Around this time last year, I started doing some freelance work with a community development consultancy. We were working on a report-cum-strategy-guide for the Local Trust, and more specifically for community groups who are having redevelopment done to them: advice not on how to stop the development process — because once it’s started, it’s effectively impossible to stop, and that’s very much by design — but on how to stand up to it and, perhaps, wrest some concessions and community benefit out of the suits, flacks and hucksters who play The Regeneration Game.

That report — finally given the stirring title Developing Potential — was released earlier this week; you can read the guidebook for communities and the Big Local case studies as separate documents, or you can hoover down a pdf of the whole thing with all the trimmings.

Despite my shocking lack of objectivity on the topic (as demonstrated above), Blue Chula put me to work on background research and report drafting. My text is in many places unrecognisable in the final version — turns out my prolixity is about as appropriate for third sector publications as it is for academia — but BC and the Local Trust have nonetheless done me the great honour of naming me as one of the report’s authors.

It’s a shame we couldn’t have released something closer to our earlier drafts, but recent changes in the legal system mean that charitable organisations have to be extremely cautious about criticising the government, as they risk forfeiting their charitable status and/or funding if they are seen as being too “political”*. But nonetheless Helen at BC pushed hard to publish case studies in which the communities portrayed could see themselves and their experiences represented fairly, and while the guidebook is notably less torches-and-pitchforks than my earliest outlines suggested it should be, I think it’s realistic about the prospects, and about the sacrifices necessary for a community to get involved in the redevelopment of their neighbourhood.

In other words, I am genuinely honoured to have my name on it — even as I’m fairly certain that it doesn’t entirely deserve to be there.

[ * — Thankfully I am not a charitable organisation, which leaves me free to decry this policy as being born of the same craven sleight-of-hand that trumpets a rejigging of the planning system in the name of “inclusivity” while actually watering down what remains of the planning system to the extent that developers can largely do what they want, provided they have the funding for a good law firm, which of course they always do. If there’s one thing I learned from spending a few months digging into UK planning law and the way such projects play out on the ground, it’s that not only is the planning system of the UK deeply dysfunctional and biased toward the developer, but that it is working exactly as its designers intended it to work. I’d hold those designers in somewhat lesser contempt if they had the courage to admit that. ]