Category Archives: Regeneration, Renewal And Resilience
Employment Polarisation, Gender And Regeneration
An ippr report by Ioannis Kaplanis tells of increasing employment polarisation in Britain – with differences most significant amongst female employees in London. Regional economies must learn from Kaplanis’s studies, looking especially at policies for the full use and retention of women’s high-level skills. One emphasis must surely be on how very senior decision makers outside London (a hugely male population) respond to this challenge.
The Institute for Public Policy Research (ippr) has just published a paper by Ioannis Kaplanis at the London School of Economics. The report, entitled, The Geography of Employment Polarisation in Britain, offers potentially far-reaching implications for renewal and regeneration in the UK.
Polarisation, but not greater absolute poverty
In essence, Kaplanis tells us that polarisation between high-paid and low-paid occupations in Britain has increased significantly since the early 1990s, but that both categories have seen expansion when measured against middle-income activity.
This, Kaplanis suggests, is because technology (and international out-sourcing?) have removed the need for large numbers of middle-level skills, whereas very highly skilled work still requires very highly skilled people – who in turn stimulate the demand for lower-level skills such as domestic cleaning and local leisure facilities. (Perhaps this polarisation is also more likely to occur where there is a lot of private sector activity.)
The gender dimension
Most significant of all, it appears, has been this effect on female employment in London – which is hardly surprising, given that many talented young people go to London to work; and London is where gender discrimination is, if necessary, most challenged and least likely to occur before the highest levels of the glass ceiling. (Merseyside, as a contrasting example, has an appalling senior level employment record in gender terms.)
Add to such a backdrop the obvious fact that women are usually responsible for hiring domestic help (they can’t do home maintenance and have high level jobs…) and we have a win-win for female workers at both ends of the formal skills spectrum.
The regional challenge
There are many other aspects to Kaplanis’s work in addition to gender, but he does note that employment polarisation is now (the converse may have been true until the early 1990s) less evident in the UK regions than in the capital.
So here’s a challenge: get highly-skilled women outside London working at the level of their acquired expertise – and pay and promote them properly.
Then maybe the UK regions would see a turn-around of their still relatively declining fortunes. It’s only one part of the equation, but it might just prompt that desperately needed impetus towards success.
Climate Change And Planning Applications Reviewed
A White Paper on sustainability and planning rules is about to appear. Ruth Kelly, the Government’s Communities Secretary, wants climate change to be an integral part of the agenda for the overall planning process, regarding both infrastructure and local renewable technologies. So why has the Local Government Association already rejected the White Paper?
The detail is always the issue, of course, but surely the Local Government Association (LGA) is plain wrong to reject – or so it appears – Ruth Kelly’s proposed White Paper on planning rules and sustainability even before it goes to print?
There may well be issues about how planning applications for big projects such as airport terminals are handled, but the present system is hardly perfect. (The time scale – six years – and cost of the process for Heathrow’s fifth terminal is one example.)
Addressing climate change where it makes a difference
The critical point of the intended White Paper is that it attends to the very real challenge of climate change. Yvette Cooper, the Department of Communities and Local Government Housing Minister, is already lined up to head a ‘green buildings
task force’; now Ruth Kelly wants to do her bit by enabling more easily the actual implementation of the essential changes to the way things will be done.
Oliver Letwin, the Conservatives’ policy spokesperson, and (Lord) Sandy Bruce-Lockhart, Tory leader of the LGA, have responded to the idea of the Green Paper by talking about loss of ‘local control’.
A global issue, not a local one
I’m all for local people feeling empowered and engaged – the local dimension does matter – but haven’t Messrs Letwin and Bruce-Lockhart lost the plot?
Climate change is a global issue, not one which can be resolved primarily by local consultation, for goodness’ sake.
Balanced Development And Housing Wealth Redistribution
Is freeing northern inner-city land the best way to a more equitable and ecologically sustainable national economy? For wealthy city-based Southerners this is possibly an obvious strategy. But some of us Up North, or anywhere in the inner-city / rural hinterland, might want a few safeguards built in.
