Category Archives for "Reviews"

0 Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future

Whilst in some respects Paul Mason’s “Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future” is a good read, I found it disappointing.  I expected at some point to understand what Mason means by postcapitalism and whilst I understand why it is not possible to define it, the concept seems incomplete.

The argument is capitalism cannot adjust to the Internet age because the Internet makes production effectively free.  Work no longer has financial value.  People collaborate and create new things because they enjoy innovation.  But as soon as you create something, it can be duplicated for next to nothing by machines.  This applies to material as well as digital products; once machines are in place, production requires little contribution from human beings.

Exactly how this brave new world operates is naturally a mystery because it is still emerging and so we cannot fully discern its shape.  Capitalism has been around for about 200 years.  The earlier economic system, feudalism, lasted many centuries longer.  Inequality is a major issue today.  The market doesn’t work properly because 1% hoover up most of the resources.  Feudalism and its precursors do not seem to be any better.  Inequality was just as much a feature of the Roman Empire, itself a pattern for every dictatorship we’ve seen since.

It is hard to see how allowing a new paradigm to emerge, trusting it will be fairer than the one we have, is going to solve anything.

Resisting the Inevitable

Mason takes a lot of time explaining Marxist theory.  This is interesting and the best part of the book.  He describes how capitalism’s story is of long-term cycles.  Someone invents something, it opens up new possibilities and so the economy grows.  As more people take on the new development, returns fall and the economy moves into recession.  It seems the latest cycle has broken down; capitalism cannot resolve the current cycle created by the Internet.

Possibly this theory shows the struggles of the last century are the struggles of the proverbial bald men fighting over a comb.  It has never been a fight between capitalism and anti-capitalism (called communism, socialism or, bizarrely, liberalism (a more pro-capitalist ideology is hard to imagine)) but a fight between capitalisms.

The Soviet Union was not an alternative to capitalism but state capitalism.  China today is managing to be capitalist without the democratic trappings of the West.

In truth we can design our own capitalisms.  After all, the issue is not the value of capital but the ownership of capital.  When 1% of people own most of the capital you can expect the economy to be less healthy.  Demanding this should end is not demanding an end to capitalism.

One interesting point Mason makes is the working class in the UK did not follow the Soviet route but chose to reform capitalism.  One such route was trade unions.  Their approach to capitalism was so threatening to the wealthy that the Tories crushed them in the 1980s and still feel threatened by the feeble rump that remains.

Co-operation: an alternative?

Another approach, Mason hardly mentions, is co-operatives.  The co-operative movement was immensely diverse during its glory days and presented an alternative economy within the imperialist economy of the British Empire.  It was crushed during the 1980s too, to the extent most people no longer understand mutuality.

So, how about this vision of post-capitalism-as-we-know-it?  Run the corporations, big businesses and public services as mutuals to set the standard for the economy.  Smaller, local businesses can be mutuals but self-employed are able to set up smaller businesses.  This allows people the flexibility to experiment with new ideas at a local level.

In such a local economy, people still have money and property but a lot of what they own is part shares in mutual businesses.

The Internet

Mason claims the digital revolution is a main cause of the current recession and transition to some unknown future.  He actually writes little about the digital revolution and in that respect the book is a disappointment.  The problem is I can’t help asking whether he would hold to his analysis if he knew more about the digital revolution.

One obvious issue is the digital revolution works only when most people link to it and that costs money.  If the machines can open up something new, how does everyone take part?  It may be true that a lot online is free but it is free only once you have purchased the equipment and access to the Internet you need.

Who Decides How Technology Works?

The reason so much is free online is a decision taken by the people who invented the Internet.  Lanier in his book, “Who Owns the Future?” says the links we use are one way; they point to another page.  You cannot track back to the original page through the same link.  If they had chosen that option it would have been possible to track everyone’s contribution and they could have earned a share in any profit made through their contribution.

They made these early decisions for good reasons but the decisions that prevail are the ones that favour those with power.  The information you put on Facebook, for example, benefits Facebook’s owners. The Internet is an unparalleled opportunity to aid communication within and between communities.  We have hardly begun to explore its potential.  Our ancestors achieved unbelievable things through mutuals with limited transport (trains) and mass communications (newspapers and the telegraph).

