Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:03 Hello, and welcome to failed architecture breeze blocks where failed architecture editors share their thoughts on works in progress, urgent matters, and current happenings in architecture and spatial politics. My name is Charlie <inaudible> and editor on failed architectures Amsterdam team. And I'm joined for this episode by Rian E Jones, author of several books, including clamp down, pop cultural wars on class and gender and tryptic three studies of the manic street preachers, the holy Bible. And now co-author along with Matthew Brown of the book, paint your town read out in may on repeater books, which is the main thing we'll be discussing today. So the book is about community wealth building, primarily as it's been applied in Preston city in the north of England. And I think probably not everybody knows what community wealth building is. So Rayanne, maybe you could explain a little bit about what community wealth building is for
Speaker 1 00:01:02 Sure. Um, community wealth building is at the same time, very simple and very complex. I think, as it's been applied, uh, the general idea behind it is about generating wealth at a local level and in a democratic way. So it covers things like workers, cooperatives buying, using local suppliers and local companies or firms, which in turn will use local labor there by reducing unemployment and, um, working in a way that's got an eye to ethical and environmental considerations. So using renewable energy, sustainable material and this kind of thing, as, as a basic idea, it's got a very long history and you can, you can trace it back even to things like the Paris commune, which was 150 years ago, but focused very much on democratic and very local decision-making. Or you could look at things like shoppers in Mexico or Harver on the way that, uh, again, democratic federalism has been applied there.
Speaker 1 00:01:59 Um, or you could look at very, very sort of micro examples, things like the Lucas plan in 1976, which was a group of British workers at that Lucas aerospace responding to their impending redundancy, basically the closure of, um, of this aerospace plant by saying, well, hang on can't we take it over ourselves and start building socially useful renewable products and some similar things like those tower colliery, which is a deep mine in Wales, which was taken into workers control in early nineties. And I think 2018, there was a similar thing attempted in Belfast at the Harland and Wolff shipyard. So these, these theories and these ideas about worker ownership and democratic control of production have obviously got a massively long history that the name community wealth building has only been with us relatively recently. And it's from a U S organization called the democracy collaborative, which Matthew bronzer, a member of that they're based in the U S um, and they're sort of the driving force behind the Cleveland model is something that inspired Preston. Great.
Speaker 0 00:03:01 Yeah, I think there's something about the idea of, and I'm, it's a section in the book taking back control, but like really taking back control of the economic processes that prevail in a particular community or locality and, uh, doing it in kind of various different ways. I, yeah, I, as I was reading it, cause we're felt architecture, it's a sort of architecture, a remit that we have, like I was thinking about just the very many ways that this kind of thing can be useful, I suppose, to development maybe more ethical development, um, but architectural practice. But I, it would be nice to know, um, maybe some sort of, uh, direct or most obvious ways the community wealth building applies to architect. Sure.
Speaker 1 00:03:49 I mean something that's community wealth building tries to do with all aspects of, of civic life, I suppose, and, and work is to make complex processes comprehensible and accessible to everyone who might have an idea for getting involved so that the book focuses a lot on, if you want to stand for local government, then it helps first to understand what a local council is, how you get elected, how a council gets this money and spends it. All of that's like really, it really is quite simple. It can be boiled down very easily, but there's a lot of it is presented in, in quite an obscure way sometimes. And as though it's this sort of arcane knowledge that only an elite half and by, by dent of having that elite knowledge than they are suitable to govern, like it's, it's a very self perpetuating thing, but I think it happens in a lot of elements of capitalism as well. Like a lot of elements of, of business. Like, you know, your ordinary people are too sexual, understand the complexities of, of, of running a business, you know, as best as they keep out of it. So the book tries to break down all of that. I think that applies to the planning process as well. And like obviously local governments are involved in that process. Yeah. Developers, private developers are involved in that process as well. Yeah.
