Mapping the Big Society

© By Urban Tick

The government is driving significant change in the way in which public services are delivered (or not delivered) and seeking to invigorate of local democracy and increase public participation through the localism and the Big Society agenda. The spatial implications of many recently-announced change are monumental: a number of its reforms and initiatives involve citizens and front-line staff actively redrawing the geography of service delivery. To understand the impact of GP consorita – and the merging of entire local council services across traditional authority boundaries – we need visuals to help us define and understand new geographies.

Experience shows its difficult to organise public institutions successfully across and between traditional administrative boundaries. An explicit objective of the government in soliciting private sector-led Local Employment Partnerships was that they would work “on the basis of local economic geography”. But take a look at the map and notes that MPs were given in their briefing packs on LEPs last month: London will operate a LEP as distinct from its commuter belt; Kent and Essex will constitute a single LEP covering both counties, exactly. Looking nationally, “the 24 approved bids leave large areas of the country without a LEP. These include the North East except Teesside, much of North Yorkshire and Humberside, Norfolk and Suffolk, the Black Country and large areas of the South West. By contrast, nine local authority district areas are covered by two approved LEPs”. Messy, eh?

I wonder if the businesses involved in devising LEP proposals had any maps to help them plan. What would be appropriate for defining a new economic geography? The ONS has defined the UK by labour market geography. But the ONS map won't show you the enterprise gap: that there are 30% more jobs per person in London than the North East. Nor will it show you that every local authority contains communities which are cut off and lack quick and cheap transport options to get people from their homes to where the closest jobs are.

So what tools will local people – to be newly empowered by the Localism Bill as planners of their own neighbourhoods – have at their disposal to help them plan? At the neighbourhood scale, University College London has developed a fantastic analytical resource for London as well as futuristic approaches such as space syntax. In New York, powerful and politicised advocacy is empowered through mapping from the Centre for Urban Pedagogy – which seeks to fuse the talents of artists, designers and community activists. In the UK, Think Public has sought to apply designers with problem-solving skills to improve public services, while local government has barely begun to scratch the surface in using basic geographic information technology. 

Local people who choose to get involved in directing the plan for their neighbourhood need to be able to draw on professional expertise to do this well, but the new planning culture considers itself as building spatial literacy from the bottom up, not the top-down. Is it possible to create a map which captures what places really feel like? How are they experienced as we walk or drive around them? Attempts to understand and represent people's social networks and urban experiences – such as the recent work from the RSA on Connected Communities – produce abstract visual diagrams in which humans are digitised to “nodes”, and friendships reduced to “links”. For someone new to the planning process, they may be better engaged starting with work that has a human quality: such as that produced by artists to map Stockport (Christian Nold) and London (Steven Walter). Digital mapping can tell us lots about social geography – London’s ethnic diversity and “twittering classes” – as well as nationwide atlases. And just wait until potential inherent in our smartphones is realised, giving us a spatialised, real-time overview of national life.

How is government helping people plan? Free distribution of some of the wealth of the Ordnance Survey provides an encouraging development, but the Vanguard scheme to pilot neighbourhood plans comes with a grant fund for 12 Local Authorities of just £20,000 each. Top-down planning in the outgoing system may have alienated many, but securing the meaningful involvement of the masses will be expensive: potential vanguards are encouraged to include in their bid proposal plans for local a referendum on the plan.

Those people that the government is empowering – a GP commissioning health services or a local heritage advocate – are unlikely to be able to coordinate the budget or expertise to utilise the advances in spatial analysis to help design the services and communities of the future. A decentralised, optimised state, paradoxically, faces a problem of scale.

The image above is a contour map of Twitter usage in London. Created by Urban Tick.