Hats off to educationalists

Signs have gone up on Stockport station trumpeting that this is 'the home of Stockport College'.

You can picture the throngs of bright-eyed students descending from Richard Branson's bright red trains, aglow at the thought of Stockport's dreaming spires. Here, perhaps, is where those youthful ambitions will be fulfilled, where tomorrow's alchemists will learn how to turn base metal into gold.

Or perhaps they'll just settle for an NVQ in leisure and tourism. If so, they may discover a way to magnify the lure of Stockport's famous Hat Museum, whose giant smokestack dominates the town. I'm sure there's a good reason why I should spend an afternoon discovering the history of hats, but I can't imagine what it is right now.

Alternatively, Stockport's future may lie in providing cheap accommodation for the visitors to Manchester's super-casino...

Betting on Blackpool

So the good people of Blackpool are angry and upset at the decision to locate Britain’s first super-casino in Manchester. Funny that such earnest advocates of regeneration-by-gambling should find it so hard to come to terms with the fact that they gambled – and lost.

Postman's knock

I hate to sound like Norman Tebbit, but there's a lot of sentimental hogwash talked about the role of local post offices.

Don't get me wrong. I think local post offices perform an important and valuable social function. They also happen to be a remarkably useful place for posting and picking up parcels. For older people in particular, they are a vital part of the community's infrastructure - see this post from Kevin Harris, for example.

Earlier this week I heard a presentation from a representative of the National Federation of Subpostmasters, who for understandable reasons, was rather concerned to avoid the closure of thousands of local post offices. Yet the Royal Mail admits that out of 14,263 post offices, some 10,500 are lossmaking. It describes these euphemistically as 'community' post offices - where the local area, be it a village or urban neighbourhood, cannot or will not support a profitable enterprise.

I also heard an older person describe the experience of using one of these beloved community outlets. She talked about the queues outside in freezing weather, the stigma of being known to your neighbours as a benefit claimant, the lack of privacy, the fact that there's nowhere to sit down.

The difficulty I have with the Save the Post Office brigade, as posted previously, is that it's asking the wrong question. The question it asks is 'what would happen if our post office shuts?', to which the obvious answer is that the community would lose an important asset. It therefore follows that there is a social need to keep the post office open. QED.

However, if the question was, 'what facilities does our community need to function effectively and provide social support?' would the answer be a post office?

So just what does a community need? Most of us need to pick up and deliver letters and parcels from time to time, so a post office service does help. But it's self-evident that subpostmasters can't make money from that alone - that's why my local post office does a very nice line in fresh bread too.

Look at the arguments for retaining post offices, and you'll see that most of them revolve around social interaction. There's a second line of reasoning which is about the local economy: local shopping centres need a critical mass to attract footfall, so when one shop goes, everyone suffers.

So why not start with the need for social interaction: a place where people can receive help and advice, be put in touch with relevant services, meet people for a chat, and maybe pick up a parcel, cash a cheque or buy a paper? Maybe even somewhere where you can sit down and have a cup of tea at the same time?

There's no obvious reason why a private business should fulfil that need. But it is a role that local government, or neighbourhood government in the form of a parish or community council, could play very well - setting up a local centre where people can access services (both in person and online), arrange social care, find recommended traders, and much more. By providing such a hub councils can offer opportunities to private businesses, which would be only too willing to rent floorspace in a warm, comfortable building with a guaranteed flow of customers. Bring in the punters and the business will follow (look at the number of shops that now have outlets in NHS hospitals, or at bus interchanges and railway stations).

That way we can save everything that's best about the local post office. What's more, we can do it without pouring endless subsidies into the Royal Mail.

Rising stars

It's four o'clock on an icy January afternoon in north Sheffield. Gemma, the community worker, has come armed with carrier bags full of fizzy pop and crisps. From the outside the youth centre, which has obviously seen better days, looks as if it too is feeling the chill.

Inside it's warm and has the kind of down-at-heel familiarity you can feel comfortable in: standard-issue stackable chairs, a pine-panelled coffee bar that looks a bit like a fairground stall, a pool table with a backdrop of hip-hop style graffiti.

Anna and Leroy, the youth workers, have been frantically texting all their contacts: this is a meeting to give young people a chance to have their say about a new magazine which is going to 22,000 homes in their area.

There are two young people here already. One, admittedly, is doing work experience with the youth project, so he hasn't had to come far. The other, a girl of about 15 with sparkly make-up, is probably quite enthusiastic. You have to say probably, because most of the time she doesn't speak.