What do you think?  Do we wait for Mason’s postcapitalist world and then decide whether we want it?  Or do we follow the example of the Rochdale Pioneers and shape the new world from within in our own way?

2 Reorientating Economics

In most debates about capitalism, it seems, no-one has a clue what it is they are talking about!  Capitalism has become a catch-all for the modern economy.  I heard two Conservatives debating capitalism on the radio the other morning.  Is capitalism essentially free enterprise?  Or does it also encompass the financial markets (a misnomer if ever there was one) and capital accumulation with no connection to production?

If small businesses are part of a capitalist economy, then so are co-operatives.    Mutuals hold wealth in common and some people do not believe this is really capitalism.  Their view is capitalism is about accumulation of personal wealth.

I have argued elsewhere that accumulation of wealth is the wrong priority.  Wealth needs to circulate and to measure its circulation is to measure the economy’s health.  How do we set about reorienting economics?

I’m not an economist and so one problem I have had is finding an economist who discusses these ideas.  Perhaps Roberto Mangabeira Unger, whom I mentioned in my post Approaches to Social Innovation a couple of weeks ago, is one such economist.  If you click on the link over his name it will take you to his Wikipedia page.

I make no apology for basing this post on a Wikipedia page; you are following the development of my thinking and this is as far as I’ve got with his contribution.  I intend to read some of his books and will review them later.  For now, if you want to follow these thoughts you can scroll down the Wikipedia page to Economic Thought and read on from there.

Today I shall highlight two insights from these paragraphs.  I’m sure I shall return to these themes in the future.

Classical and Marginalist Economics

Unger distinguishes these two approaches.  Classical economics focuses on social value and this means economics  has a vision for the future.  You can look at what’s happening and say, “We don’t like that so let’s change the way we do things.”

Marginalist economics began as a response to socialism and is the dominant approach today.  It is an empirical approach to economics, which claims to be more scientific because it measures things.  You can look at what’s happening and say, “It’s a pity things are that way but there’s nothing we can do about it because that’s what the statistics say.”

Unger seems to be saying there is something profoundly wrong with marginalist economics but I don’t think he is advocating a wholesale return to classical economic models.  So, what is his model?

Permanent Innovation

This is a massive generalisation but it seems to me Unger has thought through the implications of an economy based on permanent innovation.  There are, he argues, no real economic eras such as feudalism or capitalism.  These are rationalisation we impose upon history.  What actually happens is a struggle, as I see it, between those with a practical, innovatory approach who seek problems and solutions and those who have an absolutist, ideological approach who seek certainty and domination.

The former tends to be reformist and the latter revolutionary.  Looked at this way, we can see both approaches are potentially flawed.  The practical approach can lose sight of social values, whilst the ideological approach can stifle innovation, running after a false vision of what human society can be.

He advocates a revolutionary reformist approach, an approach designed to make politicians on both the left and the right worried!  This is exactly where I have found myself, advocating a national localised economy.  It looks reformist to the left and revolutionary to the right.  It is the approach most co-operative and trade-union movements took in the UK.  Compare their approach with the 1917 revolution in Russia.

How to Stimulate the Economy

I fully intend to return to Unger’s contribution in future posts.  In the meantime, I shall finish by listing three key policies he advocates.  They are all about encouraging innovation in the local economy:

The Wikipedia article hints that Unger’s work is worth exploration.  Leave a comment if you know his work or find what we know so far exciting (you’re allowed to be excited even if you don’t agree!)

0 Business and Society in Bed Together (Shock! Horror!)

I’ve read the New Statesman from cover to cover every week for decades. The only exception is their supplements; mostly they are not worth the effort and serve to publish dry-as-dust material that no-one would pay for.  Last week’s supplement, about business and society, was an exception and I went out of my way to read it. “Should Business Play a Role in Addressing Poverty in the UK?” can be found in the 23 – 29 October edition or you can download the pdf by clicking on the link.

