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The Future of Community: Reports of a Death Greatly Exaggerated Paperback – 20 Oct. 2008
Purchase options and add-ons
- Print length208 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPluto Press
- Publication date20 Oct. 2008
- Dimensions12.7 x 1.32 x 19.69 cm
- ISBN-100745328164
- ISBN-13978-0745328164
Product description
Review
'This powerful book is an alternative to the tradition of swansongs to lost communities. It shows that official and semi-official 'community creators' can only construct fragile pretend communities that often reveal their deep distrust of citizens. It argues that, if ordinary people are left alone by those who think they know what's best for them, the possibilities of human co-operation and the building of new communities are greater than ever.' --Professor Dennis Hayes, Oxford Brookes University, co-author of Basildon: The Mood of the Nation
About the Author
Dave Clements works as a policy adviser in children's social care. He has written widely for publications including the Guardian, spiked-online and Community Care Magazine. He is the co-editor of The Future of Community (Pluto, 2008).
Alastair Donald is researching Urban Systems and Metropolitan Design at the Martin Centre for Architectural and Urban Studies, University of Cambridge. He is co-editor of The Future of Community (Pluto, 2009) and The Lure of the City (Pluto, 2011).
Martin Earnshaw was a convenor of the 2006 Future of Community conference, held at Central St Martins. He is co-editor of The Future of Community (Pluto, 2008).
Austin Williams is author of The Enemies of Progress (Societas, 2008) and co-editor of The Future of Community (Pluto, 2009) and The Lure of the City (Pluto, 2008). He is the founder of ManTownHuman, director of the Future Cities Project and convenor of the infamous 'Bookshop Barnies' book discussions.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Future of Community
Reports of a Death Greatly Exaggerated
By Dave Clements, Alastair Donald, Martin Earnshaw, Austin WilliamsPluto Press
Copyright © 2008 Dave Clements, Alastair Donald, Martin Earnshaw and Austin WilliamsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7453-2816-4
Contents
Acknowledgements, vii,Introduction: Who Needs Community Anyway? Austin Williams, 1,
Part I: In Search of Community,
1. Faking Civil Society Dave Clements, 13,
2. A Green Unpleasant Land Alastair Donald, 24,
3. Public Space: Designing-in Community Richard Williams, 40,
Part II: Constructing Communities,
4. New New Urbanism Austin Williams, 53,
5. Density Versus Sprawl Karl Sharro, 67,
6. Salvation by Brick? The Life and Death of British Communities Penny Lewis, 80,
Part III: Communities in Flux,
7. Strictly Personal: The Working Class Confined to Community Andrew Calcutt, 93,
8. Virtual Communities Versus Political Realities Martyn Perks, 104,
9. Minorities, Multiculturalism and the Metropolitan Experience Neil Davenport, 116,
10. From Little Italy to Big America Elisabetta Gasparoni-Abraham, 129,
11. Rio on Galway: Immigration and Ireland Suzy Dean, 137,
Part IV: Undermining Communities,
12. Communities on the Couch Martin Earnshaw, 147,
13. Youthful Misbehaviour or Adult Traumas? Stuart Waiton, 160,
14. Parish Pump Politics Dave Clements, 170,
Conclusion: A Death Greatly Exaggerated Alastair Donald, 181,
Contributors, 191,
Index, 194,
CHAPTER 1
Faking Civil Society
Dave Clements
In the past couple of years or so we have seen the rise of what might be called a new participatory paradigm. Of course, it has been around for longer than that. As Ben Rogers – a fan of innovation in local government and a visiting fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research – says, the drive for 'greater public involvement' in public services, and experiments with 'citizens' juries, deliberative polling, citizens' assemblies, e-democracy and participatory budgeting', have been going on since at least the mid-1990s (Rogers 2008). But it is only more recently that it has acquired the political significance that it now has. I want to explore why that is.
There is a wide-ranging involvement imperative at work today, not a grassroots movement but a Whitehall-led mission to 'rebuild community' and revitalise civil society, through participatory mechanisms. The Local Government White Paper, Strong and Prosperous Communities (DCLG 2006), requires that local authorities forge 'strong links' with their respective communities, e.g. forcing them to ballot residents before deciding on their priorities. As part of the Best Value regime, the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act 2007 has imposed on local authorities a new 'duty to involve'.
