GURU magazine FINAL website

CIVIL SOCIETY AND POST-PANDEMIC

PLANNING

Edited by Emma Ormerod, Simin Davoudi and Miranda Iossifidis

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Table of Contents

PART I: Civil Society & Austerity

The contribution of Micro-Level Civil Society Initiatives

to shaping place futures 5

Patsy Healey

A response to Patsy Healey’s seminar paper 7

Mark Shucksmith

All of us in this together. Are we sure about this? 9

Rose Gilroy

Reclaiming ‘people power’ while shielding civil society 10

Helen Jarvis

‘Clap for Carers’ and the Idea of Civil Society 14

Simin Davoudi

From communities out there to communities in here:

reclaiming civil society 15

David Webb

PART II: Thinking & Governing Under Austerity

Covid-19 and the Suspension of Austerity and Democracy 18

Emma Ormerod and Simin Davoudi

A future of precarity and abandonment 20

Ted Schrecker

Mutualism in a time of pandemic 22

Julia Heslop

Pandemic (Un)realities 24

Ruth Raynor

Loss, Austerity and COVID-19 26

Esther Hitchen

PART III: Planning Profession & Public Interest

Rethinking the planning project in troubled times 29

Andy Inch

Rethinking the planning project in troubled times:

reflecting on recent research encounters 32

Abigail Schoneboom, Geoff Vigar and Zan Gunn

Protest and Policing under “lockdown” 34

Miranda Iossifidis

A photo essay on “the city under lockdown” is threaded

throughout the magazine, indicated by a yellow border,

with contributions from across APL

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Front Cover: Peckham Rye, London Borough of Southwark. Photo: Caoimhe Mader McGuinness

Magazine design and layout: Miranda Iossifidis

Published online July 2020

Civil Society and Post-Pandemic Planning

Emma Ormerod, Simin Davoudi and Miranda Iossifidis, July 2020

This GURU magazine evolved from a planned workshop at Newcastle University in April 2020 which had to be

cancelled as the UK went into lockdown in March, in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. In order to keep the

conversation alive we sought to collect written contributions for a digital magazine, instead. Our plan was to

discuss what constitutes ‘civil society’, ‘public interest’ and planning ‘professionalism’. What contradictions do

such terms produce, and how are these implicated in discussions about new directions in planning thought

and practice? Austerity featured strongly in our thinking, as did notions of justice, democracy and futures.

The pandemic has simultaneously heightened these issues and taken us in new directions. Whilst different

from our original intention, the collection of articles in the magazine reflect not only on current global crises,

but also issues that have shaped the consequences of this pandemic in the UK and what they mean for the

future. The context is changing rapidly but we hope that the reflections offered here will stimulate thought

provoking discussions in the months and years to come. To this end, we invite you to engage with them and

offer additional contributions to the magazine.

Contributors

Patsy Healey Emeritus Professor of Town and Country Planning

School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at Newcastle University

Mark Shucksmith Professor of Planning


Rose Gilroy Professor of Ageing, Policy and Planning


Helen Jarvis Reader in Social Geography

School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University

Simin Davoudi Professor of Environment and Planning and Director of GURU


Dave Webb Senior Lecturer in Planning


Emma Ormerod Lecturer in Economic Geography


Ted Schrecker Professor of Global Health Policy

Population Health Sciences Institute, Newcastle University

Julia Heslop Postdoctoral Fellow in Architecture


Ruth Raynor Lecturer in Urban Planning


Esther Hitchen Department of Geography, Durham University

Andy Inch Senior Lecturer in Urban Studies and Planning at Sheffield University

Abigail Schoneboom Research Associate


Geoff Vigar Deputy Head of School


Zan Gunn Director of Planning


Miranda Iossifidis Research Associate


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Re-activating public spaces on the Coast. Photo: Georgiana Varna

PART I: CIVIL SOCIETY AND AUSTERITY

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The contribution of Micro-Level Civil Society Initiatives

to shaping place futures

Patsy Healey, Emeritus Professor of Town and Country Planning


Civil Society is sometimes used to refer to a sphere

of social formation; state, economy and civil

society. At a micro-level, it can also mean:

a. the array of social groups and societies to be

found in an area, its ‘associational life’;

b. a base within everyday life from which to launch

transformative protest;

c. a sphere for asserting and enriching debate and

action about issues of public concern.

Civil society-based community development

activities re-negotiate the boundaries between

state and civil society spheres, and, may embody

all three of the above meanings, as in my case as a

resident involved in community development

activism in a small town/village in North

Northumberland.

The locality where I live would be characterised by

rural sociologists as experiencing a transition –

from an agricultural economy with a ‘paternalist’

socio-political culture to a tourist-based economy,

along with land-based industries, IT-based

professionals and small micro-businesses.

Researchers and policy-makers see the locality as a

‘community’ with good capacity for ‘selforganising’.

Locally, people express a strong sense of, and

attachment to, ‘place’, but we vary in how it is

perceived. Some parts are well-recognised,

though in a fluid, unbounded way. People refer to

a wider area, but this generates much less

attachment. Recognising ‘a place’ is a social

accomplishment, as places have no objective

existence. Mobilising to ‘care for’ a place and its

future is a political accomplishment.

People also recognise and value a strong presence

of ‘community’ in our locality. There are lots of

social activities. People are (mostly) friendly and

supportive. But we are by no means

homogeneous. There are potential divisions –

locals and incomers, young and old, professionals

and ordinary folk, those with good pay and

pensions and those with very little to live on, those

who live ‘down there’ rather than ‘up here’, etc.

And people have multiple webs of relations with

family and friends, which extend to other places

near and far.

So, and partly reflecting the ‘transition’ referred to

above, we are a micro-‘pluriverse’ in transition,

rather than the cohesive community which

outsiders sometimes imagine us to be.

