | 24 July 2010 | Muslim Institute Summer Conference, Cardiff The Big Society is being promoted as the flagship government policy even though no-one seems to have the first idea what it means. Commentator, Simon Jenkins, writing in the Guardian has described it as ‘incomprehensibly vague’. Government minister, Francis Maude is quoted as saying that it is “an idea, not a plan” (ref 1); while...
In a Right State
Martin Earnshaw | 20 October 2009 Is being fat a lifestyle choice or is it caused by circumstances beyond your control? Will the recession create a nation of alcoholics? Across a range of issues, it seems, the recession is taking a devastating toll on our well-being. One in ten have been drinking more heavily because of the recession the Telegraph reported in June while a Which? survey reported in March that the recession could...
Building Resilience
‘The Everyday Resilience of the City: How Cities Respond to Terrorism and Disaster’ by J. Coaffee, D. Murkami-Wood and P. Rogers; Palgrave/Macmillan, 2008. 304pp Reviewed by Alastair Donald | 28 September 2009 Whether through ecological breakdown, terrorism, pandemics or crime, cities are now widely perceived as permanently ‘under threat’. Consequently, creating ‘resilience’ has become a key concept in public policy, and...
Broken Communities: Is state intervention part of the cause or the solution?
Dave Clements | 12 February 2009 Facing criticism from all sides for proposing draconian welfare reforms during a recession, the Prime Minister said – as if responding to another question – that ‘doing nothing is not an option’ (1). In a way, of course, he’s right the benefits system is in a mess and needs sorting out. But sometimes it is better to just leave things alone until you’ve got something...
The Future of Community
Speech given at Belfast Salon, Northern Ireland launch of The Future of Community Alastair Donald | 25 November 2008 For obvious reasons British identity has long been a contested subject in Northern Ireland. However, today national identity has become a problematic issue on a much wider scale, with society’s elite no longer able to secure support for, or even articulate an agreed set of collective values. This was confirmed...
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