Community Organizing Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

My Churchill Fellowship report is based on interviews with over 60 people drawn from community organisations, elected politicians, public officials and professionals in North American cities in April and May 2014. I have used my... more

I have used my experience and observations of community land trusts (CLTs), and other forms of citizen inspired housing, to examine the relationship between the citizen and state, to reflect on the current state of political and civic life in the UK, and to propose practical institutional reforms through which citizens and the state could work together more effectively to ensure housing and land markets serve the common good.

Citizen inspired housing is characterised as the response of citizens organising to meet the housing needs of their community, where either or both the market and public policy cannot or will not. More significantly, I see the unique achievement of CLTs as the agency of citizens to campaign for land tenure reform, and to tackle land market speculation with practical actions, at a time when the state appears to be unwilling or unable to act.

In a series of nine narratives, I describe situations in both the USA and UK in which citizens and the state have found productive ways of working together, to promote what is now described in the USA as ‘equitable development’, and where the action of citizens have expanded the agency of the state to tackle long term structural problems which the state could not achieve so effectively (or at all), on its own. Some of these narratives describe a reaction to situations in which citizens have lost trust in politicians and professionals to act in their interest, and others which have grown from a political culture in which representative democracy sees participative democracy as a natural and necessary partner in achieving the common good.

I have contrasted these positive narratives with examples of situations in the UK, in which the action or inaction of the state is already inflicting long term and structural social and economic damage on vulnerable populations and areas of cities, and undermining the trust of citizens in the good intentions and competence of the state.

I conclude that new public interest institutions are needed to rebalance the operation of land markets to meet social and economic need: in the use of public land, and the securing of public goods from private development through the planning system.

My three areas of inquiry were:
• Can participative democracy be recognised by politicians, public bodies and professionals as having as important a role to play in civic life, policy making and practice, as representative democracy? Can politicians and professionals learn to be more generous and respectful in their dealings with citizens?
• Can citizens become more effective agents of the changes needed to improve their quality of life, rehumanise the process of development, especially in urban areas, and also extend the agency of the state?
• Are CLTs (and similar citizen organisations), merely a small and interesting way of meeting very local needs, or could they be a phenomenon with global significance? How can citizens (re)claim their ‘Right to the city’, and the right to a genuinely affordable home related to income, as the foundation of a normal healthy life?

My findings are set out in three self-contained chapters that explore in turn the domains of civic life - the (land) professional, the politician, and the citizen, the public at large - and their capacity, or incapacity, to act for the common good, and to work within a conceptual framework which acknowledges our common humanity as citizens, ‘all in it together’.

In each of the three central chapters, I have set out the UK context, against which I have developed the nine narratives. These prepare the ground for the propositions in the final chapter, which focus on these ideas:
• Power through institutions…the creation of new institutions, and the strengthening of existing institutions are necessary to enable systemic and long term change to happen, and for it to be sustained and be adaptive to changing needs and circumstances in the future. Institutions also create the environment in which new cultures and attitudes can grow.
• Knowledge and information…we all need to own the information that informs our work, so that we can develop a sense of our own power and capacity to do ‘the right thing’
• Ethics…we have to take personal responsibility for developing and deploying our ethical intelligence in shaping the actions of individuals and institutions to achieve the common good

My conclusion, drawn from my interviewees, is that CLTs (and other forms of citizen inspired housing) have a vital political role to play both in the field of housing and development, and civic life more widely, by:
• Championing the principles of ‘Equitable Development’ and land reform
• Bearing witness to political and market failure
• Planning for the way people want to live
• Citizens and the state working together to achieve more than they could on their own
• Increasing the capacity of public bodies to bring about change for the common good
• Protecting the value of public support
• Safeguarding genuine and permanent affordability
• Offering social and technical innovation, and real choices in the housing market
• Humanising and democratising social and physical change
• Creating more resilient and adaptive places through long term vision and responsibility
• Enabling ‘ordinary citizens’ to be recognised and valued as extraordinary
• Creating new potential political leaders and spatial planners grounded in their experience of urban governance

My three recommendations are practical propositions to establish three new community organised institutions through which civil society can play a more direct and instrumental role in the shaping of housing and planning policy, and lead a change in the political and popular culture about the operation of land and housing markets:

• A People’s Land Commission, national or city-scale, to bring public interest oversight and accountability to the use or sale of public land, and the granting of planning permissions on major projects, networked to local ‘Citizens’ Land Watch’ Panels set up by community organisers to work with local authorities
• Public Interest Sounding Boards set up by the built environment professional bodies to increase public accountability for their public interest purposes
• A Citizens’ Housing Alliance bringing together organisations representing or supporting a national demand side voice in housing policy

These new institutions build on the current public expectation to hold any institution to account for its capacity to achieve both social as well as economic outcomes in serving the common good.