I use the term ‘place-community’ to describe what

many of us care about, however differently. Though

people fill the idea with multiple meanings, it

motivates people to act to ‘care for place’. As an

attachment, it exists with other ‘attachments’ and

‘identities’ people have. Initiatives to shape futures

for ‘our’ place-community involve bringing into

attention both ‘place-community’ as an object, and

also recognising ourselves as a subject, a ‘we’, an

agency which can act.

Civil society-based micro community development

initiatives exist in a world shaped by the

interrelating dynamics of state and market

processes. Market processes generate some

economic opportunities, taken up locally with

varying degrees of grasp and grip. But profit

margins are very slim for most. Some market

players (eg the large landowners) get involved in

community development initiatives as part of their

‘social responsibility’ – harking back to a paternalist

past. Such enterprises may act as funders,

volunteers, trustees of community organisations.

Micro-businesses tend to focus on their own affairs

and survival, though may co-operate, especially

when funding opportunities beckon.

The State, along with an array of semi-state bodies

and national-level NGOs, dominate the

‘governance ecosystem’ in which micro community

development initiative takes place. The state

provides sets of rules and regulations, provides

several services (health, education, etc), and funds

others to provide services, along with grants etc for

some community development activities. It

intersects with micro-level civil society through

many interfaces.

This ‘agency world’ is experienced locally as a

mostly distant and fragmented Leviathan. Some

people are skilled in getting inside and negotiating

the boundary between this world and particular

initiatives, usually building person-to-person

relations (‘boundary-spanners’). Others get

intensely impatient and irritated, complaining

about how ‘government’ gets in the way.

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Civil society initiatives in Glendale, Northumberland. Image: Patsy Healey

There is a continual tension between creating

voice and asserting legitimacy as a stakeholder in

the agency world, and being co-opted and

‘groomed’ into the practices of this world. Some

community activists are aware of this and see part

of their agenda as helping civil servants and

professionals change how they relate to civil

society initiative.

Those involved in community development assert

the agency of community-based collective action.

They act politically in the sense of asserting the

power to act as/on behalf of our ‘placecommunity’.

But we have no single arena or

platform upon which agency is performed and

articulated. Initiatives compete, including with the

parish councils. So there are challenges in moving

from a ‘place-in-itself’, a ‘we’ which recognises

itself, to mobilising as a place-for-itself.

There are some benefits in this micro-diffusion of

power, but also costs. We often talk of “stronger

together” but “coming together” is not so easy to

achieve.

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This is partly because of the socio-economic

transitions underway in the locality. But it also

reflects different ways of thinking about the past,

present and future of our ‘place-community’. Some

want to hold on to the past, suspicious of

incomers. Others seek to re-build a world with

factory jobs and affordable housing. Some

incomers seek the romance of rural life. Others,

both locals and incomers, are energetic

innovators, keen to do new things, challenging

people seen as negative moaners. Few so far

advocate the kind of environmentally sustainable

lifestyles attractive to some younger generation

urban dwellers, though many care in a general way

about living sustainably. Co-existing with all these

frames is a widespread feeling of our ‘placecommunity’

as a friendly, lively, open-minded,

caring community and beautiful place, concerned

about our vulnerable members along with everyone

else, and regularly asserting a “stronger together”

philosophy whenever some conflict breaks out. Will

this frame help us to move forward?

Our activism achieved significant outcomes in

terms of ‘public value’ – materially (investment,

goods and services, environmental qualities);

through social infrastructures (platforms, and

networks, studies); socio-cultural potentialities

(raising awareness and working together); through

cultivating governance capacities? My assessment

is that the overall impact has been significant

within the locality, and had some wider influence.

What is the transformative potential of such civil

society activism? Some say that place-communities

are ephemeral outcomes of wider structural forces.

Others argue that they are traps locking people

into traditional habits, or exclusionary middle class

enclaves. Or they are a ‘gap-filling’ outcome of the

decay of the welfare state in its bureaucratic,

paternalist form, exacerbated by the past decade

of ‘austerity’ policies. A fourth argument presents

such activity much more positively, emphasising

attachment to ‘place-community’ as a mobilising

force powering not just local action but wider

alliances. My experience affirms that attachment to

‘place-community’ which converts into mobilisation

around shaping place futures can bring significant

benefit (public value) to life in a locality, and has the

potential, in conjunction with other forces, to help

reconfigure how the wider governance ecosystem

at many scales thinks and acts.

What then, is the progressive potential of civil

society activism, understood as an open-minded,

tolerant, inclusive and outward-looking culture of

local collective action, resisting injustices and

recognising our multiple engagements with a

wider world? There is nothing necessarily

progressive about micro-civil society initiative.

In my view, it matters how people “on the street”

experience the qualities of place and social life

with others in the flow of life. It matters how we

contribute to the public sphere in this flow.

Engaging in such flow provides a face-to-face

dimension to the more generalised interactions we

have within the social formations of which we are a

part. It matters how academic researchers, policymakers,

professional practices and community

activists engage with this everyday street-level of

life. Such engagement is never simple, static or

homogeneous, and defeats the categories often

used to simplify it.

If this is so, and the potential for civil society

activism is to be encouraged, state practices and

professional attitudes will need to engage more

deeply and sensitively with this street level. It

would help if (a) there was more real

decentralisation to local government and

integration of what this provides; and (b) not just

more funding at this level, but more provision of

professional expertise ‘on the street’ and linked

into face-to-face encounter.

Perhaps this is one message to hear from the

current Corvid crisis. The adverse impact on our

‘place-community’ is likely to be substantial.

Another message from those who study disaster

recovery is that it is neighbourhood help which

mobilises most relevant support quickly. The

‘resilience’ of our place-community is about to be

tested as the economic impacts of the crisis hits.

The potential is there, but it needs to be struggled

for on a continuous basis, and in combination with

changes elsewhere.

