Networking: Network Gives Fresh Perspectives on Sustainable Communities

Not so much lecturing about regeneration, more giving a brief history of a set of social theories which help us think again about the way regeneration is carried out and why, Ian took his listeners on an intellectual roller coaster ride at the end of which they could feel they had achieved fresh insight into how regeneration works - and all too often does not.


Ian divides his time between his home in Devon, his work in Sweden, elsewhere in Europe and a base as a Social Anthropologist at Cambridge University's Faculty of Social & Political Sciences.


One issue he addressed was why standard, top-down regeneration programmes often fail to meet the needs of the communities they target, despite well-meaning efforts to consult. He suggested that it's worth thinking of the basic failure to communicate in terms of fax machines.
 


These communicate by establishing a link, or 'hand-shake', with an identically configured machine. Since grass-roots communities are not configured to relate to regeneration bureaucracy-speak, the bureaucrats with the money set up, unwittingly or otherwise, committees of local people who can speak the same language as themselves. The money gets spent, there appears to be local involvement, but the problems remain.


Ian described how he has put his theories into practice. One example came through working as part of the Nordic Council of Ministers "Interactive and Digital Media", looking at the bus station area of Hlemmur in Reykjavik, Iceland. He was able successfully to question the assumption that the answer was to simply pull the bus station down - which seemed to be the source of the problem - and to build another one. Instead, using a wide range of techniques and communications technologies, he enabled the voices and needs of users and local residents and even perceived trouble-makers to be heard. This information has led to the testing of other solutions – alternative, community uses for a closed bank building nearby, for example. The good-looking bus station (not a contradiction in terms in Iceland, at any rate) built in the 1960s, survives and the process continues…


For more information on other forthcoming events see Events South West