The supplement is based on a report, supported by the Webb Memorial Trust, about the potential role of business in reducing UK poverty.

Just like most of these supplements, this makes sober reading and the very first sentence does not bode well. “Business and society are often portrayed as being unlikely bedfellows.”

What does this say about our society? How have we found ourselves in a place where the purpose of business is not seen as the benefit of society? The only other possibility is that the purpose of business is to enhance personal wealth and I fear that may not be far from the truth, not only in the public mind but also in the minds of many wealthy owners of corporate businesses.

The Poor Contribute More to Cashflow

It is worth referring to this blog post, “Why companies don’t just target the rich – because the poor have most of the cashflow”. This is a more polemical piece but the point it makes in the first graph is certainly true (although it isn’t referenced at the time of writing). The bottom 50% in society own almost no wealth but provide 30% of the cashflow. The top 10% own 70% of the wealth and contribute 20% to spending.

I argue in this blog, wealth is of no value to society if accumulated in bank accounts. It adds value when it circulates. It seems the poorest contribute proportionately more to circulating finance in the economy than the wealthy.

So, it is not business per se that is the problem. The problem is what happens to the wealth created by businesses. Distribute more of it to the poorest and there will be more cash flowing in the economy and more businesses benefit.

Excessive accumulation of wealth not only locks people into poverty but also makes business more difficult. The various scams described in the “Why Companies …” blog post would not be necessary if more money were circulating.

Private Sector Benefits from Tackling Poverty

Return to the New Statesman supplement and turn to page 7, where you will find a table listing how the private sector benefits when it tackles poverty:

Poverty it seems “with its associated physical, mental and emotional problems, contributes to reduced productivity.” I’m sure that’s right but the point is inequality also contributes to poor business prospects by reducing the money in circulation. Poor circulation will affect productivity too because it means it is harder to meet costs.

Reputation suffers because businesses resort to scams as described in the “Why Companies …” blog post.

New opportunities implies the challenging financial climate opens up new business opportunities and revenue streams. Really? I understand the argument, for example climate change could mean more jobs for businesses installing renewable energy sources or insulation.

But the main blockage, true since the recession in 2008, is there is too little money in circulation. You can’t get a loan to finance your business ideas.

In the end, the supplement demonstrates the poverty of thinking endemic among the political classes. It’s not that poor people’s stress affects productivity so much as the inequalities that make them poor in the first place. If our political leaders do not understand this, what chance have we of a fairer society?

Business and society are natural bedfellows, it is our blindness to the impact of globalisation and the corporate élite that both increases poverty and reduces productivity.

1 Approaches to Social Innovation

Today’s topic is an article by Geoff Mulgan in the 16-22 October 2015 edition of the New Statesman, “Trotsky, Blair and the new politics“.  (You may find it helpful to read the article first; it will open in a new tab.)  Mulgan does not dwell on either Trotsky or Blair; he tells his own story and raises a number of issues.

Sadly, the article is another dig at Jeremy Corbyn.  The New Statesman does not support his leadership and has found it difficult to find a constructive response.  This article might be their most positive approach so far.  It begins by arguing Corbyn’s leadership “could help the Labour Party rediscover its purpose”.  At the end Mulgan suggests the party may have turned down a cul-de-sac.

To a degree, I share this ambivalence.  As a Green, I depart from Corbyn’s approach to the environment, the economy and democracy (voting systems).  Nevertheless, I welcome his promotion to leadership because politicians have become too complacent. It is possible his leadership will open up new possibilities.  It’s a pity the New Statesman can’t offer constructive ideas about how the Labour Party could develop in the future. Instead it laments the loss of the election in 2020.

Mulgan’s career took him from the hard left to working closely with Tony Blair.  He learned to see the difference between the divisive and largely theoretical leftism of the various Trotskyist groups and the need for good management and administration.  He understood the implications of digital technology in the late twentieth century and argued for “networks and different ways of organising the state”.  This contrasts with the top-down arguments for nationalisation and planning from the hard left.