I will argue that these developments are not as positive as they might seem. Overall, they have worrying implications for the workings of our democracy, for the kind of politics we can expect to see for the foreseeable future, and for the state of our communities. Up until now, cynics have been able to content themselves that such initiatives are ultimately of little consequence, and can happily be ignored. But now they are centre stage and set to undermine still further people's relationships with politics and with each other.
THE PARTICIPATORY PARADIGM
Geoff Mulgan, chair of the Carnegie UK Trust Inquiry into the Future of Civil Society in the UK and Ireland, recently confirmed a hunch of mine – whatever civil society is, you and I are not a part of it. Unless you belong to one of the 'charities, social enterprises and voluntary organisations' that he says make it up, that is. The rest of us only know 'disconnect', as the former prime minister's former head of policy likes to put it. Mulgan is also chair of Involve, 'a charity bringing together practitioners in democracy and public engagement' that sits alongside government vehicles like 'Together We Can' in the campaign to 'engage' us with each other in our communities and of course with them.
Mulgan has expressed his concern that there is a lack of 'shared public arenas where communities can deliberate about the future' (Mulgan 2007). He needn't have worried. As promised in the Green Paper, The Governance of Britain, the government launched its first citizens' juries last year. According to newly anointed prime minister Gordon Brown, they would herald a new type of politics, 'engage citizens in active democracy' and create 'better relationships between government and the people' (Panton 2007).
James Panton, a lecturer in politics at St John's College, Oxford, is sceptical. He thinks the new participatory paradigm is indicative of a managerial political class desperate to engage with the electorate as an end in itself. In the process, it seems to me, they are creating an almost seamless political discourse between civil renewal and a strategy meant to counter their own keenly felt estrangement from 'the people'. '[T]here is an appearance of democracy because the process is discursive', he argues, but 'the contours of the debate have been established in advance'. Participants are patronised and disempowered by the experts appointed to mediate the 'debate', in the hope that the 'right' conclusions are reached by all, he explains.
One contributor to this book, Suzy Dean, in a review of Participation Nation: Reconnecting Citizens to the Public Realm (2007), published by Involve, describes such participatory mechanisms and consultation initiatives as 'coercive participation'. '[W]hen the agenda is already set', she says, 'people's sense of apathy regarding public life is reaffirmed rather than challenged' (Dean 2008). Rather like putting a cross against the name of the least offensive candidate after an uninspiring election campaign, it can be an empty gesture, only reinforcing one's alienation from public life.
The simple fact is that citizens' juries and their like are neither able to breathe life into politics and public life, nor re-engage people in their communities. This is because they themselves are borne out of the very failure of politics that has given rise to so-called apathy in the first place. Unlike the institutions that went before them they are not able to mediate people's lives. They have no substantive social base and no wider legitimacy in the community. More worrying for me is that for all its vacuity, the participatory paradigm contains within it a set of assumptions about what people are like, what they are capable of 'engaging' with, and ultimately about what's good for them. The content of the deliberations of those first citizens' juries (i.e. health, crime and children) spoke volumes about how low our political leaders have sunk. This new deliberative politics can only contend with that which immediately impacts at a gut-level, that which worries the concerned citizen, the anxious parent, the worried-well, the fearful resident.
So what of petitions as a less mediated way of engaging in 'direct democracy', as an opportunity for people to say what they think about various issues, rather than being fed with the emotive 'pet' issues of the day, and prodded to make the appropriate affective response?
As Martyn Perks explains in his discussion of virtual communities in Chapter 8, the government's apparent enthusiasm for e-democracy seemed to wane early in 2007, when 1.8 million signatories to a government petition on congestion charging declared themselves opposed. When they met to discuss the matter, MPs were clearly rattled by the undermining of their own position, but also by such a naked expression of the popular will. Tony Wright MP, chair of the public administration select committee, was rather belittling of respondents' mere 'registering of dislike' of government policy. Another described the whole business as 'patronising, manipulative and sinister'. Fellow committee member, Kelvin Hopkins, went so far as to describe the petition as Hitleresque, courting the kind of right-wing populism that could 'whip up war fervour' (Tempest 2007).
There is a good argument that the rise of politics by petition, the bypassing of the ballot box and the undermining of representative democracy it implies, are nothing to be celebrated. But this is not it. The contempt for the idea that ordinary people are entitled to give their opinion, or even vent their frustrations however they see fit – whether it be via a petition, or by voting BNP – is underscored by a profound fear of the masses. Perhaps for this reason, and given the farce of the congestion charging e-petition, you might think the political class would steer well clear of petitions altogether.
