Working in place (and working out what that means)

Warning! This is one of those more geeky think pieces as I’m trying to make sense of, and dreaming a bit, about three connected strands of thought:

• the importance of community power as a foundation for any kind of democratic or public service renewal
• the need to weave this into the narrative of public service reform rather than have it run in parallel or in opposition
• a refocus on the civic infrastructures and fabrics needed to make both of those things happen

The policy focus on neighbourhood governance in the Devolution Bill also factors in this as does the emphasise on neighbourhood healthcare in the NHS 10 year plan – these are both useful leverage points for those of us who believe that community based thinking and decision making is vital to thriving places.

I’m thinking about these things through the lens of systems practice – very much in the Donella Meadows sense rather than more technocratic approaches – and thinking about power and the other possible leverage points to make change happen.

I am looking through the systems lens as it feels as if there is so much potential for change at the moment which will be missed if we don’t connect the different elements and opportunities to shift the whole system – not just the parts that we are sitting in.

This is also very much sparked by a conversation with Nick Kimber and also the recent Re:State piece in the MJ asking for ‘no more pilots’ – if we want to do deep and transformative work we need to be creating the conditions for experimentation and learning and systemic change – not one off moments when things are different.

This coalesces in a vision of the neighbourhood as being the smallest unit of design for future public services but more importantly as the place where we need to focus efforts in terms of community power as a foundation of everything else. Its also the place where prevention needs to happen – the mythical ‘upstream’ where people have what they need to live well. This is then the building block of the rest of a redesigned system (I did warn you I was dreaming).

What are the conditions for this being possible? Where do we need to put our attention? Here is a first go:

• We need to firstly be prepared to wrestle with what we mean by neighbourhood and at create some shared descriptions. One of my observations stepping into a new system is how many definitions of place there are between services, organisations, and then something completely different when you talk to people out and about. If we want to make neighbourhoods powerful then we need to talk about place – and that means we need to work out what it is. For a practical take on this – have a look at this brilliant work happening in Sheffield and then imagine it connecting to a more coterminous view of place from within local government and perhaps even more importantly health which is having its own wrestling match with place at the moment.
• In parallel, you want to explore a delivery approach for services which reflects this map – something we scratched the service of with our neighbourhood model in Adur and Worthing. I’m not just talking about place services like parks or public realm, I’m thinking foundational economy of high streets and small parades and vitally our prevention services in family hubs, day centres and of course the mighty library.
• There is a need to look at how we rethink place based democracy – have a read of my colleague Mel’s blog in this over at CFGS on this – the LGR policy steer of Neighbourhood Committees opens up this space but the whole devolution agenda is an opportunity if we take it.

This all relies on a commitment to community power, underlined by asset based working articulated beautifully in Cormac Russell’s piece for New Local earlier this year but also a commitment to the role of the ward councillor and their deep connection place – we need to work on and in the liminal space between community power and local representation.

But for this to work we need to create spaces where we can design this with the public service practitioners who work in place rather than assuming the state is just an incumbrance to community power. Public service has, through a number of factors, been pushed into a technocratic and often mechanistic model (yes New Public Management I am looking at you) but it doesn’t have to be that way. Reinventing AND reforming public service to be more human and relational is within our gift – and arguably is exactly what our communities need as we explore and model ‘The work we need’ which Hilary Cotton writes about in her new book.

Last and my no means least we need to think about the civic infrastructures which underpin all of this. I sometimes joke that the summary of my whole PhD, which looked at the relationship between technology and democracy, is ‘not Facebook’ and while I am very conscious of the risk of being that person who had an idea 10 years ago and then rushes to every situation claiming it’s time has come….but I think it’s time to talk about digital civics properly again. We need safe spaces we can organise, connect and learn together online

But I don’t think we can talk about digital civics on their own – we need to think about how we are supporting our civic infrastructure to work across online/offline boundaries and become the foundation of renewal, or sustainment, for our communities. I loved this report – again from New Local – about the centrality and value of community spaces – not the least as it acknowledges the huge variety and the fact that a shared space is unique to the community it is embedded in.

There is clearly a lot here – but that’s not surprising. Society is a shared endeavour not a solo act. To make change of this scale happen we will need some discipline and method to organise experimentation and co-create – but I think that overhead is worth it to end up doing something much bigger together rather than each of these strands operating in isolation and ultimately frustrating each other.

This needs us to think more about the potential of ally-ship, connection and sharing power. It needs the different tribes of practitioners who see the opportunity to think like a social movement not like a group of competitors, with a shared purpose of system change. It also needs us to understand the conditions needed for this to happen and create those in as many places as possible – and then leave places to create what they feel they need within those conditions – all the time but open to changing the conditions so they are generative rather than than reductive. I think this is part of the invitation and opportunity of the Test, Learn and Grow programme – the thing now is to get organised to take it up.

‌PS. Apologies to the people who have been saying this consistently all the way through.

PPS. Yes, this is very much in the fantasy system space but a bit more practical….