A response to Patsy Healey’s seminar paper

Mark Shucksmith, Professor of Planning


Civil society may be viewed as a ‘third sphere’

independent of state or market; as a public space

or public realm, in which deliberation occurs;

and/or as a pursuit of the public good. Edwards

(2004) argues that civil society then can be

simultaneously a goal to aim for, a means to

achieve it, and a framework for engaging with

each other about ends and means. Patsy’s paper

follows this line, distilling lessons from theory and

local practice for micro-level civil society action in

shaping place-community futures. In earlier work

she developed the concept of institutional

capacity (consisting of knowledge resources,

relational resources and mobilisation capabilities)

to elaborate the elements of successful civil society

actions. An asset-based approach might also

include community-owned land or buildings, such

as the Cheviot Centre in her small town, which not

only provides space for meetings, businesses,

public library and tourist information but also

provides rental income which in turn helps fund

community development actions.

One of the difficulties inherent in civil society

activism, especially in relation to the public

interest, is that people and social groups have

differing, perhaps opposing, interests, as Patsy’s

paper recognises. The identity and meaning of

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Essential services are closing in rural areas: former petrol station in Shetland. Photo: Mark Shucksmith

place is frequently contested, between for

example those whose place attachment is elective

and those for whom it is vested (Shucksmith

2012a), such that social construction of place is not

only power-infused but also class-infused and

perhaps invisible, constituting a form of symbolic

violence (Bourdieu 1992). One of the contributions

which social scientists can make, alongside

encouraging deliberation, may be through

revealing hidden power relations, especially

discursive power. This is not only important at the

micro-level, but also when framing narratives are

promoted at higher levels, such as a ‘need’ for

austerity, individualisation and other elements of

roll-out neoliberalisation.

This reminds us of the importance of vertical as

well as horizontal relations, beyond as well as

within the place-community, as emphasised by the

‘networked rural development’ concept. Patsy

points to the continual tensions between speaking

into the ‘agency world’ and becoming co-opted

into its practices, noting the skills required to span

these worlds on behalf of their place-community. It

is vital to engage in ‘spaces of dependency’

(whether nearby town halls or distant

boardrooms), where decisions may be made which

have important impacts on a place-community

(Mackinnon and Derickson 2012). This may be

assisted by working together with other placecommunities,

in networked collaboration rather

than in neoliberal competition.

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This brings us, finally, to the crucial role of an

enabling state in fostering and supporting microlevel

civil society action. The state has a responsibility

to all its citizens. Framing resilience as a self-help

characteristic and responsibility of each place alone,

or each individual, is part of neoliberalising

individualisation and the rescaling of risk and

responsibility (Cheshire et al 2015): the necessity for

responsibility to be shared by government is

apparent from the Covid-19 crisis if it wasn’t before.

Moreover, place-communities have widely differing

capacities-to-act, and as Patsy acknowledges, her

town has ‘good capacity’. Many others do not, and

the state has a duty to help build capacity to act in all

places so that spatial inequalities do not become

further entrenched (Shucksmith 2012b).

References

Bourdieu P (1992) Social spaces and the genesis of

classes. Pp.227-251 in Bourdieu P (ed) Language

and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Cheshire L, Esparcia J, Shucksmith M (2015)

Community resilience, social capital and territorial

governance, Ager (Journal of Depopulation and

Rural Development Studies), 18, 7-38.

Edwards M (2004) Civil Society.Cambridge: Polity Press.

MacKinnon D, and Derickson KD (2012) From

resilience to resourcefulness: a critique of

resilience policy and activism, Progress in Human

Geography, 37(2), 253-270.

Shucksmith M (2012a) Class, Power and Injustice in

Rural Areas: Beyond Social Exclusion? Sociologia

Ruralis, 52, 4, 377-397.

Shucksmith M (2012b) Future Directions in Rural

Development, Carnegie UK Trust.

All of us in this together. Are we sure about this?

Rose Gilroy, Professor of Ageing, Policy and Planning


As a gerontologist, my interests lie in ageing which

alongside climate emergency is one of the biggest

challenges worldwide as societies age in a context

of globalised economies and cultural and

technological changes.

Our views of older people are complex and

contradictory. On the one hand, there is what has

been termed the gerontocidal language of age

quake, the dependency disaster that will engulf

economies “burdened” by pensions and older

people’s drain on health and welfare systems. On

the other, older people no longer seen as frail of

body and empty of purse, are now wealthy

consumers to be courted who will stimulate the

economy through their demands for goods,

services and new technologies. If we live long

enough we can become a national treasure- David

Attenborough, the Queen and, more recently,

Captain Tom Moore.

How can it be that with shifting demographics and

a normative expectation that we will live into our

9 th decade (ah but not if we are poor) ageism is rife

in our society? From our 50 th birthday onward, we

are stereotyped and suffer discrimination on

grounds of age. The ubiquitous use of the pair of

wrinkled hands that illustrate every story about

older people or the laughing granny. The othering

term “elderly” or worse, “the elderly” that makes a

homogeneous mass of older people regardless of

the manifest differences created by gender, marital

status, care roles, wealth, social capital, household

composition, ethnicity, culture, disability, sexual

orientation, housing and neighbourhood context.

In the current pandemic, an older person is not

“one of us”. They are to be physically isolated. The

virus will sweep through them and pass to others

overwhelming the NHS. They had underlying

health conditions meaning they were on their way

out anyway. They are 70 or older so they are frail

and must be cosseted and protected. They are

abandoned in care homes and left to die.

Over thirty percent of people over 70 have no

health conditions at all. About one million people

over the age of 70 provide unpaid care, including

one in seven women in their 70s for their spouse,

siblings, neighbours, grandchildren alleviating the

state of responsibility and allowing younger family

members to work. Many civil society groups

provide support, services and advice to older

people but older people are not simply

beneficiaries. Twenty percent of those aged

between 70 and 85, over 1.5 million people,

volunteer in their communities. They are often the

ones cooking the meal for the lunch club, offering

a befriending service, supporting children’s

reading skills in schools, fundraising for important

causes, raising their voice against prejudicial

development in their neighbourhoods. We need

look no further than Patsy (now 80 years of age) to

be convinced of the role of older people in their

communities, striving to improve quality of life,

refurbishing and managing decent housing for

working age people, building incubator pods for

small businesses, regenerating Wooler, bringing

new life to a small place.

