Practical. Thinking.
Seeing a new city is always a good way of reflecting on your home town. You look at what’s done differently and wonder why nobody thought of that back home; your eyes are more open to the way people use space and interact with each other. Meeting new people has the same effect. You look [...]
A couple of weeks ago I was asked to give a lecture at Sheffield University’s Interdisciplinary Centre of the Social Sciences. The talk focused on people-centred approaches to regeneration, and how they could be encouraged in today’s policy context. The full text of the talk and the accompanying slides are here. I also wrote a [...]
Since 1992, several hundred homes in a corner of west London have been the standard-bearers of a new form of community control. Previously owned by Westminster Council, they were transferred to a resident-controlled housing association, Walterton and Elgin Community Homes, under the 1988 ‘tenants’ choice’ legislation. Walterton and Elgin Community Homes (WECH) arose from [...]
On the front page of Giroscope’s website is a three point pledge to its tenants. It sounds like the sort of thing some big, commercially minded landlords would do, but the content of this small Hull charity’s promise is rather different: • So long as the conditions of the tenancy are met, you have the right [...]
My thoughts on the demise of high street photographic chain Jessops and the likely closure of HMV have been featured in the Guardian’s Northerner blog. The problem is not simply that a particular business model has become obsolete, I argued. ‘What’s broken is our own ability as citizens to share in the ownership, management and [...]
One year ago, the Portas Review of the high street echoed our vision that the high streets of the future should be ‘multifunctional social centres, not simply competitors for stretched consumers’. The response to the review I coordinated last year was collaborative, and those of us who compiled it believe a positive future for our [...]
Eighteen months ago Gillian Newlove struggled to leave her house. Her confidence was at rock bottom and she did all she could to avoid meeting people. Last Christmas couldn’t have been more different. Her paintings were exhibited at Accrington Town Hall, she met the mayor and visitors were enquiring about buying her work. The change [...]
‘This is not just an ex-mining valley – it’s an outdoor experience valley,’ says Dave Lewis, community director at Groundwork Merthyr and Rhondda Cynon Taff in south Wales. Dave is showing off the climbing centre at the heart of the Taff Bargoed valley, in the middle of a site once deemed too polluted and dangerous [...]
A few years ago the Joseph Rowntree Foundation produced a report entitled Person or place-based policies to tackle disadvantage? Not knowing what works. The title was a fitting, if depressing, summary of more than two decades of research and practice. The current government has decided that the answer to this conundrum is to stop looking [...]
One of the best things about the current exhibition about high streets at the Lighthouse in Glasgow is the way it looks creatively at the possible futures for the high street as well as indulging nostalgia with artefacts and film clips from the past. Many of its ideas about possible futures echo suggestions in The [...]
Copyright © 2013 · Julian Dobson. Design framework by StudioPress