On the contrary. Hazel Blears has proposed that councils should be required to respond to any petition signed by 250 or more of their residents, or by 1 per cent of the local population. This is in accordance with the new 'councillor's call to action' clause in the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act 2007. Blears (DCLG 2007b) proclaimed in a speech launching these new powers:
Governments are elected to serve the people, and that applies locally as well as nationally. New petition powers would put more influence, power and control in the hands of communities, leading to greater action to tackle their concerns and improving the health of our local democracy.
You might argue, on the other hand, that this eagerness to put the rightful responsibilities of central and local government 'in the hands of communities' is not a democratic act, but rather symptomatic of our exhausted political culture. That the political elite should resort to asking us for ideas rather than proposing something of their own is not, after all, something to celebrate. It seems to me that this dearth of substance at the political centre is not unrelated to the official interest in the wider disconnect in our communities described by Mulgan.
The consequences of this 'interest' though are as likely as not to lead to further fragmentation rather than to re-connect individuals in their communities. For instance, as with citizens' juries, in the absence of anything else, Blears is rather keen on petitions that connect with people's anxieties – whether it's run-down streets, anti-social drinkers, installing streetlamps in run-down estates, or designing out 'blind corners' on parks and estates where unsavoury types congregate. Indeed, I would argue that the problem of political legitimacy – a lack of ideas and a failure of leadership – is being projected onto an already anxious society, and played out through a divisive communities agenda.
WE'RE ALL VOLUNTEERS NOW
This is particularly apparent in the political class's enthusiasm for volunteering. The government has made volunteering a central plank of its engagement strategy, as a way of rebuilding communities and a sense of civic duty. Without a hint of irony, it has now deemed volunteering virtually compulsory for aspiring active citizens. 2005 was the Year of the Volunteer. There is a Volunteering Week, and a Volunteering Day, and something called Make a Difference Day. Last year, the prime minister pledged to celebrate community champions and create a 'good neighbour MBE' to recognise the good work of volunteers (Branigan 2007).
Opposition leader, David Cameron, has been described as 'obsessed with volunteering' as a means of 'restoring civility' and rediscovering notions of 'mutual responsibility' in the belief that this is what 'transforms local communities for the better' (Newland 2007). Julia Neuberger, Liberal Democrat peer and chair of the Commission on the Future of Volunteering, looks forward to 'a society where volunteering is part of our DNA, so that by giving time we enrich our own lives and those of others' (Commission on the Future of Volunteering 2008). The ambitions of the Commission and the purpose behind initiatives such as Volunteering Week are to create a kinder, more connected society, and to promote volunteering as a 'form of civic engagement', she says.
An understanding of this vogue for volunteering in official circles is important if we are to have a richer understanding of the participatory paradigm. It shows what happens when the 'mechanisms' of which the Mulgan-ites are so fond are temporarily abandoned as the agenda moves into the midst of communities. Because for all this encouragement of individuals to participate in community life, to help needy others and in turn build a new society; the unmediated nature of the real world of relationships runs counter to the suspicious and fearful disposition we are encouraged to adopt towards each other, by the distrustful state. For all the fanfare surrounding the importance of volunteering, in practice the government has done all it can to institutionalise a culture of suspicion that can only put off those wishing to volunteer.
During Volunteering Week last year, a survey found that 13 per cent of men who didn't volunteer to work with children feared being branded a paedophile if they did. Following the passing of the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act 2006, which ensured the massive extension of vetting procedures, 17 per cent specifically said they were put off by the prospect of having to undergo a criminal records check (Ives 2007). This is indicative of a culture of suspicion that is also affecting relations between adults in the community. Neuberger has expressed her concern that 'no touch' protocols prevent volunteers in the care sector from bathing and feeding elderly and disabled people. '[I]n the present climate we are automatically suspicious of people wanting to visit nursing homes and care homes on a casual, uninvited basis', she says (Neuberger 2005: 48).