The response to Covid-19 has put intergenerational

relations back at least a decade. We

should be working to bring generations togethernot

just families because about 2 million people

are ageing without children – through technologies

but for the longer term, let’s work to include older

people’s voices in their communities. The

opportunity to `have a say` is at the heart of

Planning in the UK so let us, as planners, work to

engage and to listen.

Co-design workshops held for Future Homes project in which older

people were key collaborators. Photo: Rose Gilroy

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Reclaiming ‘people power’ while shielding civil society

Helen Jarvis, Reader in Social Geography


Findhorn Ecovillage ‘experience week’ 2015: ‘group-work’ driving

new forms of communal living. Photo: Helen Jarvis

Relationships of ‘people power’ are at the heart of

my research and teaching, variously in ‘groupwork’

driving new forms of communal living,

including place-based interventions to combat

loneliness, student activism and citizen-led

movements for social and ecological justice. This

resonates with Patsy Healey’s civil society activism,

emphasising the ‘social architecture’ of

relationships and solidarities.

The message appears simple: efforts to cultivate

relationships of mutual trust and common purpose

strengthen civic influence in local concerns. But

the reality is more complex. Civil society

encompasses multiple facets of public and

associational life: some facets are more

progressive, participatory and transformative than

others.

On the one hand, it is useful to recognise a

continuum of civic purpose. This way we can

support the ethic of care that underpins voluntary

and community advocacy and service (cycling

campaigns, food banks) without dodging the

imperative to organise – to question why any

welfare state should rely on food banks to feed

hungry families. In community organising, the

benefits of ‘charity’ are typically challenged by the

idea that organising together means not doing for

others what they can do for themselves.

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A relational approach goes further, to challenge

the atomistic view of individuals tackling local

problems on a voluntary basis (the ‘self’ of statesponsored

‘self-organising’ and ‘self-help’),

emphasising instead intentional associations of

‘do-it-together’ collaboration. Viewed this way,

public life will flourish if we open up multiple

spaces (social and material) for people to seek

common ground with others.

On the other hand, there are facets of public and

associational life that routinely harbour incivility,

hostility, isolation and exclusion. In 2018, Julia

Unwin led an independent inquiry that described

civil society as ‘breaking apart’ and ‘individualized’,

deeply divided by the EU referendum and toxic

public debate. She called for more power to be

put in the hands of people and communities,

preventing an ‘us and them’ future by helping

more people to design, control and own the

things they care about.

A global pandemic has now disrupted all sectors

of life. We are simultaneously witnessing ‘empty

streets filled with the love and care that we have

for each other’ (quoting the Queen’s televised

message to the nation), with civil society richly

served by volunteers organising mutual aid

groups online. At the same time, Coronavirus has

unleashed a ‘tsunami of hate and xenophobia’.

The dark side of ‘social distancing’ (misguided

government term for physical distancing) is

prejudice, harassment and the targeting of

vulnerable groups. The pandemic has exposed

and exacerbated deep social inequalities. While

Covid-19 is the most intense collective experience

since the Second World War, this shared civic

experience is atomised, rather than mobilized: it

consequently threatens to dismantle the social

architecture of ‘people-power’.

Habeeba Haque speaking, Community Organising Against Domestic Violence, Misogyny and

Hate Crime 2019. Photo: Helen Jarvis

How far does the pandemic threaten social

connectedness and civil society activism? Will the

social and environmental gains of communal living

be forever extinguished? Perhaps not. Even as

virus suppression prevents us from gathering in

groups, there is evidence that more of us are

yearning for more neighbourly, convivial, even

communal living arrangements to reverse the illeffects

of social isolation.

Looking to the future, planning practice should

cultivate inclusive, purposeful relationships of

‘people-power’ – while shielding civil society from

the scarring effects of Coronavirus. After all, we are

social beings.

‘Do it Together’ civil society initiatives in Oakland, California, 2016:

car-share group, little library, and collaborative affordable housing.

Photo: Helen Jarvis

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Forest Hill, London borough of Lewisham. Photo: Miranda Iossifidis 13

‘Clap for Carers’ and the Idea of Civil Society

Simin Davoudi, Professor of Environment and Planning and Director of GURU,


In the midst of a global pandemic and the tragic

loss of lives and livelihoods, every Thursday at 8.00

O’clock in the evening we step out of self-isolation

and join our neighbours – in windows, balconies,

and front doors - to clap for those who put their

own lives on the line to save the lives of others. Six

weeks into the lockdown, what started as a simple

‘clap for carers’ has turned into something more. It

has become a weekly ritual of performing our

sense of belonging and taking part in a collective

action which we think is contributing to a public

good. Is this what a civil society is all about?

The answer probably depends on the perspective

we adopt. If we

follow Alexis de

Tocqueville’s view

of civil society as

a form of

organised

associational life,

independent of

the state and the

market, the

Thursday ritual

can hardly qualify

for the civil

society status. If

we follow Jürgen

Habermas’ view

of civil society as

public sphere, our

collective

clapping seems

to resemble such

a status, because

it can be seen as a form of collectivity, steered by

its members (us) through democratically

constructed shared meaning (see Cohen and

Arato, 1994), in this case, gratitude. But even this

interpretation can only take us so far. Because, like

the Tocquevillian view, it does not fully account for

the politics of civil society relations and the

tensions that exist within civil societies in relation

to concerns about, for example, race, gender,

class, identity and exclusion. Neither does it take

into account the possibility of our actions being

co-opted into regressive neoliberal strategies of

mood management and deflection.