‘The sensible way to redistribute housing wealth [and] promote balanced development’, writes Simon Jenkins in today’s Guardian, ‘is to free on to the market the millions of acres of empty and under-occupied inner-city land.’
Jenkins thus pronounces Gordon Brown’s idea for five ‘eco-friendly’ towns, apparently on derelict rural sites in the south, as ‘solely about economic growth’, with little or no reference to the ‘duty to promote social cohesion or civic enterprise.’
It appears Brown is judged to have learned nothing from the work of Willmott and Young and others who devoted much of their professional lives to the lessons of Bethnall Green in London’s East End, and other housing relocation programmes.
One size does not fit all
If Gordon Brown intends only to build his new towns, and not to
attend in any way to the issues of VAT (still imposed on brownfield development) or distantly rural housing, perhaps Simon Jenkins has a point. But I doubt that’s all there is to it.
These southern ‘eco-towns’ will free up housing in overheated areas such as the Golden Triangle, and will make it easier for many people on medium and low wages to live within striking distance of the national facilities they service for a living. These eco-towns will also offer people in some rural locations a more affordable option for housing.
The ‘Northern’ focus
I am amongst those who have argued fiercely for large-scale knowledge economy and other investments in the North of England. I don’t however think, despite Gershon and its challenging proposals, that simply trying to move people Up North
en masse is an answer – which is the de facto corollary of the ‘just develop northern inner-city brownfields’ position.
We have already noted the extraordinary idea, still promoted it seems by some strategists in the North of England, that northern housing investments and wages must be kept down – that’s the income levels of those of us Northerners actually in work, sacrificed – for the sake of in-coming investors. Now it appears that southern commentators also think northern house prices must be constrained.
One way traffic?
Charming. That’s one way to make sure people can come to us in the North, but we can’t go to live with them (and they won’t be able to go back to the South either).
What I’d rather see is two-way traffic, making it easy for people
to migrate in roughly equal numbers between different parts of the country at different points in their careers and lives.
Perhaps, indeed, it’s this fear of losing out on the housing market which is making Gershon so difficult to implement? People know, intuitively, that if they move North they will lose out, just as we up here know we can’t afford to move South, however much we might want that experience personally or professionally.
Getting real – and sustainable
So let’s get real. There is a need for more affordable housing in the South, and if it can be even quasi-carbon neutral (if ‘quasi’ is the term) I’d welcome that. We have to start somewhere.
And let’s add to that the need, frequently and vigorously promoted, to develop northern brownfield, inner-city sites in a similar way, with whatever tax breaks and incentives are
required. Maybe that’s next on Gordon Brown’s list?
Graduate retention
But please don’t do all this in a way which actually diminishes the opportunity of the (relative minority) of Northerners who do have personal and professional high ambitions – those very people most generically equipped to promote Simon Jenkin’s overall ‘social cohesion and civic enterprise’ – from moving around the country as they should.
The North needs such people even more than the South does. At the moment however, the best advice for most very bright young graduates from northern universites is, ‘Go South Now’. (Challenge me on this is you wish…)
If we’re serious about retaining high skills practitioners in the North, it would be a good idea at least to acknowledge their
property and income interests too.
Lewis’s, Lime Street And Liverpool Losing Out
Liverpool city centre is in a state of flux, as the Big Dig re-routes and bewilders in equal measure. The aim is that the city centre will become a pleasant, business-friendly place to be. The disgraceful state of Renshaw Street, linking Lime Street Station to the city south end, sadly belies that intent. It’s scruffy and delapidated; does it have to be like this?
The steel-grey vistas above are what first greet visitors to Liverpool’s city centre. The once-mighty Lewis’s department store and the street from there to the main train station look much as some of us recall them thirty years ago, except perhaps they are less well scrubbed. And to add to this we now have the challenge of the City Centre Movement Strategy (CCMS) ‘in action’ every time we come into town.