TERMS OF ENGAGEMENT
Just looking after someone that you happen to know, or helping out at the local community centre, has been politicised and turned into something else. But as Neuberger recognises, despite her advocacy for its wider significance, 'volunteering is often its own reward' (Neuberger 2007). Even those, like Neuberger, who are profoundly concerned about the hurdles put in the way of volunteers – and the impact that suspicion of their motives has on their valuable work in the community – are not immune to the pervasive culture of mistrust on which paedophile panics and rumours of elder abuse thrive.
The uncertainty about what volunteers working as football coaches or as care workers can and cannot do in their interactions with children, the elderly or adults with special needs is poisonous and stifling of normal adult relations with children and with vulnerable adults. Indeed, it is more pervasive even than that, colouring the way we all relate to each other in our everyday lives. The miserable view of what human beings do to each other is commonly held in official circles – and it is rarely treated with the contempt it deserves. This is because it speaks to a profound anxiety about even the most basic of informal relations.
This fearful individuation has its origins in the collapse of the old politics of left and right, and the failing legitimacy of social institutions from the Church of England to the trade unions, that once bound us together (or at either side of an ideological divide) and helped us make sense of the world and our place in it. But can the state rebuild community or revitalise civil society, or should it steer well clear? My contention is that it is doing more damage than good in its efforts to secure its own legitimacy, and to find a new rationale in the often petty politics of community.
REALLY 'ACTIVE' CITIZENS
Despite this underlying anxiety that pervades society, and official attempts to rediscover a sense of purpose through the community agenda, it is perhaps worth mentioning that on account of living in communities, we inevitably participate in them too. This might seem like an obvious point to make but in the fretting over community on the one hand, and the exaggeration of the extent of volunteering on the other, it is in danger of being overlooked.
Community is made of the casual and more intimate bonds that we make and remake every day. But this does not mean, as some claim, that 22 million of us are volunteers, on the basis that many do something vaguely selfless at least once a year. Indeed the politics of participation, of which the official volunteering push is a part, is undermining that which it seeks to bolster – i.e. the voluntary relations of trust and good will that we all enter into without the need for official encouragement, but out of a 'sense of community' that apparently eludes the authorities.
Countervailing trends mean that political and cultural imperatives are strangling the 'giving' nature that we all possess to a greater or lesser extent. Where people fail to engage – with each other or with the wider world of politics – there is reason to believe that this has less to do with apathy, or even antipathy necessarily, and more to do with the kinds of misanthropic goings-on sanctioned by the authorities. By exploiting people's fears about each other and by constructing a politics to fit, people's estrangement from each other is confirmed and codified.
This 'tendency to believe the worst in one another', as Zoë Williams (2007) puts it, is not conducive to the construction of Blears's 'confident communities'. Williams argues compellingly that if only the government could bring itself to trust people to get on with their lives they might find a 'seam of civic duty' running right through our communities. I think she is right. Why is it that those who claim to want to re-engage us and rebuild our communities are also the ones that seem to be so intent on sowing the seeds of distrust?
(Continues...)Excerpted from The Future of Community by Dave Clements, Alastair Donald, Martin Earnshaw, Austin Williams. Copyright © 2008 Dave Clements, Alastair Donald, Martin Earnshaw and Austin Williams. Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- Publisher : Pluto Press (20 Oct. 2008)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 208 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0745328164
- ISBN-13 : 978-0745328164
- Dimensions : 12.7 x 1.32 x 19.69 cm
- Best Sellers Rank: 2,527,883 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 323,381 in Social Sciences (Books)
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About the authors

Austin Williams is senior lecturer in Architecture and Professional Practice at Kingston School of Art in London, and Honorary Research Fellow at XJTLU University, Suzhou, China where he lived for 6 years and helped set up the XJTLU Architecture department in 2011, teaching urban design and studio.
He is the director of the Future Cities Project, the China correspondent for The Architectural Review, and the author of "China's Urban Revolution: Understanding Chinese Eco-cities" (2018) and “New Chinese Architecture: Twenty Women Building the Future” (2019).
Williams founded the mantownhuman manifesto, featured in Penguin Classics’ “100 Artists Manifestos” and has spoken at a wide range of conferences, from New York to Ningbo; from Hawaii to Hong Kong. He is a regular media commentator on development, environmentalism and China. He has written for media outlets as diverse as Nature, Wired; Top Gear; Daily Telegraph; the Times Literary Supplement; spiked, and; The Economist.
He directed over 200 short documentaries for NBSTV and authored and illustrated the “Shortcuts” design guides. His documentary "Che Fang/Edge Town" (directed by Jiang Hao) was shortlisted in the AHRC Research in Film documentary awards in 2018.