20200528_Making a noise. Photo: Damien Walmsley, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

One way to account for these political tensions is

to think about civil society as contested public

sphere. Seen in this way, our collective clapping

can be seen as the enactment of public sphere

understood, not as a static, essentialized and

neutral space, but as a dynamic, contingent and

political space. A space in which we are not

passive observers of a universal moral principle

(appreciation), but proactive political actors, with

our own visions of the common good, who are

contingently engaged in shifting the discourse of

what and whom is, or ought to be, valued as we

emerge from the crises (Davoudi and Ormerod,

forthcoming).

Sooner or later the

pandemic abates and

clapping ends, but the

discourse of change

may sustain well into

the future and the

collective clapping

may become the

embodiment of civil

society engaged in

transformative actions.

For that to happen, the

momentum created by

clapping and other

forms of reflexive

activities needs to be

channelled towards

genuine reforms aimed

at improving the

working conditions of

carers and reversing

the ramifications of decades of neoliberal austerity.

Let’s cling on to such a ‘spring of hope’ in this

‘winter of despair’!

References

Cohen J. and Arato, A. (1994) Civil Society and

Political Theory, MIT Press

Davoudi, S. and Ormerod, E. (forthcoming), Hope

and despair at the time of pandemic, Town

Planning Review.

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From communities out there to communities in here:

reclaiming civil society

Dave Webb, Senior Lecturer in Planning


There’s a certain irony in writing about civil society

from the confinement of a spare room and in the

context of five weeks of almost purely zoom-based

contact with the outside world. Civil society as we

know it has been put on ice, much like the wider

economy. But, says Boris, that’s okay because ‘we

will beat coronavirus together’ and the economy

will come ‘roaring back’. It’s not true though is it. It

was recently reported that experts feel social

distancing measures will need to continue, off and

on, until 2022. The UK economy could shrink by

35%, making this the deepest recession for 300

years. The UK’s transition period of alignment with

the EU finishes at the end of 2020 and Michel

Barnier says that progress with trade talks has

been ‘disappointing’. We know one thing: the next

two years are going to see an epochal shift in how

we approach planning and government more

widely.

The scale of what’s to come is frightening but there

is some comfort in the knowledge that, as

planners, we are used to charting and interpreting

big changes in how the purpose and practice of

our work is defined. The complexity of the

planning system is largely an expression of this

history of contest over big ideas. Our current

regulatory system, for example, is born out of the

death of its precursor - the ‘sustainable

community’ - as an imaginary around which

various state, market and civil society actors could

be made to coalesce. New Labour’s sustainable

communities were to be sites of vigorous

economic activity, supported by vanguard planners

and cross-sector partnerships, all focused on

guiding the market towards compact and inclusive

environments. It was a vision of civil society that

promised social inclusion, social mixing and

increased understanding of each other, but it was

built on the fallacy that markets are rational and

manageable, which the 2007 economic crisis

exposed.

Civil society was at the forefront of the changes

which ensued. Rather than seek new forms of nonmarket

organisation, a superficial rhetoric of

community and civil society was used to disguise a

radical extension of market logics and wealth

accumulation. Economic responsibilities were

downloaded onto individuals and communities,

creating a new class of people dependent on food

banks and personal loans via a form of economic

management which has been aptly described as

‘privatised Keynesianism’ (Crouch, 2009). Planners

and planning were denigrated and relegated to

the simple tasks of allocating housing land and

trying to stay out of the way. The market and the

public interest became synonymous. Communities

were armed with neighbourhood planning and set

the task of finding new ways to relax regulations

Children’s play area in North Tyneside. Photo: Dominic Aitken

15

and wave through private development. The

community sector, far from being enlarged to

support a new ‘Big Society’, was incessantly

marketized and confined to a tier of larger,

pseudo-charities with the specialist expertise

needed to bid successfully for increasingly skimpy

public sector contracts.

The Centre for Urban Research on Austerity

provides a useful guide to thinking about the

future of these already overstretched (and in many

cases bankrupted) civic organisations in a context

of severe economic contraction. It charts how

austerity measures in Athens triggered an

explosion of informal grass roots organisations but

that these tended to remain small-scale, “with all

their energies focused on managing the human

crisis”. Political mobilisation was dampened not

just by a lack of time but also by a lack of hope, as

geopolitical forces conspired to inflict austerity

regardless of which party was elected. Is this the

future for a blighted and economically precarious

UK? Or is it already here?

How, then, might an awareness of such shifts help

us to think about the role of civil society in reacting

to the coming economic wasteland? Common to

all the visions of civil society outlined above is that

they conceptualise community action as

something out there, to be engaged with,

governed and manipulated to serve the interests

of political economy. But what about the elements

of civil society closer to home? The most obvious

candidate, though by no means the only one, is

the Royal Town Planning Institute of which many of

us are members.

Allendale. Photo: Mark Shucksmith

Should its role be to assist planners to engage

‘communities’ with government, or should it have a

more fundamental role in challenging unjustifiable

forms of political economy and collaborating to set

out alternatives? We urgently need a debate about

how the institute can re-engage with critical

academic thought, about how planning can reassert

itself as something more than just a

dependence on private sector investment (the

billionaires) and about the roles which land reform

and social sector development will have in the new

political economy. As a body of professional

people, the power is in our hands to define

ourselves however we see fit. But we ought to do

so soon because the need to build the project that

succeeds neoliberal austerity is extremely urgent,

and if we don’t build it others will.