The Big Dig as a way of life
To those familiar with Liverpool’s city centre the Big Dig has become a way of life. Intended to make the heart of Liverpool ‘fit for purpose’ for the celebratory years of 2007 and 2008, this now seemingly perennial feature of the city centre experience feels to have become a liability for Liverpool’s citizens, rather then an opportunity to enhance our future.
Many are asking whether a city which has suffered so much digging of holes and diversion of traffic in all directions can actually survive as an economic entity until the works are finally completed. The word is that some local businesses are going to the wall, especially in the train station area around Liverpool Lime Street, RenshawStreet and the Adelphi Hotel (not, it seems, itself under duress).
Enterprise endangered
Certainly, there have already been casualties. Heart & Soul, Chumki Banerjee’s signature bistro restaurant just around the corner on Mount Pleasant, has closed and Lewis’s Ltd (quite a different retail company from John Lewis) is rumoured after many years – it was founded in 1856 – to be folding imminently (mid-May 2007). There are also suggestions that
some other long-established local stores are at risk.
A relaxed approach to regeneration?
No-one denies that improvements to the city centre are required; but many question the apparently relaxed approach the City Council and others have taken to achieving this.
Work on the Big Dig seems at best to be nine-to-five, and nobody, as far as one can tell, has a responsibility actually to clean up the grimly grey and crumbling retail and commercial buildings along Renshaw Street from Lime Street.
Take a fresh look – and freshen up!
Is it surprising that businesses in this well-established part of town are feeling the pinch? Who would choose to walk from Lime Street up to Lewis’s along a street resembling the set of a 1960s kitchen sink melodrama, when they can instead take the
crossing outside the station into the pedestrian zone?
Perhaps some city leaders need to walk this walk, as well as talking the theoretical talk about the local infrastructural wonders we can soon expect.
Support the positive
There will always be brave souls who find a way forward. Fleur Hair and Beauty, previously located in the now-collapsing Lewis’s department store, has taken a walk across the road to the Adelphi Hotel Health Club, where the business can re-consolidate. No doubt there are others too who have faced the future and re-grouped.
Things are never static, especially in the world of enterprise, and to some extent this is good. That, however, does not excuse the failure of city local leaders to address problems which are beyond
the control of all but the very largest businesses.
Challenging market conditions
This is a city with more than the usual proportion of small and medium sized enterprises (compared to large ones – but still low in proportion to the public sector). These SMEs, often owned and run by individuals who actually live in Liverpool, have little slack in their business plans to accommodate civic laxity.
Not all businesses are equally effectively run, but Liverpool can’t afford the luxury of just letting private sector interests go to the wall without any support.
Nurture the positives
As I have said before, Regeneration Rule No. 1 has to be:
First nurture the positive assets you already have.
It’s not just the interests of visitors to our 2007 and 2008 celebrations that we must protect. The concerns of local workers and entrepreneurs are also core.
They, after all, are the people who hope still to be here in 2009.
Fleur Health & Beauty
Spindles Health Club
The Britannia Adelphi Hotel
Ranelagh Place (Renshaw Street)
Liverpool L3 5UL
0151-709 7200 x 044
And a happy PS: Fleur has now re-opened her salon in the ‘rescued’ Lewis’s, to run alongside the Adelphi salon – Lewis’s, Ranelagh Street, 0151-709 7000.
What’s The 2008 Liverpool European Capital Of Culture Year For?
Liverpool ‘s 2008 European Capital of Culture Year will be upon us in just a few months. But deep divides remain between artists, civic leaders and many local people about what the 2008 Year is ‘for’.
Alex Corina has taken the plunge into controversy on developments with the Liverpool’s plans for the 2008 European Capital of Culture Year. He’s reinvented Edvard Munch’s The Scream as The Liverpool Scream, just as in happier times he produced the Mona Lennon.
How do we measure success?