Speaker 0 00:05:03 I, I think that, that brings me to the next thing I wanted to ask about, which was Matthew Brown talks about community wealth building as a kind of extreme, common sense. And I think there's a disconnect there in so far as it may well be extremely common sensical, but it obviously isn't, uh, you know, like common sense, you know, it's usually something that registers more broadly and is the norm, right? And that isn't the case with community wealth building. So I'm wondering this disconnect, like how do you, I guess, overcome or actually make it common sense and maybe what are some of the effective ways of spreading this knowledge with the exception or maybe including your book? Um,
Speaker 1 00:05:46 I, I think you're right, that there is a disconnect. I think perhaps the results of community wealth building are regarded as common sense as in everyone should have control over their environment, decisions should be taken democratically, et cetera. Those things are common sense, even though they don't really happen at the moment. But so I think the Preston model as a way of achieving these results perhaps is a bit counter-intuitive because it does involve making cultural changes as well as systemic changes to the way that councils operate and the way that that money is spent. I think that there's almost like a paradox between how community wealth building is talked about as, as transformative and radical. When a lot of it is just common sense. Like a lot of the counselors that we spoke to about this, they didn't immediately see the relevance of it because they'd say things like, well, we already buy local.
Speaker 1 00:06:33 And that obviously committee wealth building is a lot deeper than that. And it's about ensuring that local suppliers operate ethically, that they're sort of stipulations about targeting employment in, in the contrast that, that kind of thing. But yeah, buying local is common sense and it's been around for ages. However, like on the other hand, there's other critical tendencies, which talk about community wealth building as, you know, pointless and just sort of tinkering around around the edges when it can actually have really transformative effects. Again, buying localism is an example of that. I mean, one of the things about progressive procurement is it's a it's been called in Preston is that it combines buying local with things like workers empowerment. So unions are a part of the whole process and it brings in ethical and environmental considerations, which means that it's, it becomes a choice available to all, not just people who can afford to adopt a particular lifestyle that involves them buying low carb, eating organic, et cetera.
Speaker 1 00:07:23 Whereas at the moment like the poorer, you are, the more likely you are to be reliant on cheap, low quality food and clothing and products, which also have massively long supply chains and made cheaply overseas. So in that sense, community wealth building is quite transformative. It does entail significant material change, and it's more holistically, transformative than just buying local as to how we get that across. I think that that's something that needs a lot of thinking about the Preston model, I think has established itself in polished sort of policy wonky circles, quite strongly as an alternative economic doctrine. And that's been good because decision-makers at a certain level can use it as a reference point and they can orient the changes that they want to make around that they can point to Preston and say, we're going to try and follow Preston or adopt Preston model rather than just saying we've got this really radical idea that hasn't been tried anywhere.
Speaker 1 00:08:11 Just trust us, it's going to, it's going to work fine. The challenge of community wealth building I think is to do a similar thing on the ground within public consciousness. How we do that, I think an obvious thing is to focus on is material outcomes. So are they more jobs are the higher wages, are the jobs about quality, these trade union organization encouraged beyond that? I think there's, there's an idea of sort of place-based pride. I don't know if that's the right term to use, but it is something that's happening in Preston. For example, if people are happier and more proud to live where they do, because it's a nicer place to be and they get more out of it in turn, they invest more in it. So it's this almost kind of virtuous circle, which takes a long time to build up. And I think develops quite gradually a very spectacularly, like so much about this just is about mundane change that you may not even notice when it's happening, but I think that's what has to be focused on and building some sort of mass momentum behind that.
Speaker 0 00:09:05 There was a particular example you discuss later in the book of a, I believe it was a Welsh place that where they visited Scotland. Oh
Speaker 1 00:09:14 Yeah, yeah. The, um, the green valleys schemes.
Speaker 0 00:09:17 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Who were somewhat skeptical of the effectiveness of the principles that were community wealth building principles that were being advocated in order to maybe achieve some of their goals. And it wasn't until they went on a field trip up to Scotland to see something that existed already, that was when the sort of energy and merged. And there is this really big thing about kind of, you need to actually see it and grasp it don't you and see concrete results in order to kind of spread the idea. Oh
Speaker 1 00:09:49 Yeah. I mean, that was, that was the only cause I was, as I was researching the book, I was going through thinking this very sort of low level anxiety thinking I'm just talking to local counselors and think tank people where the ordinary people, how, when are they going to sort of emerge and, um, speak to me? Um, so, um, yeah, discovering that the green valleys project was really good and it's happening very in basically the same part of Wales I'm from the south Wales valley. So that was really exciting as well. Um, I think Wales is, or that part of Wales is a really excellent example to look out, to be honest, because it's been like, de-industrialized, it's been post-industrial since the mid 1980s, there's been very little investment. There's been very little to replace the amount of manufacturing, sort of big workplace, heavily unionized jobs that were lost.