We wait around for the others. After a while Charmaine appears. She's another youth worker. So we start.

We're kicking around various ideas for the magazine. Some of the conversation is quite animated. These are the bits where the teenagers nod their heads or grunt in a positive-sounding fashion. Other bits are slightly harder going. We establish that what young people most enjoy reading is horoscopes. The girl perks up. 'My mum knows all about the stars,' she says.

We could have a discussion about how to make up a community horoscope ('Aquarius: today is probably not the best day to enquire about the burst water main outside your house') but the moment passes. Fortunately.

There's a knock at the door. Could this be the influx of young people we're expecting? A well-wrapped gentleman of about 50 enters. It turns out he works with young people, so he's more than welcome.

An hour on, it's dark and we're packing up. All in all, we agree, it's been a promising start. Gemma gathers up the bags of uneaten crisps.

All fired up

Given that some children can't resist the temptation to burn down school buildings, you might question the decision to put this giant artwork of a phoenix in the atrium of the rebuilt Meadowhead School in Sheffield.

Still, you can see the rationale. Here we have a brand new facility, bankrolled through the private finance initiative (otherwise known as the construction industry's slush fund) and a huge morale-booster for beleaguered teaching staff.

There's a massive amount of money going into the Building Schools for the Future programme - some £3bn in the last year. The idea is to rebuild all our secondary schools, and anyone who's been in some of the buildings that were thrown up 40 or 50 years ago will know that's long overdue.

Governments are keen to plough money into capital projects - well, every minister likes a monument. It's also a clear response to the Something Must Be Done About It brigade: look, something is being done about it.

I wouldn't want to detract from anything that's happening at Meadowhead, which has an excellent reputation. But it doesn't take long for paintwork to become grubby, graffiti to start appearing on desks and a new building to be taken for granted. Five years down the line, will the staff and kids still be excited about it?

This week I spoke to a council official in South Tyneside, which is about to get a load of stick for sending 35 teachers over to Pennsylvania to learn how to encourage kids to be emotionally resilient - that is, to cope better with the stresses and strains of life. Wait till the Daily Mail gets onto it.

But if it was choice between a new building and a bunch of kids who felt positive about life, had high aspirations and the ability to take a few knocks, I think I'd settle for the latter. It might even stop a few schools being burned down.

When the music stops...

Old-fashioned Trots used to talk in earnest tones of the permanent revolution, when the oppressed would seize once and for all the means of production, overthrowing their capitalist tyrants and replacing them with socialist tyrants.

Revolutions are messy and violent, and anyone considering one in Blair's Britain had better watch out for the inevitable asbo. Instead we now have the theory of the permanent merry-go-round, where everyone periodically changes places without anything much being knocked off course.

Each revolution - no, let's call it a cycle - of the merry-go-round gives us a different set of faces, different letterheads, and a new website or two. Ministers are able to impose their authority on the new organisation, at least until another minister comes along and decides the structure is no longer fit for purpose.

So the carousel jingles on and English Partnerships and the Housing Corporation are poised to become a bright new bureaucracy. Some commentators have been following this avidly, issuing weekly updates on what might or might not happen as if this were an event of earth-shaking consequence, comparable with the release of Nelson Mandela or the fall of the Berlin Wall. 'Sources' in the know whisper a running commentary as the ministerial digits prepare to grasp the ministerial rubber stamp. Meanwhile staff jockey for position, from chief executive to deputy understudy to the janitor.

Just how much difference does this costly and morale-sapping repositioning of deckchairs make where it really matters? No doubt there'll be some efficiencies, though they would have to be radical indeed to offset the stultifying effect of devoting the energies of the best and the most expensive staff to internal reshuffling for months on end.

There is, naturally, merit in having an organisation that is best structured to deal with the challenges of today. If that structure enables it to meet the challenges of tomorrow, better still. But however well the bureaucracy is constituted, it will soon become obsolete because circumstances will change. What's important is to have personnel in post who have the skills, attitude and freedom to overcome obstacles, whether those are found inside the establishment or outside.

That begs the question of whether such people are already in post. If they are, do we really need to create a new officialdom to enable them to function successfully? And if not, what exactly is this brave new world going to change?

More welly for Kelly?