He contrasts political protest movements with the use of political power to cut poverty and rebuild public services.  A significant problem on the left, is a tendency to overemphasise the former at the expense of the latter.  Is it better to emphasise management? The ideal is perhaps credible politicians energised by a strong movement.  Without such a movement the party is solely concerned about winning elections and not about what to do once they have power.

The problem for many on the left is they do not recognise entrepreneurship and innovation.  This does not derive from committees but from people experimenting on the ground.  I have written about the innovation that accompanied the growth of the retail co-operative movement.

Minimalist and Maximalist Social Innovation

Mulgan cites the work of a Brazilian thinker, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, who in a new book, New Frontiers in Social Innovation Research (Palgrave MacMillan) distinguishes minimalist and maximalist social innovation.  Mulgan writes

“The minimalist view puts social innovations squarely within the third sector and: ‘Its resonance is with solidarity and communitarianism … within the tradition within classical liberalism that prizes voluntary associations as well as with the strand within socialist thinking that proposes a non-statist socialism.’

“By contrast, the maximalist view, Unger writes, is concerned with ‘the whole of society, of its institutional arrangements and of its dominant forms of consciousness … At its maximalist best, the social innovation movement [undertakes] the small initiatives that have the greatest potential to foreshadow, by persuasive example, the transformation of those arrangements and of that consciousness.'” (All ellipses and additions are Mulgan’s.)

I have argued, for example in my ebook “Community Development is Dead!” (see below) that community development is weak when tied into the third sector.  Local businesses are at best ignored.  Even social enterprises, whilst often similar to small and medium businesses, are designed over and against mainstream local businesses.

Innovation and the Third Sector

Mulgan and Unger are not arguing against social enterprises, so much as underlining the fact that social innovation can happen anywhere through the work and the risks taken by just about anybody.  It is not right to restrict social innovation to the third sector.  There are two reasons for that.

Third sector organisations can be just as moribund as public sector and large private sector organisations.  The third sector draws many people with alternative values and so if you’re looking for the entrepreneurial spirit, for social innovation, it is one place to look.  But large voluntary sector organisations can become just as ossified as other organisations of comparable size and age and even smaller groups just as readily opt for bureaucratic solutions.

The second reason is that a lot of social innovation does happen in the private sector, particularly in the local economy.  For many, their starting place may be different but their destination closely parallels that of social entrepreneurs.

The fact is neither of the main political parties has ever favoured local business or social innovation.  Both favour top-down, corporate planning solutions.  Their policies always seem to be about concentrating wealth and power in fewer hands.

This is the political change we need.  Neither main party embodies this approach, although Mulgan suggests, bizarrely, David Cameron’s Big Society is closest.  Corbyn has broken the mould but I do not as yet see any evidence his economic policies are close to understanding social innovation.

Still, whilst things are chaotic, we cannot be sure how things will pan out.  It will be interesting to see how the debate develops over the coming months, now that Labour has jettisoned the ridiculous idea it needs to win the next election.

0 A Case for Regulation

There is common ground between Jeremy Corbyn, the new leader of the UK Labour Party and Bernie Sanders in the US, an influential contender for the Democrats’ leadership. The word used of both is “authenticity”.  Their political stance implies they favour regulation.

My purpose is to ask what that word “authenticity” means and why it has so much impact. The implication is that politics as we experience it somehow lacks authenticity. The political centre has moved far to the right.  Even left-wing politicians such as Tony Blair or Barack Obama occupy similar ground to right-wing politicians. Corbyn and Sanders have fewer associations with vested interests on the right and tap into a sense of independent thinking.  Whether this makes them electable is another matter. It will be interesting to see the long-term impact of their influence

A paper, Threat to Democracy: The Impact of “Better Regulation” in the UK, issued by the New Economics Foundation this week, shines light on the reasons for this perceived lack of authenticity. The primary purpose of politicians is to protect the interests of the people who vote for them. Politicians bought by these huge commercial concerns become inauthentic.

