The vital importance of place for re-growing economies

 By pixelsandpaper

On the same day, belated recognition from both sides of the political divide, of the crucial importance of places.

Yes, there are such things as interest groups and virtual communities and ersatz Facebook friendship, but what really matters when it comes to regeneration is real places and real communities, with all the inconveniences which come with that.

That was certainly Lord Glasman’s message at nef’s seminar on local banking last Thursday.

At precisely the same moment, in Newcastle, deputy prime minister Nick Clegg was saying much the same: 

“For years people predicted that, because modern technologies would shrink distances, eventually we would run our economies from behind our laptops, and our identities would become so fluid that we would attach less and less importance to our immediate surroundings. Local life would become an anachronism.  But that will never happen. Human beings need interaction, community. We are our most dynamic when we share ideas face to face.”

That understanding is a very important step forward, it seems to me – an acceptance that virtualisation was not always going to be the economic way forward.  We need real stuff and we need to manufacture it.  We can’t just juggle debt.

Clegg’s speech was important in other ways, and largely unreported, describing a shift in the power balance between Whitehall and the big cities, a “reconfiguring of our relationship [that] will be driven by their ambition, their pace”.

He set out plans to finally let cities be entrepreneurial, letting them keep their business rates, and crucially letting them vary them to achieve economic objectives.

The problem about this new deal with the cities is that, as talented and imaginative as they are, they are emerging from two generations when it was widely believed that all the economic levers were in Whitehall and the City.

So it isn’t immediately clear to them what they should do.  We gave them a brief outline back in the summer.

But we know that isn’t enough. There is a new economic future for cities. It is based on innovation, import replacement and using the assets they have – leaking money flows, wasted people, thwarted imagination.

We at nef have been waiting for this moment for a generation, so critical for the Great Transition, and will help in any way we can.