Despite the intentional playing to the gallery in all this, there is a very serious issue to be considered here. It concerns the rationale/s which lie behind the 2008 culture programme.
For many (not all) in the Culture Company I gather that one of most important ‘real’ ways that success will be measured in 2008 is number of tourist beds (i.e. overnight stays) which are achieved during the year.
The local artists’ perspective
I can see why this is a significant measure, but it’s not the message which most ‘community arts’ people in the city want to prioritise. They, like some Culture Company officers, seek to develop their communities by using ‘culture’ as a socially helpful way to bring people together.
This is however obviously much harder to measure and has less immediate impact on the seriously challenging sub-regional economy (though longer-term it would be good).
A view from cultural institutions
And then of course there are the ‘high arts’ bigger organisations which no doubt see the major outcome for themselves as being numbers of tickets sold for shows, concerts, whatever.
Again, a very valid perspective, and we need to recognise that if these organisations were not to benefit from 2008 ‘celebrations’
they would be in serious trouble in 2009 – which would mean the loss of many very accomplished artists and performers who currently work in the city(but often choose not to live here because the additional employment opportunities are so much better in, say, Manchester – see below).
Nurturing home-based professional artistic talent?
But the requirement to sustain the big arts organisations, though vital for Liverpool’s future status, still ignores the need – not at all as yet recognised as far as I can judge – to support locally-based fully trained and professional artists and performers with very high levels of skill who want to work in the city simply as artists and performers, not as community-based animateurs.
An edgy approach
This may be difficult when, for instance, the new Liverpool
Commissions stream requires that applicants offer something wacky and on the edge; which is good for some, but sounds absolutely daft if you are a historically-inclined fine arts person or a classically trained musician.
Playing to the local Liverpool gallery, which prides itself on being on the edge, is understandable, but it won’t impress many others from elsewhere; and why aren’t local professional artists being respected as artists in their own right – or so it might appear – in the same way as visiting ones?
I have already asked How Will We Know That Liverpool 2007 & 2008 Were Successful? And that debate continues.
At least three views?
In the meantime, I’m still not sure what the answers might be, but they seem to coalesce around the three views above:
1. tourist spend / beds
2. community cohesion and capacity building
3. (potentially) retention of high-level artistic skills in the city
Where’s the dialogue?
Unfortunately however there seems to be very little dialogue between those who promote each of these perspectives.
Indeed, I’m not sure it’s possible to do this under the present ‘consultation’ arrangements, with occasional meetings of large numbers of people – professional artists and others with very different experience together – in sports halls and the like.
Bringing the issues into focus
If Alex Corina’s current activities can help everyone to focus on
the ‘what’s 2008 for?’ message whilst there’s still at least a little bit of time left, that will be excellent.
As a city resident I’d like to see everything succeed so that proposed cultural ‘villages’, respected highly-skilled professional artists and performers, and our tourist trade all flourish ; but we’re still a way from achieving this.
A matter of urgency
The dialogue does need to be getting somewhere, and pretty quickly, please.
Regeneration And Community Engagement In Action: The ‘Rules’
‘Regeneration’ happens when someone with influence perceives a need for improvement. But this is a process in which professionals omit to involve those to whom regeneration is being done at their peril. What follows is therefore a set of observations or ‘rules’, derived from direct experience, about how regeneration and community engagement may play out on the ground.
The ‘Rules’ below are presented from the perspective of a professional approaching a regeneration scenario. The reader might like to turn them around and ‘translate’ them, to reflect the possible understandings of a person ‘in the community’ on whose (claimed) behalf regeneration is taking place.
1) It is very difficult to ensure that everyone ‘knows’ what they need / would like to know.
2) People at all levels get suspicious / unhelpful if they feel ‘left out of the loop’.
3) Identifying legitimate Stakeholders is always a challenge – not all of them are formal.
4) Professional practitioners are not the font of all knowledge.
5) Perspectives and language (discourse / terms) may vary
dramatically between parties.