A Case for Regulation

The paper describes an activity introduced during the Coalition government (with roots in the previous Labour government). They aim to deregulate just about everything. The paper is not long and so I shall not go into detail. It shows deregulation is not in the interests of the economy, society, democracy or the European Union. The United States is one of the few countries that has gone further down this road than the UK. The paper makes the point that regulation and red tape are not the same thing and indeed shows how deregulation can result in an increase in red tape, when it suits big business.

The main point I want to make in this post is the case for regulation. The following is a paragraph from the report. I’ve added bullet points but otherwise it unchanged:

Local Business Benefits from Regulation

In other words, regulation is good for local businesses. Deregulation is abdicates democratic control of the economy, resulting in capital accumulated in the hands of very few people. They benefit because politicians allow them to.

Whilst people, when asked about red tape, might favour deregulation in theory, they tend to favour regulation when they contemplate its detailed impact. The report puts it:

“It seems that deregulation, in the abstract, is an attractive idea, but when confronted with specific protections, most people quickly recognise how important good regulation is to the quality of their lives. It’s also clear that tokenistic consultation measures are sufficiently flexible to allow this inconvenient discovery to be ignored.” (Page 11)

Politicians are finding most people do not support this campaign to empower the corporations and so introduce it under the radar. Many sense politicians are either selling out to unelected corporations or else not aware of what is happening (much deregulation does not need parliamentary approval).

What is to be done? Read the report and support its recommendations!

0 Who Owns the Future?

Who Owns the Future by Jaron Lanier offers two visions for the future. Like all such visions, they are incomplete.

The first is a humanistic future, where machines help people become their true selves. It is where people find “the thing they cannot not do” and if they need help machines are on hand. So, the surgeon uses machines to monitor and guide her hand. And note this is a world where all benefit. Those who are differently-abled find machines help them live a full life. The key idea is shared benefits are true benefits.  Maybe this is idealistic but some people have already chosen this future and through collective action we can choose to make this real for all.

The alternative is not, as you might expect, a machine-centred future. Machines have no purpose of their own and Artificial Intelligence is still something we’ll ever see. The alternative hierarchical future is where machines concentrate money and power into fewer hands. Again, some will argue, it is already happening.

Evidence for both futures can be seen in the present. We can choose either.  There are other possible futures, for example where there are no machines because we can no longer fuel them. My hunch is the second future is a step along the road to ecological disaster.

Our Choice

We can choose to use machines to help us become better human beings. The key word in that last sentence is “us”. Who is “us”? I could have written, “We can choose to use machines to help others become better human beings”. Perhaps I mean “those whose hands are on the levers of power can choose to use machines for the benefit of others”. If current practice is evidence of their intentions in this respect, the prospects are not encouraging.  The Volkswagen scandal suggests they have used machines to deceive; no-one believes they are the only ones.

“We can choose to use machines to help others become better human beings”. Look closely at the last sentence and ask, who is “we”? Perhaps the key to this is mutuality or self-interest. When I help others, I benefit too. The key to the future is not machines, it is collaboration. People working together for a better future for all.

Jaron Lanier

Jaron Lanier in his book “ Who Owns the Future?” argues the impact of machines has not been entirely benign because they have concentrated information into the hands of the few. Kodak used to employ 140 000 people and was worth $28 billion. It is now bankrupt and replaced by Instagram, worth $1 billion and employing 13 people.

Middle class people used to benefit from what Lanier calls levees. Levees are the walls built in fields to retain water and so feed the crops. It used to be possible to build levees around certain activities, where the practitioner’s expertise prevented others joining them without being accepted into the profession. Machines are used to break down these walls. For example, a few years ago you would have had to ask professional video makers to produce a video. Now you can easily do it yourself. Granted there is still a market for good videos from those who don’t have the time or patience to learn to do it well. The same applies to web design.

However, what might appear to be a process of democratisation, where people are able to do things they couldn’t a few years ago has its downside. Are those 13 Instagram employees really worth $76 million each? Compared with Kodak’s employees worth only $200K? If Instagram’s employees are really worth that much, I wonder how many of them have seen anything like $76 million.

