Save our cities by Ruth Jacobs

Recently British politicians, in central government and locally in the big citirs, h;Lvc begun to express increased concern about the problems of declining inner city ar(.as, They have been following the lead of a number of academics who have suggested that the 30-year-old policy of industrial and population dispersal from these areas has rlou gone too far and is resulting in a collapse of the economic, social and financial hasc of such areas.

Another important influence has been the findings of two officially sponsored pro- grammes, inner area studies in Birmingham, Liverpool and London carried out }Iy planning consultants and a series of Community Development Projects (CDPSI undrr. taken in a wider range of areas. The latter projects are especially interesting as t ) ~ ~ y have moved, over a number of years, towards an increasingly radical analysis of inrlrr area decline which links this phenomenon directly with the consequences of modrrr, capitalism and proposes socialist solutions. As a result, in this last year or so central government has taken measures to terminate the CDPs.

The government Minister responsible for planning and housing (Peter Shore, Sccrc.. tary of State for the Environment) has stated that new policies will be announccd in the spring, and the conference which Ruth Jacobs reports on below was heavily pro. moted in the press as a major opportunity for the various groups concerned with inner area problems to come together, define the correct strategy and influence offiicial think- ing.

Les hommes politiques britanniques, au niveau central du gouvernement et aussi au niveau local des grandes villes, ont commence rkcemment a exprimer une anxiikti. grandissante devant les problemes poses par la dktkrioration des centres urbains. 11s font suite aux initiatives entreprises par un nombre d’acadtmiques qui ont sug+ris que la politique, vieille de 30 ans, de dispersion des industries et des populations dc ces centres, est allke trop loin et provoque I’effondrement de la base economique, soriair et fiscale de ces zones.

Une autre influence importante a ete les rksultats prksentes par deux prograrnmrs gouvernementaux, les etudes des centres-villes de Birmingham, Liverpool et Londrrs effectuees par des planificateurs conseils prives, ainsi qu’une serie de projets de dCve- loppement communautaire (Community Development Projects-CDPx) cntreprisc dans une grande varieted’endroits. Ces derniers ont un intertt particulier, car au cow des annkes ils se sont orientes vers une analyse de la deterioration des centres-villcs de plus en plus radicale, qui rattache directement ce phenomene avec les conskquencrs d’un capitalisme avanck, et ils ProPosent des solutions socialistes. Le resultat est quc l’annee derniere le gouvernement central a supprime les CDPs.

Le ministre responsable de la planification et du logement (Peter Shore, Secrktairr d’Etat pour I’Environnement) a diclark qu’une nouvelle politique sera announcer au

A conference sponsored by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and The Sunday Times at the School of Advanced Urban Studies, Bristol, 9--12 February 1977.

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rintrrnps. 1,a conferrnce dont Ruth Jacobs donne un compte rendu ci-dessous, a rq- Eeaucoup d r publicit6 dans la prcsse commc 6tant une occasion importante pour les divrrs groupcs s’intercssant aux probkmes des centres urbains, de se rassembler afin dr di.finir u n c stratkgie et d’influencer la pens& officielle.

A conference set UP to ‘Save our Cities’ and to focus on ‘the deteriorating s ta tc ofour urban heritage’ was faced with clear evidence that the fundamental issur h% as that ofpoverty. How were discussants and contributors able to resolve thisdilemma? HOW were membersofthe Labour Government going to formu- late ameliorist policies when, as the studies their department commissioned demonstrate, ameliorism had so clearly failed? Indeed, why were Labour

interested in an area in which there were no votes to be won but many to be lost if resources were to be redirected from the richer, marginal arcas where votes did matter? The political background is obscure and various arguments have been put forward. One simplistic suggestion is that, as the Secretary of State is Member for an inner city constituency, he is responding to prrssure from a new wave of energetic Labour councillors who have taken Over from the old guard. Another, more Machiavellian, proposal is that the Prime Minister is engaged in fixing a social contract with strong, well- organized unions and has problems enough on that front. If he can push the pmblrms ofpoverty away from fiscal measures which may affect large sections ofthe population to area-based measures, this may be a cheap yet easily publi- cized ‘solution’. Since the private sector is increasingly the focus for job crea- tion policies, i t might be possible ‘to create wealth’ at no great cost to the state and to be humane and progressive at the same time.