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- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 10 April 2018This was an encouraging book to read.
- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 17 August 2009This book provides a much-needed critique of top-down political strategies to "heel our broken Britain", at the same questioning the extent to which a sense of community has actually broken down. There are undoubtedly problems, most clearly illustrated for me in the reluctance of adults to discipline young people in public (or to back me up on the bus when I've tried to discipline them). The government response to both real and perceived problems ranges from repressive legislation such as ASBOs to strategies to "engage" communities through volunteering, and heeling our "vulnerable" selves (and in the process shifting the blame from the social to the individual), or re-designing public space. However, as is argued, while the desire to engage communities seems sensible, the strategies on offer are often limited and patronising. Distrustful of grassroots community associations, the authorities only want us to engage on their terms. But devoid of a political vision of the good society they want to engage us in, this either ends up as engagement for its own sake, or, as some writers' point out, more to cohere the elite themselves. And no matter how innocuous state engagement strategies can seem, there's also often a level of coercion involved, as the desire to improve "wellbeing" inevitably leads to the politics of behaviour. However, all is not doom and gloom, as the positive experience of Brazilian immigration into the small Galway town of Gort shows, despite elite fears of the inability of people to interact normally left to their own devices; and as people's reaction after the 7/7 London Bombings shows "the capacity of individuals to take responsibility for themselves and to make common cause with others ... remains, and often asserts itself even under the most difficult circumstances."
This is an accessible and enjoyable read, made more so by being able to debate it with joint-editor Dave Clements at Manchester Salon earlier in the year. The 14 self-contained chapters (plus intro and conclusion) analyse specific but overlapping aspects oft he debates around the contemporary sense of loss of community; providing a great introduction to its subject, yet at the same time offering important insights into something that affects us all in one way or another. Communities may not be in great shape, but their far from dead.
- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 15 July 2011This book is of general interest as well as being useful and informative reading for researchers interested in this field. Although published 3 years ago, it touches on very topical issues - that of David Cameron's "Big Society" and Boris Johnson's "Team London".
The book sets out to challenge current perceptions of community, the loss of a sense of community and the idea that community is inherently a good thing.
The book is made up of 4 Chapters each containing a selection of short essays from different contributors. Contributors to the book come from a diverse range of backgrounds and their work derives from their interest in the Future of Community Festival organised by the Future Cities Project.
The barely disguised cynicism and humour of the Introduction to the book gets the reader interested. The book is well structured. Each of the 4 chapters has a specific focus around separate notions of community: In Search of Community, Constructing Communities, Communities in Flux, Undermining Communities. The short essays within each chapter are easy to read and digest and in most cases illustrate their points very clearly. Each essay critiques the way in which various political interventions and/or manipulation and policies, in their effort to promote community are, in their view, actually undermining communities and individuals within them.
After reading this book, the reader is left with an overriding sense of "Big Brother" . There are several arguments put forward to support this:- namely that there is now a dependency on authority which is preventing people in communities from managing their own affairs as they did in the past; that Policy makers have effectively disenfranchised individuals and communities by creating a culture of fear (CRB's, CCTV, ASBO's) and in so doing have undermined the role of the adult in communities which has in turn led to managing rather than socialising young people; that even architects and town planners in their efforts to create communities through their design of public spaces and buildings are in fact undermining the very notion of real community.
The book is very thought -provoking, it deconstructs the impact of numerous government initiatives and the efforts being made to re-engage individuals into community life. It is being suggested that these interventions are in fact hampering individuals from having the freedom to make their own decisions as they are being manipulated into regaining a sense of community by policy makers thus negating the very idea of communality. However, in order that we do not lose all hope of ever being able to manage our communities without government "support", the book does cite two real examples of healthy, well functioning communities that appear to have survived precisely because of the lack of intervention from policy makers and makes the very good point that the political class often ignore the fact that people have " a natural propensity for friendship"(p148)
The topic of "community" has been well covered in this book and provides a good insight into the theory behind this subject. It is a very good starting point for those wishing to engage in a wider debate on this subject, that is to say one which is more critical of the arguments being advanced by the contributors to this book.
As a newcomer to this topic, I really enjoyed reading this book. I found myself agreeing with a lot of its content and look forward to reading the counter arguments which will surely follow.