Siren Servers

Lanier writes about “Siren Servers”; they

“gather data from the Internet, often without having to pay for it. The data is analysed using the most powerful available computers, run by the very best available technical people. The results of the analysis are kept secret, but are used to manipulate the rest of the world to advantage.”

Think of the impact of siren servers on bookshops. Siren servers practice data scraping, where they pick up bargains on rival bookshops’ websites and then they can undercut them. How do we react? We can choose to visit the local bookshop to look at books but there is always the temptation to find the online offer that undercuts their special offer. The net result is fewer bookshops. Is that what we really want?

(Yes I am a hypocrite.  I use affiliate links to a huge siren server.  I don’t do this for the money (income from my affiliation so far is zero) and I don’t believe this will significantly change.  It serves as a link to more information about the book I’m reviewing.  Where you choose to buy it is your choice.  Perhaps we need a peoples’ movement who check out online and then purchase in shops, where shops are accessible.)

Conclusion

Lanier’s book is a good explanation of the challenges we face from those who control new technologies. He suggests solutions, which certainly open up new possibilities and show how decisions sharing data online are not set in stone.

Whether his solutions are practical is another matter. My view is people need to be realistic about where the power is online and work together to create genuine alternatives. These alternatives must be rooted in our lives as we live them and we decide if machines will aid us.

We have access to information and communication unparalleled in human history. We can allow the corporations to control it and so concentrate power in their hands or we can collaborate to build our own levees, where genuine interactions can take place in our neighbourhoods, cities, towns and villages.

1 Our Town Centres Tomorrow

The core principle to Julian Dobson’s approach in “How to Save Our Town Centres” is perhaps summarised in this single sentence:

“The thriving high streets and town centres of the 21^st century will be those that rediscover how to maximise returns to their communities.” (page 127)

The concept of community is notoriously slippery and perhaps mostly we must fall back on “I know community when I see it”. We can say community is present where there is growth of sustained relationships between people committed to a particular place. Whilst there is a degree of trust required in any financial transaction, in large commercial chains it is primarily through written contracts and familiar branding; not so much through personal contact.

City Centres are Complex

So far, so simple. Dobson shows how complex our cities are and the many factors we need to consider. So, in the second part of the book, he has written chapters about:

Economic Development Equals Community Development

Dobson questions the approach to regeneration that brings together the great and the good. He writes:

“They fail to appreciate that economic development must encompass community development … this means considering not only what kind of places we want to create, but how they are to be run and in whose interests: who will control or influence what can happen in 5, 10, 20 or 50 years’ time and how to ensure our towns are no longer at the mercy of decisions taken hundreds or thousands of miles away – or even behind closed doors in the local town hall or chamber of commerce.” (page 262)

In my free e-book (see below) “Community Development is Dead! Long Live Community Development!”,  I argue practitioners have ignored the local economy. The corporations have taken advantage of the neglect many local activists have practiced towards their local economy. They have their power because activists have refused to dirty their hands in trade. As a result community activity has become grant dependent and so unable to build sustainable programmes in their communities.

An Objection

And this brings me to an objection to Dobson’s argument. We cannot get there by concentrating solely on town centres. Town centres are one part of larger towns and cities with many suburban centres. And they too need regeneration. The big supermarkets recognise local shopping centres are important and wealthier centres usually house at least one major chain in direct competition with local businesses.

Local businesses not only base their activities outside their town centre because they can afford the premises but also because they value where they are. They build networks of suppliers and customers where they are.

We need a model that provides a framework for trade across the city, allowing customers to find local businesses not only in the centre but across the city. I’ve written about Hunters Bar in Sheffield, a distinct centre that draws people for recreational purposes, perhaps on an afternoon off work. In the same post, Spital Hill is another example of a local centre, where there is in embryo an Islamic shopping centre. There are many other similar places in the city. We need to find ways of supporting all this economic activity and the city centre can support these satellite centres.

This apart, “How to Save Our City Centres” is an essential contribution to the debate about the future of our cities, local economies and communities.