Speaker 1 00:10:33 And there's been obvious immiseration, uh, impoverishment and then the psychological and social effects that go along with art. So it's a really grim place. The efforts made to change that or something. I remember from when I was growing up in the nineties, I was a kid, but we'd always be enlisted into sort of proto focus groups and consultation schemes that were like, well, how would you like your town to look, you know, what, what should, what should we do? It's like, well, you know, material investments, obviously I didn't say this one was like nine, but material investment would be nice. Really. You know, it's, it's no good. Just sort of painting dragons everywhere. Like we need actual financial investment or, and all these schemes have been tried endlessly. Nothing has, um, someone who writes about this called it's something like, what is it, the endless, the endless pointless scrum of regeneration schemes in south Wales.
Speaker 1 00:11:20 And I've got this, this has produced is just a widespread skepticism. Like it's not a sort of hostility, it's not a nihilism. It's, it's just, uh, no, you know, we've been told so many times that change is coming and it never has. And so people are just very skeptical. However, as you were saying things, things like, um, B being taken somewhere and, and just told like, look, here's, here's a practical, concrete idea of how people have changed. I've changed stuff. And so, yeah, I think the, the take-up among the wash Valley's residents was just like, oh, brilliant. Now, now we've seen it can work. We can do it ourselves.
Speaker 0 00:11:52 I thinking that for me anyway, the, uh, the 2019 UK general election cost quite a long shadow over the, uh, at least some of the tone of the book. And, um, I remember from, I think it was about three weeks before election day, Richard Seymour posted an article on his Patrion blog, where he was talking about how the state doing less over the past few decades has kind of limited our collective sense of what's possible. There's this sort of just pervasive doubt that anything good can happen. This comes to my next question is sort of the difficulties in scaling community wealth building without a kind of broader national movement. That's kind of making big things possible.
Speaker 1 00:12:38 Yeah. I mean, one of the, um, the disappointments, I guess, so one of the negative results of, um, the labor party, you know, being under new management is a lot of the supporting planks of, of the Corbyn leadership was, um, John MacDonald's attempt to reach out really quite, quite broadly and quite non-partisan, um, to places and groups that were interested in reconfiguring social and economic ownership and power. So he referenced the Preston model quite a lot. I think the 2017 labor party report called alternative models of ownership, reference community wealth, building a lot. And they actually set up a community wealth building unit under Corbyn, I think, has now been dismantled. So there has been like there, there was scope for national support for these local initiatives. Um, actually ad Miliband, um, was interested in community wealth building too, though. He didn't really take it out such it just to reinforce the idea that this isn't particularly revolutionary or radical, like it can fit in well with moderates social democracy, as much as it can with autonomous Anaco cinder colorism.
Speaker 1 00:13:37 Like if you like, um, so I'd argue there was that potential there, but that isn't the roots that the labor party has now gone down. So that's, that's disappointing because I certainly think as Richard Seymour was saying 30 years of neo-liberalism has, has not only involved rolling back what the state can do. It's also encouraged individual blame or responsibility for our circumstances. So like, if, if your life is intolerable, that's because, you know, you haven't tried hard enough or you haven't bought enough scented candles, like as, as opposed to looking at structural systemic causes. I think this is partly why the shift in the response to COVID-19 from the British government, like seems so, so shocking in some ways. And, and so spectacular because we we'd been told for decades, that's the state simply couldn't do this. Uh, certainly couldn't, you know, produce money and give it to people that was unthinkable, uh, that was communist.
Speaker 1 00:14:29 Um, and yet here they were doing it under a Tory government. So really quite unsettling though. I do. I do think that response was perhaps more like states paternalism was that it was a state which enabled people or empowered people. There was quite an odd contrast between that and the local mutual aid networks that, that sprung up. And again, really kind of start literally like, I, I didn't, I don't even know where the energy behind it came from, but all of a sudden, like my, my neighbors were sort of texting and saying, let's basically start a protest Soviets and go and requisition the big Tesco's, you know, and just, just shoot his goods to the elderly. This is amazing what spot this on. But I, I think there definitely is there's, there's a space there that things like this can fill now that we've seen that it is possible to fill up space.