16

The World through the Window, Lockdown April-June 2020, Ghent. Photos: Rolf Hughes

PART II: GOVERNING UNDER AUSTERITY

17

Covid-19 and the Suspension of Austerity and Democracy

Emma Ormerod, Lecturer in Economic Geography, School of Geography, Politics

and Sociology, and Simin Davoudi, Professor of Environment and Planning and

Director of GURU, School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at Newcastle

University

The global Covid-19 pandemic cancelled our faceto-face

session planned for April 2020 to discuss

‘governing under austerity’. Pausing to take stock

from the confines of our homes in lockdown, and

short of any empirical analyses at these early

stages, it is becoming clear that this unfolding

pandemic is having profound ramifications for

social and economic futures across the world. We

can see that what began as a singular public health

crisis has rapidly spiralled into a plurality of

interrelated social and economic crises, especially

in the context of a decade of austerity in the UK. At

the same time, the rising sense of solidarity and

community spirit has elevated the discourse of

change, leading to a re-evaluation of what people

value most and the way in which we value different

forms of labour. Previously undervalued and ill

paid key workers have found a voice and a

presence in the media and in our social

consciousness. Doctors, nurses, carers, teachers,

delivery drivers, bin collectors, and grocery shop

workers are putting their own lives on the line to

save the lives of others. To what extent does this

crisis offer a window of opportunity for society to

call for transformative changes to our economic,

social and environmental relations? Will we

bounce back to where we were, or break away

from an undesirable ‘normal’ (Davoudi, 2012)?

Crisis and the suspension of austerity

The pandemic has brought into sharp focus preexisting

social, economic, health and

environmental injustices which intersect around

class, gender and race. The consequences of a

longer-term political ideology which has pursued

economic competitiveness at all costs, and in the

last ten years, adopted severe austerity measures

with devastating effects on the most vulnerable in

society are being laid bare under the pandemic.

Austerity, as an ideologically driven policy choice

to reduce the role of the state in supporting

people (under the notion that it reduces ones’

ability to be independent), has been shrouded in a

sense of nostalgia, which evokes times of war and

hardship in order to rally people towards a

common goal. However, in bringing the

governments’ deficit down, the sacrifice has not

been even across people and places (Davoudi, et

al., in press). Austerity has disproportionally

18

impacted the most vulnerable: children, disabled

people, women, and lower paid families, with a

distinct geography which discriminated against

the ‘left behind’ or ‘kept behind’ cities and regions

such as the North East which are more heavily

reliant on shrinking public sector jobs. A decade of

austerity measures and deepening privatisation of

the welfare state have led to steeply rising levels of

homelessness, children in poverty, reliance on

food banks, and growing income and wealth

inequalities.

Yet the Covid-19 pandemic has seen the

Conservative government effectively suspend

austerity and ‘do what it takes’ to bail out millions

of people from losing their jobs and companies

from collapse. The newly appointed Chancellor of

the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, has effectively

propped up the country through various schemes

including employment retention, mortgage

breaks, increases in statutory sick pay, and a large

and growing financial package of support for

families and businesses. These will undoubtedly

help to ease the current situation, but they will not

reverse the consequences of a decade of austerity,

especially in the face of a further economic

recession. Indeed, there are already some

suggestions from the government that financial

rescue package and its associated borrowing will

have to be paid back through increased tax and

potentially a new, and deeper round of austerity

measures. Caution is therefore required in

reporting ‘the death of austerity’.

This view on the Tyne is so close to my house, yet I had never seen it until

COVID-19 lockdown happened and I started doing daily walks in my

neighbourhood. Walking a lot has helped me cope with the weirdness and

stress of the current situation, and this view the Tyne is just so beautiful,

and different every day! I have taken this same picture so often, and now

have a quite collection of skies. Photos: Loes Veldpaus

Emergency and the suspension of democracy

A significant consequence of the Covid-19

pandemic is the invocation of a state of

emergency. The notion of emergency, unlike that

of crisis, doesn’t suggest a critical turning point,

with a direct and immanent solution. Instead “it

represents as sudden, unpredictable and short

term what are usually gradually developing,

predictable and enduring clusters of events and

interactions” (Calhoun, 2004:376). The current

pandemic is not simply a disruption in a smoothly

functioning global order. It is instead the outcome

of that complex order where problematic food

systems intersect with global capitalism, revealing

a series of inadequacies and risks that have been

taken in the everyday governing of the economy

as well as emergency planning and failure to learn

from the experience of previous pandemics such

as SARS.

One casualty of a state of emergency is often

democracy, as events are used to legitimise an

extraordinary, and otherwise unacceptable,

exercise of power. We see instances of this

globally, for example, in Hungary where Prime

Minister Viktor Orbán has effectively suspended

democracy through emergency legislation in

response to the pandemic, allowing his party to

govern unchallenged indefinitely. Whilst

democracy is not as overtly threatened here in the

UK, smaller events can and ought to be scrutinised

for their squeezing out of democratic processes.

There has been a lack of Parliamentary scrutiny of

the executive decisions taken by the Cabinet at the

informative stages of devising strategies for

lockdown (for hospital admissions and for the

provision of Personal Protective Equipment [PPE])

and whilst the Prime Minister was recovering from

the Covid-19 infection. There have also been

major concerns over the lack of transparency of

Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE)

both in terms of the identity of its members and

publication of the minutes of its meetings.

At the more local level, local authorities across the

country are reviewing their decision making and

democratic processes, rearranging schemes of

delegation. For example, Cornwall Council have

suspended planning committees (where decisions

are taken by elected members), replacing them

with increased powers for planning officers to

make decisions. Gateshead Council has decided a

temporary addition to delegation that allows the

Chief Executive and the Strategic Directors to deal

with decisions normally considered by the Council

Cabinet (i.e. elected members) ‘in consultation’

with each other and the Leader of the Council or

appropriate cabinet member. Whilst not an

expressly un-democratic move within the

circumstances, decision making can rapidly

become removed from the democratic structures

and its checks and balances. It is within these

smaller moments that we must not lose sight of

transparency and representation.

And yet, is there some hope in the dark (Solnit,

2016)? Not an idle hope that everything will be ok,

but that within uncertainty, hope becomes the

space to change things. We see moments of

collectivity, solidarity and community attachment in

the weekly ‘Clap for Carers’, moments of helping

neighbours with shopping or just simply checking

in on people. Can we continue to hold on to the

things that this pause may have shown are more

important to us? Is there hope that this pandemic

offers us an opportunity to change the current

political ideology under which we are governed?