6) Expectations may similarly vary, and can be challenging to manage.
7) It is essential to start any programme by identifying ‘what works’ and protecting that.
8) Who is ‘qualified’ to undertake such ‘what works’ identification can be problematic.
9) Participants’ understandings develop over time; what they’d initially asked for will change.
10) The same may also apply to the professionals involved – especially if they are sensitive to context.
11) Sustainability – social, economic, physical – is often
overlooked in practice, if not in theory.
12) There is rarely a clear end-point (when does ‘regeneration’ finish?)
13) Engagement is by definition voluntary; it can never be forced, but is very necessary.
14) Equipping people to engage often requires patience, skill and thoughtful leadership.
15) Many stakeholders only really become interested when the chequebook arrives; be ready and beware!
These observations formed part of a lecture delivered (by Hilary Burrage) on 23 April 2007 to Masters’ students of social policy and political science at Charles University, Prague, in the Czech
Republic.
What do you think?
Do these ‘rules’ reflect your experience? And are there other ‘rules’ to add to these?
SuperLambBanana
SuperLambBanana may be kinda cute, but, made of steel and concrete and 17 feet tall, he’s no lightweight. Created in 1998 by Taro Chienzo for the Art Transpennine Exhibition, he abides in Liverpool city centre, be/amusing all. He’s been Friesian (black and white), pink and sometime graffitied, but ‘really’ he’s yellow.
See more photographs of The City of Liverpool here: Photographs of Liverpool & Merseyside;
and photographs of elsewhere, here: Camera & Calendar
Click here for more information on Super Lamb Banana, alias ‘Superlambanana’.
Graduate Retention Strategies: Ageist, Sexist Or Just Shortsighted?
Graduate retention is a serious aspect of any decent policy for regeneration. But the emphasis on new / young graduates alone is strange, when there are always also other highly qualified and more experienced people who might offer at least as much in any developing economy.
A recurring theme in the regeneration of cities and regions is the emphasis on retention of graduates. This is an entirely reasonable focus, given the cost of producing graduates and the potential which they have in terms of economic value. The flight of bright graduates from regional to capital cities is a well-marked issue for most regional economies.
Reducing the loss of graduate talent is generally a task allocated to the regional universities which have educated them. There is a whole sector of most regional knowledge economies which is dedicated simply to training and retaining graduates in the hope that they will enhance the economic performance of that region.
Extending the scope for retention
There are also now schemes which train ‘women returners’, women who have taken time out to raise a family or who have
only later in their working lives decided to develop their formal skills. Generally these schemes give good value for the ‘returners’ and their future employers, at least in terms of providing competent middle-level practitioners and professionals; and certainly they can make a really significant difference to the lives of the women who undertake the training.
Overlooked and under-used
But there is another group of people with high skills who are often simply not geared into their local and regional economy in any meaningful way. These are often older, highly qualified and experienced graduate women who are no longer working (but are usually not registered as unemployed), and who may remain living in an area because they have family or other personal commitments there.
These women generally do not need any further training (except in the same way that other practising professionals might need it) and they often undertake a good deal of voluntary and unpaid work in their communities. Little of this work however is given any formal economic value, and even less of it is focused strategically on the requirements of their economic location.
How could their activities be strategically focused, when these women, often for reasons beyond their individual control, may have almost no continuing professional connection in their communities?
Invisible people
In an economy with a significant proportion of women leaders and decision-makers the ‘invisible’ older female graduate might be identified as a person with serious economic potential,
someone for whom every effort should be made to find or create suitable high-level employment or enterprise opportunities commensurate with her qualifications and experience.
Highly qualified men are likely, we might suppose, to move to a job elsewhere which meets their requirements; the women may have no choice but to relinquish their employment, if their family moves elsewhere or if circumstances mean their job disappears. In many challenged regional and local economies however the scope to realise this female potential remains unperceived by those (mostly men) who decide the strategy for their local economies.