2 Our Town Centres Today

So, what are the problems facing town centres today? Last Friday I introduced Julian Dobson’s book, “How to Save Our Town Centres”. Today I shall summarise what he understands their problems to be.

What Are Town Centres?

We are making a massive mistake if we think town centres are solely about retail; fundamentally they are places where relationships develop between citizens. Retail depends on trust and so the nature of cities and their spaces, where relationships can grow, is important. At least, that is true for local retail businesses. The large corporations depend on their brand to develop trust and so have become independent of civic institutions.

Dobson writes:

“Not only the shops are going: many of the institutions that once anchored town centres, from churches to libraries to adult education centres, have disappeared or diminished. The activities that brought people into town in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries are often no longer there, and sometimes no longer anywhere.” (page 10)

Later, he writes:

“Go back to the ancient Greek idea of the agora and you will find a far richer mix than exists in even the most successful contemporary street markets. The agora was a civic space, not just a marketplace. In the agora of Athens there was the courtroom, places of religious worship, the gymnasium, the mint that produced the city’s coinage, and the bouleuterion, the council building where people assembled to legislate and to discuss public affairs. The agora was used for theatre and performance, meeting and holding court: it was far more than a shopping precinct.” (page 46)

The Marketplace

This vision will be familiar to readers of this blog although I’ve usually used the word marketplace to describe similar diversity. People generate all these activities and so we say they are people-centred. Of course, some institutions, for example civic authorities, manage activities such as courts or council meetings. But all these activities are essentially public activities. They take place behind closed doors only in totalitarian states.

But ideally local businesses and community organisations generate most activity. Each activity supports future activities because town centres have histories known by the people and are an inspiration to them. They take civic pride in their unique place.

Three Trends Undermine Town Centres

According to Dobson there are broadly three trends that have undermined our town centres in recent decades:

“The shopping centre, the supermarket and the internet giant: each in its way is stripping trade out-of-town centres and away from local businesses.” (page 78)

And when the trade goes it becomes more difficult to sustain the other activities.

The one thing that unites these three threats to town centres is branding. Meadowhall, Tesco and Amazon (for example) are all trusted brands. This means they are well-known, provide a massive range of goods and offer credible guarantees of quality.

What Can Be Done?

Whilst many local retail businesses can compete on quality they can rarely compete on their range of goods (addressed by having many businesses and not so much by increasing the range of goods held by a trader) or becoming well-known because they have limited marketing budgets and are often based in premises they can afford outside the town centre.

Somehow we have an economic system that makes no effort to protect the interests of local businesses and communities.  Local authorities plan to attract corporate businesses into their areas in the hope it will regenerate their towns.  Instead they take more finance out of the area, destroy local supply networks and then when they find a better offer, are likely to leave.  Where are the plans to grow, support and protect local businesses and communities?

No summary can do justice to Dobson’s book and especially the wealth of examples he offers based on good and bad practice.

Next week I shall explore some of the solutions Dobson offers and reveal the one point on which I do not agree with him.

2 How to Save Our Town Centres

They used to say the story of Sheffield was a tale of two cities. The old city centre was bombed during the Second World War. I can remember travelling by bus as a child into the centre and passing bomb sites. I didn’t know they were bomb sites at the time. A comedian once said the residents of Sheffield quite liked the bombed look and so modelled their city on it!

One day during the 1960s, my parents took me to the Central Library to see a model of the plans for the city centre. This was the famous “Hole in the Road”. I remember being particularly impressed by a ramp built into Cockaynes (which I thought had been there forever). It was to connect to subterranean passageways from the hole in the road (follow the link for archive photoes, scroll down for Castle Square with the hole and as it is now).

Using subways, bridges and pedestrianised streets you could walk from Moorfoot to the Castle Market without crossing a road. Sheffield was the cleanest industrial city in Europe and the greatest shopping centre outside London.

I moved away in the seventies and upon my return in 1989, the hole in the road was a shadow of its former grandeur. Sheffielders were once again enjoying empty spaces. They wrecked the centre by building Meadowhall, the biggest out-of-town shopping centre in the region, a couple of miles away.

A Tale of Three Cities!