Can we imagine an alternative economic, social

and environmental future that does not see a

return to or deepening of unjust forms of austerity?

References

Calhoun, C. (2004) ‘A World of Emergencies: Fear,

Intervention, and the Limits of Cosmopolitan

Order’, Canadian Review of Sociology, 41(4) pp.

373-395

Davoudi S. (2012) Resilience: a bridging concept

or a dead end? Planning Theory and Practice, 13(2)

pp. 299-307

Davoudi, S. Steer, M., Shucksmith, M. and Todd, L.

(in press) Islands of Hope in a Sea of Despair: Civil

Societies in an Age of Austerity and Pandemic, in

Steer M., Davoudi, S., Shucksmith, M. and Todd, L.

(eds.) Responding to neoliberal austerity, Bristol:

Policy Press

Solnit, R. (2013) Hope in the Dark, Edinburgh:

Canongate Books Ltd.

19

A future of precarity and abandonment

Ted Schrecker, Professor of Global Health Policy,

Population Health Sciences Institute, Newcastle University

Despite breathless journalistic reports, austerity

and its collateral damage have not gone away.

Post-2009 tax and benefit policies in the UK (Keiller

& Walters, 2018) combined with transformations in

employment relations, such as the rise of the gig

economy, to redistribute income and wealth

upward and increase regional inequalities (Beatty

& Fothergill, 2016) – this against a background

where the Great British Class Survey, at the start of

the decade, found that a third of the population

had just £1,000 in household savings (Savage et

al., 2013).

The damage was compounded by a reduction of

roughly half in central government grants to local

authorities (National Audit Office, 2018), with cuts

concentrated in cities and in relatively deprived

areas of the country. The economic shutdowns

that were the UK’s blunt-instrument response to

the pandemic are partly attributable to austerity

measures that compromised public health

infrastructure (Pollock, 2020); even before those

shutdowns, local authorities were pessimistic

about their ability to maintain services (Local

Government Information Unit, 2020).

The shutdowns seem certain further to magnify

inequality and insecurity. Jobs and earnings at

greatest risk have been those of low-paid workers

without tertiary education and unable to work from

home, who are concentrated in poorer regions

(Allas, Canal, & Hunt, 2020; Magrini, 2020); there is

probably quite a bit of overlap between those

groups and those with minimal household savings.

Short-term rescue measures have blunted the

impact, but the massive borrowing needed to

finance these will combine with plunging tax

revenues to limit future fiscal policy space. Many

lost jobs, in sectors like hospitality and retail, are

unlikely to return. And little attention has been

paid to the distribution of potential long-term

health consequences, while it is possible that ‘the

UK will be operating a health system with the

capacity of a middle-income country’ (Edwards,

2020).

Urban abandonment, Detroit: The UK’s urban future? Photo: Nitram242. Reproduced under a Creative Commons 2.0 licence.

20

Leaving aside broader questions of postpandemic

economic recovery strategy, one

outcome for towns and cities seems especially

likely. In the United States, legal scholar Michelle

Anderson (2014) observes that post-crisis fiscal

austerity and municipal bankruptcy have meant

services in ‘new minimal cities’ are ‘focused on

little more than the control of fire and violent

crime’. A further step is suggested by selective

abandonment strategies now being promoted in

post-bankruptcy Detroit (Safransky, 2020). Without

a reversal of

the past

decade’s cuts

and a major

infusion of

new

resources to

compensate

for shutdownrelated

revenue

losses, local

authorities

may simply

stop

providing or

supporting services to districts like low-occupancy

commercial high streets and low-income

residential areas; utilities will be released from

whatever obligations they have to provide services

in those areas. Remaining users are unlikely to be

able to pay their bills, council taxes or rates,

leading to creation of no-go wastelands until some

far distant future when they become attractive for

reinvestment (probably beyond the lifetimes of

many of us).

Closed school in North Tyneside. Photo: Dominic Aitken

Nothing is inevitable about such an outcome.

However, avoiding it will probably require both

vision and progressive mobilisation of resources

on a scale that is hard to envision in a relevant time

frame given constitutional realities. Think, for

example, about ‘use it or lose it’ policies on

unoccupied buildings, and fast-track planning

processes aimed at repopulating town centres with

affordable energy-efficient housing, backed up by

a multi-billion-pound public investment vehicle.

This can be imagined; can it be made to happen?

References

Allas, T., Canal, M., & Hunt, V. (2020). COVID-19 in the

United Kingdom: Assessing jobs at risk and the

impact on people and places. McKinsey & Company.

Anderson, M. W. (2014). The New Minimal Cities.

Yale Law Journal, 123, 1118-1227.

Beatty, C. & Fothergill, S. (2016). The Uneven

Impact of Welfare Reform: The Financial Losses to

Places and People. Sheffield: Centre for Regional

Economic and Social Research, Sheffield Hallam

University.

Edwards, N. (2020).

Here to stay? How the

NHS will have to learn

to live with

coronavirus. London:

Nuffield Trust.

Keiller, A. N. &

Walters, T. (2018).

Distributional Analysis

[of the 2018 UK

Budget]. London:

Institute for Fiscal

Studies.

Local Government

Information Unit

(2020). State of Local

Government Finance Survey. London: LGIU.

Magrini, E. (2020). How will Coronavirus affect jobs

in different parts of the country? Centre for Cities

National Audit Office (2018). Financial Sustainability

of Local Authorities 2018. London: NAO.

Pollock, A. (2020). We need hands-on public health

expertise to tackle COVID-19. AllysonPollock.com

Safransky, S. (2020). Geographies of Algorithmic

Violence: Redlining the Smart City. International

Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 44, 200-218.

Savage, M., Devine, F., Cunningham, N., Taylor, M.,

Li, Y., Hjellbrekke, J. et al. (2013). A New Model of

Social Class? Findings from the BBC's Great British

Class Survey Experiment. Sociology, 47, 219-250.