Doing the audit
Has anyone tried to estimate the numbers of ‘non-economically-productive’ highly qualified older women in a given regional or
local economy undergoing regeneration? Does anyone know what these women currently contribute informally to their economies, or what they could contribute formally in the right contexts?
Older women are often seemingly invisible. My guess, from many private encounters, discussions and observations over the past few years, is that here is an almost totally untapped resource.
Nurturing all available resources
Retention of young graduates is of course critical to economic renaissance; but so is the gearing in of the potential of older and more experienced graduates. This is another example of why economic regeneration strategists need to appreciate and nurture more carefully what they already have, as well as what they would like for the future to procure.
This article is also linked from the New Start magazine blog of 14 March 2007.
BRCs: The Science Golden Triangle Wins Again
England’s Northern Universities are upset that the Biomedical Research Centres (BRCs) of excellence are all in the ‘Golden Triangle’ of Oxford, Cambridge and London. ‘Added value’ economic impact has been sidelined. With intimations of southern advantage and selective assessment perspectives, is this a re-run of the 4GLS synchrotron debate on location in the ‘north’ or ‘south’?
Prof Alan Gilbert, Vice-Chancellor of Manchester University, is championing medical science in England’s northern universities, after his institution was not selected as a comprehensive biomedical research centre of excellence (BRC). This accolade, worth 8-figure sums to each institution, has been awarded only to universities in Oxford, Cambridge and London.
Once again, the Golden Triangle has triumphed over everywhere else in England.
And once again the southern economy hots up as northern sensitivities are similarly inflamed.
Who decides?
The decision to support only Golden Triangle universities was made by the Department of Health / NHS National Institute for Health Research
(NIRH) high command, on the basis of assessment by a panel of experts working outside England of the international excellence of medical science in the competing universities.
This panel does not seem to have laid much emphasis on the impact of macro-investment in the knowledge economy on regional economies as such.
History repeats itself
So here we go again.
More science money is being invested where money has already gone. Comparatively less is made available where investment has historically been more difficult to obtain.
When the big debates about synchrotron investment in the North of England were conducted, the medical science people were
hardly to be seen. The Wellcome Trust, a major player in bio-medical research, was widely regarded as unhelpful to those making the northern case, and even some northern university medical scientists did not support it.
Yet investment (usually of government money) in scientific institutions with capacity and established further potential is critical to wider long-term prospects for the UK economy.
Biggest impact, greatest added-value
Prof Gilbert says that universities must not ‘ask favours because we have been disadvantaged historically’. But in fighting his case he could look at the Daresbury (4GLS) – Rutherford Appleton (Diamond) synchrotron debates to see that the issues may be slightly different.
It is not ‘asking favours’ if those of us, the public whose money is
being spent, demand equity in terms of investment opportunities for top-level science.
Wider perspectives
The NHS is a very closed institution which has not, historically, been good at acknowledging it is now an important part of the wider knowledge economy.
Patient care is the aspect of this huge organisation which most members of the public experience, but that should be a fundamental ‘given’. It cannot provide refuge from the fact that, medically or otherwise, international science knows no silos.
Excellence in context
Nor can a rightful emphasis on patient experience permit us to forget, as collectively holders of the public purse, that any public investment needs to work in as many different ways as possible.
As the growing success of the U.K.’s ‘northern’ Darebury Laboratories has shown, internationally excellent science, public benefit across the nation and added-value regional development can evolve hand in hand, if enough decision-makers have the vision and courage to ensure that this will happen.
Carbon-Neutral Villages, British And Czech Alike
Self-sufficiency in energy is an ambition shared by many. Increasingly we are recognising that carbon-neutral living must be for real. Communities in Ashton Hayes, near Chester in the U.K., and Knezice, an hour east of Prague in the Czech Republic, provide different real-life examples of how this might be achieved.
Co-incidence or, perhaps, rather more than that? Perhaps the renewable energy agenda is at last becoming mainstream.
Dreaming Realist 