Speaker 1 00:15:17 I think, and I, I think Brexit has kind of operated partly in a, in a similar way to the pandemic. Like it, this just swept away. Um, my voted remained like full disclosure, but I think Brexit has swept away. A lot of previous certainties and people are now thinking well, okay, why don't we replace them with something rather than just accept that there's, there's not going to be any change. Things are going to sort of trundle along in as dissatisfying away as they have been for 30 years. Um, but I think that's, that's what Matthew was getting up by saying like our, our way of taking back control is community wealth building because we haven't, we haven't taken back any control through Brexit. We've rescinded a lot of control and we now are going to see massive deregulation and attacks on workers' rights, et cetera, et cetera. So if we actually want to take back control, we have to do it ourselves and not just rely on voting for a government that's supposedly going to do it.
Speaker 0 00:16:07 I, I noticed actually, as we were talking that we hadn't really talked about outsourcing and insourcing, which I think from an architectural perspective, something about this idea of development as like attracting inward investment from a big multinational, rather than actually trying to build projects that, that, that employ local contractors and things like that. That was something that was really seemed really revolutionary in a very discreet way to me, in terms of like that, the problem is that economies of scale are difficult to achieve with smaller units. But if you kind of have this mindset, you can sort of like create new possibilities to fill the gaps in the supply chain. I don't know if you maybe wanted to talk a little bit about, oh, sure.
Speaker 1 00:16:49 I mean, I'd sourcing as a, as a kind of political historian. Like it's been interesting to trace the erosion of power or other, the actual taking back of power from local authorities by central government over the whole of the 20th century. Really I'm leaving it in the twenties and thirties. I think there were sort of battles with Poplar council in London over rate setting, and those things were kind of replicated then in the eighties in Liverpool and Lamberth so yeah, the, the focus from hostility to local governments, then the focus on privatization and Thatcher and, and then even like new labors, um, insistence on a PPI public privates investments, um, which he didn't call privatization. That's still basically was, um, now we'd, we seem to call it outsourcing rather than privatization, but again, it's still removal of services that are effectively delivered by some arm of the, of the state or local authorities are not democratically accountable.
Speaker 1 00:17:40 Um, so services are being removed from there and transferred to private companies or private developers often involving just, you know, millions of pounds of public money going with it as well, which I, I don't know, it's something that should be given a lot more attention. Preston, however, was a place where outsourcing very clearly fails. And, um, that the spectacular example of that was a development called the tithe barn, which was going to be basically a massive multi-level shopping center, Lasher complex, uh, which had been talked about for decades, like many of these regeneration schemes are, and then the global financial crisis pattern, the developers behind it got cold feet and pulled out. So leaving the council with nothing really at the, at the same time or a few years later, Preston's central government grant was cats to zero. So it was, it was really a question of, we we've got absolutely nothing, the few resources that were in our hands, um, have now been taken.
Speaker 1 00:18:37 So we can't rely on previous models of wealth generation or wealth creation. Uh, and I think that was perversely kind of helpful in arguing for, well, okay. We can't try what we've tried already. We're going to have to look at new models, new ideas. And I mean, the argument was very much, okay. We've tried inward investment that is very conclusively, very spectacularly failed. So why don't we try looking to our own resources and our own ideas and, and using lots so that this idea of, of the city rescuing itself is something that I think is very appealing about the model and something that I'm sure can be replicated elsewhere there. Like I say, it will involve not only changes in procurements and looking for anchor institutions that councils can work with, but just cultural changes. It seems. And it has seemed to me for decades that many councils, particularly labor councils actually, um, just see their job as managing decline.