Today it is a tale of three cities. The hole is long gone, the Supertram introduced in the early nineties and many sixties monuments replaced by millennium projects. The millennium projects have actually been quite successful and are more popular than many of the buildings they replaced.

However, as a retail centre Sheffield has not done so well. There have been several attempts to build a new shopping centre at Barkers Pool and a new proposal is under consideration at present. The Castle Market has moved to Moorfoot (so there’s no need to do the famous walk) and they’re building a new retail site nearby. But the Moor itself is a shadow of its former glory with most of the retail chains closing or moving to Meadowhall. Fargate, arguably, the main retail street, is a mess. It looks like someone emptied a back catalogue of street furniture onto one street and then paved it with Italianate cobbles that make walking along it an unpleasant experience.

How to Save Our Town Centres

I could write more about Sheffield’s centre (and possibly should) and it will be familiar to Julian Dobson who lives in the same city and is the author of “ How to Save Our Town Centres: A radical agenda for the future of high streets”.

The only thing I would take issue with is the book’s title that hardly does justice to its content. The implications of his argument would stretch far beyond town centres and are relevant to every neighbourhood.

I’ve covered ideas in this book previously in this blog. (He uses the term Agora and writes about the retail co-operative movement’s significance.) The writing is brilliant, a pleasure to read and I’m really jealous he has managed so much I’ve attempted to write about!

The book is not only a pleasure to read but also practical. There are many examples of projects all over the United Kingdom and indeed the world. Experiments are happening all over despite the lack of political support for change. Dobson includes practical suggestions for activists and legislators, should we ever manage to elect politicians who truly share our interests in a thriving national localised economy.

Of all the books I’ve reviewed so far (and I’ve reviewed some very good books) this is the one I most wholeheartedly recommend you read. I’ll write more about it over the next few Fridays.

2 The Heritage of Asset Based Community Development

I’m not familiar with Asset Based Community Development (ABCD). However, Cormac Russell’s book “Looking Back to Look Forward” has inspired me to find out more.

The book is primarily Cormac Russell “in conversation with John McKnight about the heritage of Asset Based Community Development and its place in the world today”. John McKnight is one of the founders of ABCD. The core of the book explores nine key thinkers, who were or are McKnight’s contemporaries and inspirations.

The book has a helpful bibliography about ABCD. ABCD will re-issue it in an expanded form in 2016, to include interviews with other founders of the movement.

Alinski and Illich

Of the nine key thinkers I was previously familiar with two, Saul Alinski and Ivan Illich. The other seven thinkers and activists cover a vast area of expertise in areas such as a health, education and the arts.

Ivan Illich observed that as institutions develop they move from their foundation principles through various phases. They culminate in self-defeat, meaning they reinforce the problems they were set up to solve.

They clearly illustrate this principle in the economy. Local businesses exist to enrich communities. Good business people leave a trail of new or improved businesses because their model is generosity. Obviously things don’t always pan out that way and many business owners do not excel as employers, for example.  We remember the pioneers of the industrial revolution who left a great civic legacy. They were also exploiters of their employees.

At some point in the growth of a business it slips its moorings and ceases to benefit the wider community, concentrating wealth in fewer hands and extracting it from circulation in the economy. So, big businesses no longer enrich and begin to impoverish local economies.

Communities from the Inside Out

The vision behind ABCD is residents can grow their communities from the inside out, using the assets naturally available to them. They throw “their lives into becoming the counterbalance to a non-sustaining consumer culture”. Their negative view of the marketplace perhaps marrs his positive approach in some part. I would like to see a more positive vision of the marketplace when it is a place for sharing of local assets.

There has to be some focal point where communities share their assets and why not call it the marketplace? It would certainly be a more historically accurate use of the word than the current neo-liberal version.

The assets available to communities appear to fall into six categories:

Whilst I am sure the ABCD approach is on the right lines, I am less sure it has sufficient leverage to effect the changes we so desperately need. I hope to see in the longer book a positive approach to reclaiming marketplaces in local neighbourhoods and an analysis of the political leverage required to effect real change.