Pctcr Shore’s initial speech provided a kind of answer: first, he feared ‘the rot sprcading’ SO that in the end i t would ‘affect the central business areas’. Second, he was concerned about the existing infrastructure in the inner city: ‘mads, mains services, schools, housing, commercial buildings-not all in good condition, some actually requiring replacement, but some quite new. It would be costly to stop using i t prematurely.’ Thirdly, he put forward the old chestnut that agricultural land would be saved by restraining peripheral development. The solutions he put forward were largely in support of the private sector. Inorder to attract employers to providejobs, Shore said ‘conditions will need to be made attractive and potentially profitable-in terms of sites, road access and labour force. I t is no use seeking new firms if they cannot survive, make money, and, one hopes, expand.’ The emphasis given to the small firm by most of the contributors who advocated this line was curious, given the evidence from many studies that i t was the large, often multinational firm which supplied most of the big cities’ employment in manufacturing and which tended to take on and lay off unskilled workers in response to fluctuations indemand for its products. As John Bennington, leader ofthe Coventry CDP, pointed Out, three-quarters of all jobs in Coventry were provided by 14 companies ofwhich I o were multinationals. As a result of a move to increasing

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capital intensiveness and shifting jobs overseas, very high unemplo) r n c i r t had become the central issue of the inner city problem. GEC had been \ark’ ’%

Y the equivalent of 30 workers a day since 1968 and neither the local authofit nor the government could do anything about it

The Secretary of State’s second objective related to housing and the \ocial

g and physical environment. Here he had nothing to say apart from emphasizin the importance of the human scale and the contribution which thc health, education and social services could make to the problem. His final piot)lern area was what he called ‘social stress’.

T o solve these problems, he proposed an ‘institutional fix’ betwec n ( (‘rltral and local government and he called for new partnership arrangcni( i i i j H~ also referred to the importance of self-help and much was made of that notion in the conference. Its meaning was extremely vague and everythinq from Samuel Smiles-style individualism to communal self-managing ( ollr( Liveq came under the heading from different contributors. Interestingly, 111 Shore accepted that all previous programmes had done little more than top or perhaps ameliorate problems. He now accepted that ‘if we are to get t o grips with the underlying economic and social forces, we must deploy t h v major instrumentsofpublic policy’. By this, he didn’t seem to mean more than rcdjs. tribution between local authority budgets and ‘value for money’ i n terms of

practical policies. This was clearly a disappointing statement and delegates expected more,

Basically, the problem was described as a change in the relationship h t w r e n capital and labour: should capital move to labour or labour to capitd ’ That seemed to be a harsh political choice which the Secretary of State could not make. We were told that, in West Germany, manufacturing industn i\a5 de. clining even more rapidly than in the UK. This was a general trend in the advanced societies. I t seemed as though our backwardness was b e i y wed as a resource to bale out the inner city. The proposal by Professor MurraL 5 trwart that we should determine a public policy that worked with and guided the private sector was not taken up. He suggested import substitution and a focus on what the public sector buys so that demand could be manipulated within an areal context.

Professor John Stewart of the University of Birmingham’s Institutc of Local Government Studies believed that the answer to the problem of the deprived (there was no inner city problem he said) was to create a highly efficient deli- verysystem for urban resources and facilities. This meant concentrating power in the existing institutional framework and redirecting existing I csources rather than developing new institutional forms or claiming new resource?. He rejected the need for new policies. One could be forgiven for thinkinq he had a vested interest in existing local government institutions.

Most delegates disagreed with him. First, there were those like John Benn. ington who argued that it was the vcry efficiency and humanity of thow respon. sible for managing the delivery systems that was part of the problcm pro. fessionals and managers defined problems in individual terms and provided

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services to individual families. This tended to draw residents of the area away from their class interests to see things individually and personally, thu\ frag- menting a common consciousness. At the same time, paradoxically, local bureaucrats had an homogenizing effect on a population by dealing with prob- lems and policies in a language and at a level of abstraction which ordinary

lc found difficult to grasp. Finally, since the local authority had no tools orpowers with which they could influence the main source of the difficulties- namely the logic ofprivate capital accumulation-assumptions about putative efie,-tiveness would, inevitably, have mystifying consequences.