Just what has Ruth Kelly got against the sustainable communities bill? Nick Hurd's private member's bill, due to receive its second reading in the House of Commons on Friday, ought to be an uncontentious bit of legislation designed to give local people a bigger say about their locality.

The bill, designed to tackle the 'ghost town' syndrome, is officially supported by the Lib Dems and the Broccoli Party (that's the Conservatives, for sticklers for protocol). Most Labour backbenchers also support it.

Yvette Cooper, the earnest junior minister at the DCLG, has been in contact with the Local Works campaign, which is behind the bill, and has made positive noises. However, a meeting scheduled for 10 January was cancelled, and civil servants suggested the campaigners should talk directly to Ruth Kelly and Phil Woolas later this week. However, on 8 January - so Local Works has been informed - the two ministers decided the government would oppose the bill, making this week's meeting a nonsense.

Of course it may be that the local government white paper has paved the way for a nirvana that will make the sustainable communities bill all but redundant. The 'community call to action' could be what we've all been waiting for.

On the other hand, could it be that we have a government that only wants local democracy on its own terms?

Life's not a bed of roses

It's enough to make Ebenezer Howard turn in his grave. The pioneer of Garden Cities would have been horrified at the findings of the latest Worldwatch Institute report on global trends.

One third of the world's urban population lives in slums without necessities such as clean water, durable housing or a nearby toilet, the 2007 State of the World report notes.

What's more, half the additional 1.1bn people projected to join the world's population in the next 23 years will live in urban slums unless global development priorities are reconsidered.

The report argues that unplanned and chaotic urbanisation is taking a huge toll on human health and environmental quality. Around 1.6m city dwellers across the world die each year because of a lack of clean water and sanitation.

'For a child living in a slum, disease and violence are daily threats, while education and healthcare are often a distant hope,' says Worldwatch project director Molly O'Meara Sheehan. Scary stuff, and it's happening just a cheap holiday flight away.

So are cities the great evil? Ebenezer Howard would have said yes. He'd have been appalled at our tendency to put huge numbers of people where they are most vulnerable: eight of the world's ten most populous cities are on or near earthquake faults, six of the ten are at risk of storm surges, and of the 33 cities projected to have more than 8m residents by 2015, at least 21 are coastal cities that may have to prepare for rising sea levels.

But our cities also provide amazing examples of how human beings can work together against the odds to improve their conditions. In Karachi, Pakistan, the Orangi Pilot Project has connected hundreds of thousands of poor households to the city's sewer network at a fifth of the cost charged by the official water and sanitation agency. In Rizhao, China, 99% of households in the city centre now have solar water heaters, while most of the city's street lights and traffic signals are now solar-powered.

Cities are no more of a problem than the mirror we look into every morning: what stares us in the face is a reflection of ourselves.

An equal music

Recipes for sustainable communities are like recipes from cookbooks: there's no need to restrict yourself. You can go for big, robust flavours washed down with a bottle of wine, Jamie Oliver style, or something fast but tasty like Ainsley Harriott. Or you could go for something green and nutritious, with plenty of aduki beans and fresh veg. What matters is the combination.

Here's a combination from Liverpool: take one internationally-renowned orchestra, five schools, and a neighbourhood with more problems than you can shake a stick at. And suggest you can make a difference by getting kids to learn the cello.

That, in effect, is what Music for Life has done. This is a five-year project to link musicians from the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra with the local community in Kensington. There were plenty of people who saw it all as elitist and irrelevant, from the activists who couldn't see beyond the need for improved housing to the dads who didn't want their boys doing something as effeminate as learning classical music.

Kensington is a new deal for communities area, with all the problems that qualify a deprived area for new deal funding. Poor housing, low educational attainment and limited job prospects all loomed higher on the agenda than cultural activities.
The orchestra had to convince local people and schools that the programme was worthwhile. As Judith Agnew from the Philharmonic explained: 'We suffered from an attitude that classical music is elitist and this was just an audience development exercise. By us saying we would be working for at least five years, working every week with the children, we could use pester power from the children - "come and see me perform". We were totally frank about how committed we were to being there.'

There are now some 60 children at five primary schools learning musical instruments, and many have continued their interest into secondary education. One head teacher, Charles Daniels at Sacred Heart Catholic Primary School, reported that pupils' behaviour had been transformed since the start of Music for Life. 'Our biggest failing was not realising how good the scheme was - it took a while for the penny to drop,' he said. 'The project is so good we would move anything to make room for it.'

