Where I lay my head is home

[davywavy]

A year or so ago I read an article (I can't find it now) about how Detroit City Council, finally realising that their city just was never going to be what it once was, had started demolishing residential suburbs and returning them to nature. I thought it was an interesting idea as it seemed to make two assumptions; firstly that the housing stock was not only now redundant but also that the people who had lived there were now not only gone, but they weren't coming back. At the back of my mind I vaguely contrasted this pragmatic solution with the plan put into practise about five years ago by our own Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG), when they started demolishing entire housing estates in places like Liverpool and Newcastle.
At the time I was shocked by this plan; the rows of hundreds of rather nice, solid red-brick Victorian terraces being merrily bulldozed out of the way. Surely some better solution could be found for such nice properties, I thought.

I sometimes mention that I grew up in 'It's Grim Up North' territory; I do it to establish my working class hero credentials when arguing with the sort of Labour supporter who had a nice middle-class upbringing in Hampshire and feels a bit guilty about it. My dad worked as a pig herder and then went down the pit, and I left school with only one 'O' level. This might be mendacious of me, but I don't half find it entertaining.
Anyway, whilst I was up there visiting family a few weeks ago I was driving through one of the innumerable housing estates in the area. The sort of place where one house in three is boarded up and there's 40% unemployment and whilst I was doing so I got to thinking about Detroit and the DCLG and wondering who was right.
It's the nature of communities to grow and shrink; no municipality has any moral right to exist solely on the merit of it already doing so. The industrial communities - be they Detroit or Sheffield or wherever - grew as people moved to them because there was work there and, when the work ends (in the case of Detroit because people started making better cars cheaper elsewhere), something else is needed. Both the UK and the US have spent large sums of money on regenerating or supporting communities in this situation, but I can't help but think that this money may well have been better spent on retraining people with skills and also helping them relocate to where those skills are in demand, rather than supporting and regenerating communities - which seems to be just a euphamism for spending lots of moolah to get people to stay where they are for no real reason.
One thing which really struck me is that when the DCLG set about knocking down terraces in Liverpool, the local residents objected strenuously and it appears that their objections were not based upon idea of losing homes they'd lived in all their lives, but instead were based on their experiences of what happened during the last time this process happened in the 1960's and 1970's, when houses were cleared simply to make way for new housing developments and people were just moved about in the same small area with no greater opportunities to make themselves a better life than were there before.

I can't help but feel that the money being spent on this entire process of regeneration and supporting communities might be better spent on the very thing which created those communities in the first place - encouraging people to move where there is work for them, where they can create new neighbourhoods.

But what do I know. What do you think?

Comments

[meme-machine.livejournal.com]

Hi Dave,

I'd take issue with your last sentence. The thing which created communities in the first place was not people moving there because there was work. That's a very recent phenomenon - something from the massive dislocations caused by the Industrial Revolution, and which created ghettoes, social unrest, overcrowding, various "urban maladies", and a general grottiness of life which arguably we're still trying to cope with.

By far the vast majority of communities have agrarian origins. They were collections of farms, then concentrations of specialist crafters into towns supported by outlying villages. But you know this :-)

My family are staunch Northerners and originally farmers who came down from Cumbria into Lancashire with the railways during the late Industrial Revolution, and in doing so lost contact with "the land" and became urban or semi-urban proles and petty bourgeois. That was about 180 years ago, so we've managed to put down new roots, and now consider central and east Lancs "home".

I had to leave, because economic deprivation meant there was little there I could do other than manual work, which I didn't want to. I would have *loved* to stay, but was forced out by economic circumstances and a general lack of planning. I don't resent it, but it has made me relatively "rootless", which I consider a loss, and it would have been nice to have had the choice.

The Industrial Revolution is a blip in human history - a mere couple of centuries - and already our societies are beginning to find the concentration of labour in cities to be not all that productive. On the whole, the uncontrolled social movements produced by the Revolution have been socially disastrous, unless you're a rich landowner: we have people crammed in on top of one another in cities, urban decay and lawlessness, and vast tracts of countryside underdeveloped and largely empty, and far too expensive for its "ancestral inhabitants" to currently go back to. Quite absurd.

So, personally I'm hoping we get over this Industrial Revolution hiccough, and get sensible about communities, roots, and creating a decent living environment again. And, yes, that requires a bit of thought and planning, rather than simply a kind of Darwinist sauve qui peut ;-)

Sarah