Thc Srcond basis for criticism came from those radicals who rejected both efficient delibcry systems and the organized and centralized power of the manual working class. Instead, they argued for a diffusion of power ‘to the peopIe’ as they put it. What the people would do with such weak and diffused dosesofpOWer wasn’t clear but community action and artistic expression were Seen a9 5elf-evidently good things. Those who saw themselves as spokesmen for the people felt that they had the right to do things in a self-activating way and they were scornful of what they described as ‘ambulance services coming in from theoutside’. Yet they, in turn, were categorized as ‘kerb-level Luddites’ which did not please them. At a breakaway meeting of various radical or populist delegates, the range of positions seemed to be too great for any con- sistent view to emerge. Self-help was branded as some kind ofego-trip. Worse, mme community activists appeared to hold an individualistic view of enter- prise which accepted ‘the need to create wealth’ ideology. The productive work they had in mind reflected Morris for wall-paper designs more than his name\ake who built up an industrial empire based on motor cars.

A third criticism ofthe Stewart approach came from the few articulate coun- cillors who claimed that the problem was political and the answer lay in their political judgements. Resentful of both the salaried bureaucrats on the one side and the salaried leaders of community groups on the other, they felt that the very efficiency of the managers reduced their effectiveness. They claimed that they had to struggle to get the technical documents and policy-option papers they wanted rather than the papers the officers thought they ought to want.

Evidently, this conflict over ways of getting things done reflects implicit models of how society works and the way a problem is perceived determines the kind ofsolution proposed. Hence, if the central problem is unemployment in specific patches caused by structural shifts in our economy, then responses in terms of more efficient delivery systems will he considered irrelevant by those who adopt such an analysis. All possible solutions were dismissed by some element as irrelevant, unrealistic, ineffective and so forth. Most solutions were seen to br in direct conflict with other solutions. Members of the conferencr could draw on a vast knowledge of practical and academic experience which meant that all positions from the far left to the far right had eloquent spokesmen.

Faced with this bewildering variety of expertise, i t was clear that any

P@P

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attempt to sum up conclusions would be nugatory. David Eversley did trv to create external enemies for delegates at the end by referring to ‘economists:‘, the ‘affluent areas’ and ‘the Treasury’ as forces preventing redistribution, However, one did not need to look outside the conference: as one acadc.nlir caustically remarked on hearing the final discussion-‘with friends like these the inner city lobby doesn’t need enemies’. Certainly, the journalists werc. led to wonder amongst themselves why there appeared to be so much vested intckr- est in urban and regional questions. T o them the problem seemed to bv onc ofpoverty and, that being so, fiscal redistribution appeared to be the oh\.iOus answer.

Why, then, the public discussion, the political debate and the middle-c,lass concern? If the most informed experts can’t agree, and engage in professio11~l tribal warfare, if all political positions are relativized, if ameliorist aid to spr- cific areas has proved ineffectual and attempts to control big firms impractic a], then a talking-shop is all that is left. The conference was an exercise in applied cognitive dissonance: the problem was defined in terms ofjobs but ans\trrctl in terms ofdelivery systems. The main problem was the big firm but the ar1swc.r was given in terms of aiding small firms. Those who came firmly C0nvincc.d that their small project was worth doing went away confused and anxious that perhaps they were wasting their time. Those who were concerned solely with taming state monopoly capitalism also accepted the necessity for practical a$ pragmatic immediate action. The most widely acclaimed practical proposal was that a Foundation or Charity should support a clearing house for ideas so that practical experience could be passed on from one area to another and made more cumulative. But, on the Government’s own evidence, such pro- posals will do little good :

the continued existence of inner area problems reflects structural change i t i rhc economy of Merseyside

low incomes are the centre of the problem. They explain why people live in Small Heath [Birmingham]

. . . any serious attack on the problems of the inner city needs to increase incomes and improve housing . . . (Inner Area Studies, 1977).

Britain does not need specialists in urban and regional analysis in ‘977: t needs a political programme for the period after the end of ameliorism.