Two Ofsted inspection reports have mentioned the impact of Music for Life; attendance at four of the five schools has improved; and key stage 2 results in maths, science and English are markedly better. Adults, too, have been getting involved, with a growing number joining a community choir.

So what's the point here? Get everyone playing Bach and we'll all be happier? Not exactly, but don't underestimate the difference it can make. Funding for arts is usually the first cut to be made when times are tough, and we can expect plenty of cuts in the year to come. But if we want kids who have aspirations, a stake in society and a sense of excitement in their lives, maybe we should stop seeking to protect the ordinary at the expense of the extraordinary.

Bob the builder, can he fix it?

The delightfully contentious Jane Jacobs would have had much to say about the construction boom in Britain's cities.

Fifty years ago she made this observation about north American cities: 'As for really new ideas of any kind - no matter how ultimately profitable or otherwise successful some of them might prove to be - there is no leeway for such chancy trial, error and experimentation in the high-overhead economy of new construction. Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.'

By old buildings, she didn't mean stately homes, palatial mansion blocks or stucco-covered Victorian Gothic splendour. She just meant old buildings, constructed and paid for, that can be sold or rented cheaply to new enterprises.
Here in Sheffield the occasional old building is being restored for new uses. The education offices on Leopold Street will become a hotel; the famous Butcher Works, loved by filmmakers for its Dickensian atmosphere, will become upmarket flats. Neither of these are the incubators of new enterprise Jane Jacobs had in mind.

For the last couple of years I've worked in a former chapel in Sheffield's 'cultural industries quarter'. The chapel has been a place of worship, a metal-bashing workshop, shared office space and this year will be the home of a text-message voting company. It was nearly knocked down as part of a development of flats (sorry, apartments), but was saved by an enlightened bureaucrat who insisted it should be kept for business use. All hail, whoever you are.

The chapel, sadly, is the exception to a prevailing climate of new build in the area. Another exception is Truro Works, a tastefully converted workshop now used as student accommodation. Elsewhere more and more student flats are going up, with buildings completed faster than an undergraduate on a pub crawl and displaying about as much sensitivity to their surroundings.

Will these be the crucibles of new ideas, the wombs from which tomorrow's top businesses emerge? Is this the yellow brick road that leads to the knowledge economy? Better to keep the sheds and redundant factories that were there before and let them out dirt cheap to people who want to create something. Pretty it will never be, but at least it will keep the place alive.

Dig for victory

Andy is a confident, cheeky Mancunian kid in his last year at primary school. He's the sort of lad you'll find organising playground games or playing practical jokes in class.

Archaeology, I'd guess, wouldn't be the first thing you'd expect to find on his list of interests. Yet Andy was a leading light in a community archaeology project in Wythenshawe, south Manchester, last year (the picture shows the dig, but that's not Andy).

Andy's school took part in Dig Manchester, an excavation of a former mill organised by the city council, local regeneration agencies and Manchester University. 'I went back at the weekend with my family to do more research,' Andy said. 'I exposed a millstone. It was brilliant.'

Dig Manchester wasn't a typical regeneration project. Funding agencies struggled to see its relevance at first. Yet it's helped bring a sense of pride and connectedness to a community that's recognised by outsiders for all the wrong reasons.

Dig Manchester tapped into local people's creativity and sense of place, and helped them feel good about themselves and their home. If you're looking for output boxes to tick - jobs created, investment generated, qualifications achieved - projects like this aren't terribly helpful. But if you want change, they can make all the difference.

Projects like Dig Manchester generate a buzz and a belief that's impossible to impose through target-driven programmes. Of course, buzz and belief can easily evaporate. But without them it's hard to see how regeneration can be raised above the daily grind.

The lifeblood of regeneration is hope. Not the wishful thinking and worn-out rhetoric of political manifestos, but hope of real changes in people's everyday lives.

Over the years I've noticed that the further up the professional scale you travel, the less excitement there appears to be about the task we're all involved in. There's plenty of skill, an abundance of contacts, a razor-sharp awareness of policy: but energy, enthusiasm, buzz and belief don't always sit comfortably in a tailored suit and are difficult to communicate through your Blackberry.

There are some people who still get it. Listen to Peter Roberts from the Academy for Sustainable Communities, or Rita Patel at the Peepul Centre in Leicester, for example.

So if you're still an enthusiast, don't let the dullards grind you down. And if you're afraid you're turning into a dullard, why not make it your mission to meet an enthusiast or two?