Speaker 1 00:19:32 Um, they they've sort of swallowed the dogma that councils can do nothing. They completely powerless. And, you know, the last that's a good thing because the private sector can always deliver better services, which we're seeing is completely untrue. Um, even something like track and trace, you know, just to take a, again, a very spectacular example, completely sunnier failure by private corporations, even though they were given billions in public money. So yeah, I mean, it, it seems absurd to me that councils are resistant to new ideas when currently they're presiding over a situation of just continual decline. Like obviously try, try something new. Why
Speaker 0 00:20:05 Not? Yeah. It comes back to this question of extreme, common sense, doesn't it? But there was something just incredible figures about like how much money was being brought back into the, uh, the, the, the Preston economy and the wider Lancashire economy. Just reading from the book here in 20 13, 6 of the local institutions that signed up for the effort spent around 38 million pounds in Preston and 292 million pounds in Lancashire as a whole by 2017. This has skyrocketed to 111 million pounds and 486 million pounds respectively. The new localized contracts won by Preston based businesses covered everything from school lunches, fuel and legal services to large scale construction projects, tens of millions have been won by local construction firms in recent years, resulting in the refurbishment of Preston's iconic bus station by the family run from Conlon construction. And Eric writes not-for-profit companies development of Frye gate court, the pension fund owned student development, a council food budget of 1.6 million pounds for the provision of school meals too large for local providers to realistically bid for was broken into lots and awarded to farmers in the region.
Speaker 0 00:21:13 So yeah, this, instead of the money leaving the local area, going into the bank accounts of big multinationals and ultimately I guess, offshore tax havens, I think it's, um, yeah, it's pretty inspiring anyway. Um, I think it's probably important to point out, or at least like give some lip service to the fact that we're in a pandemic and, um, maybe finish with what the future holds for this kind of, um, uh, approach, the community wealth building approach. And I think you were probably writing it sort of in-between so the, you can't talk about, that's not really the subject of the book, but there was clearly some mention of it. And I think one thing that was curious and, and inspiring considering that, that the UK of the high street is just sort of emptying out already. It was, but it is kind of increasingly disappearing that the concept of the civic high street and something of a new way of looking at the way this sort of high street is modeled. Um, I don't know if you could just sort of like sketch a, uh, a picture of what that kind of, what kind of moves are being made in that direction and what the sort of possibilities are more generally in light of the pandemic.
Speaker 1 00:22:24 Yeah. I mean, it was, as you say, it was sort of written, um, the book was written around the start of the pandemic, so we could put in very sort of basic gestures towards the negative effects that it has had, but you're right. That I think there has been some debate about what more positive stuff can we pull out of, of the changes that the country has gone through? Um, I think it is generally acknowledged that the high street, as we used to know it, like for most of the 20th century just isn't appropriate or sustainable at the moment. And the pandemic obviously exacerbated that because shops were closed, people turned to Amazon or delivery, et cetera. So the power and the resources that those companies already had was exacerbated, particularly within, within Britain, like the idea that government has any interest in resuscitating or rehabilitating, the high street has also been shown to be, to be false through the pandemic.
Speaker 1 00:23:15 And it seems likely that cities will be run and towns will be run like even more than they are currently in the interests of private developers. I'm probably focusing on sort of turning, turning high streets and commercial space into residential space. So exacerbating gentrification on pricing out local people. So set against that. There have been issuing ideas from like the new economics foundation for one on the idea of the civic high street or the social high streets. And I think what lies, this is something that we often forget that the high street is not just commercial space. It is also it's social and public space. There's some research by the, uh, foundational economy that has found people think of the high street as a social space. Um, it is somewhere they might go to meet up in a park or a library or a cafe.
Speaker 1 00:24:03 So can we think about that? And can we think about keeping those elements, which allow people to network to have social contact and also to organize, like, could, could these spaces be used as advice centers, could some of the new grassroots unions use them, or could, could they become like shared workspaces if everyone's working remotely or working freelance, like could there be a much more accessible and much more financially accessible way? Could there be shared workspaces? And that would obviously devolve into maybe commercial outlets would be a sideline there without even even thinking of them as, as functional places. Could they just be spaces for leisure and recreation and could that work to foster kind of intergenerational contact or, or community contact. So there's all these really interesting, I think debates that are being hard, because again, we will need to rebuild basically both after Brexit and after the pandemic. So why not rebuild something that we want rather than letting, um, yeah. Rather than letting a government do it, my ear, just to kind of go back to the, the disconnect, I guess, between the national and the local, my most optimistic thinking about community wealth building is that if it is a mosaic and a patchwork, then you know, those, those things can gradually add up to something bigger than themselves. And that's maybe how we will get to a national or international transformative project, but that's that's yeah. That's, that's a very optimistic, yeah.