For updates of this analysis see my blog.

The new Gold Dust.

Bought before lockdown

and shared out amongst

friends for our new found

love of bread making.

Photo: Emma Ormerod

21

Mutualism in a time of pandemic

Julia Heslop, Postdoctoral Fellow in Architecture,


I began writing this on the 75 th anniversary of VE

Day. The front page of the Daily Express told us, in

the words of Dame Vera Lynn to, ‘Keep smiling

through’, whilst for the Daily Mirror this was ‘A Day

of Hope’. Vera Lynn sang her rendition of ‘We’ll

Meet Again’ to ‘unite’ the nation – linking the

experience of the Second World War to that of

today’s lockdown. Whilst life didn’t immediately go

back to normal, VE Day was a day of hope

following six years of war. This hope was to grow

through political change – ordinary people who

had suffered through two World Wars would now

be looked after through the development of the

Welfare State, and most importantly through the

founding of the NHS in 1948.

After decades of welfare

cuts and privatisation by

political parties on all

sides, this sense of hope

is now unimaginable to

many. During Covid-19

we are told that it does

not discriminate, that ‘we

are all in this together’

and to ‘keep calm and

carry on’ (phrases that

have also been used

throughout austerity).

Yet it is clear that, as in

austerity, some people

pay more. Evidence

suggests that hospitalisation rates are highest

amongst minority groups (Teo et al., 2020) and

experiences of lockdown are widely different.

Whilst many people’s lives have slowed, or

‘paused’, for many others there is a speeding up

and juggling of activities – caring for children

whilst working, for example. For others the

lockdown has exacerbated existing issues, such as

mental health problems, social isolation or

situations of domestic abuse. Furthermore, ‘key

workers’ working in what might be called the

‘Foundational Economy’ (Foundational Economy

Collective, 2018), who keep places running, such

as carers, nurses, food chain workers,

tradespeople, teachers, council workers, bus

drivers, shelf stackers and postal workers, whilst

often being overlooked, underpaid and insecure,

are also those at most risk of catching the virus.

Therefore for so many, this is not a ‘holiday’, not a

‘pause’, nor is it a ‘leveller’ – it is the continuing

22

Photo: Georgiana Varna

discrimination of those that have less or who work

in certain sectors of the economy. Moreover, we

are seeing regional disparities. Whilst the

government was hastily discarding the ‘Stay at

home’ message, the numbers of Coronavirus cases

were rising in the North East of England. Such a

barefaced London-centric perspective put lives at

risk – a painful reminder that the North continues to

be overlooked, even after ten years of ‘Northern

Powerhouse’ rhetoric about ‘levelling up’ the country.

The long term impacts of Covid-19 will also

discriminate, like those of austerity. The Bank of

England has warned that Britain is on the brink of

the worst financial crisis for 300 years in which the

economy could shrink by 14 per cent in 2020 with

unemployment hitting

9 per cent (Bank of

England, 2020). This

may cause new rounds

of cuts and austerity

measures, which will

fall on the backs of the

poor, sick and disabled,

as well as women and

ethnic minority groups

– many who have

already suffered at the

hands of austerity. But

when services and

benefits are already

threadbare, how will

individuals, communities and local authorities

cope? In Newcastle tackling C-19 has already cost

the Council an estimated £60 million, yet so far, the

authority has received only £18.6 million from the

government (Holland, 2020). As highlighted in

Ormerod and Davoudi’s framing article, we know

what governing under austerity involves – a toxic

mix of welfare retrenchment, privatisation and

service breakdown – all of which have uneven

geographical effects. This process could easily

intensify after the peak phase of C-19 is over.

However, there is another story that has emerged

from this crisis - one of mutual aid and a renewed

role for local authorities as key facilitators of this -

an approach which may offer new practices for

governing locally. Newcastle City Council,

alongside partners in the voluntary and community

sector, has set up the Citylife Line service where

people can volunteer or request support. More

than 400 people signed up in the first 24 hours

(Graham, 2020) and the service has since raised

over £45,000 (Holland, 2020). Through this service

the Council is playing an important co-ordinating

role – matching people in need to local

organisations that can support them. Alongside

this, informal mutual aid groups have been set up

by citizens to help individuals with shopping, dog

walking, hot meals, activities for children and more

- often facilitated through social media. Whilst

these could be actions and networks for a time of

exception, they equally have the potential to

continue and be scaled up.

For me, this is where Vera Lynn’s hope lies – in the

so-called ‘sharing’ or ‘solidarity economy’ – age old

forms of skills-swapping, time-sharing, caresharing

and asset-sharing such as informal

childcare circles, befriending services, swap shops,

growing projects, food co-ops and more, all

initiated through the pooling of physical,

economic and intellectual resources. Whilst cooperation

is a natural and central condition of the

social body (Kropotkin, 1902), the potentials for

highly organised forms of this – the pairing of skills

and resources with needs - is much expanded in

the digital age, whereby activities are more easily

networked and thus scaled up. Instead of the key

driver being monetary exchange and the fuelling

unsustainable consumption upon which capitalist

economies rely, these practices seek to challenge

the hegemony of growth and resource and wealth

inequalities through practices of sharing and cooperation

- purposefully making space for the

expansion of the social by bringing people

together in an everyday manner.

Yet it is not enough for these activities to merely

exist and deal with a need (whether immediate or

not). A food bank, for example, offers immediate

relief from the problem of hunger, but it does not

offer a solution for hunger in the long term, or

offer insight into why the issue exists. These

activities also need to be politicised – and this is

where organised forms of mutual aid need to

happen alongside informal, local sharing activities.

Here, it is useful to refer to the history of mutual

aid. Welfare did not originate in the state but in

small autonomous working class groups,

associations and friendly societies such as sick

clubs, coffin clubs, building societies, food and

housing co-operatives, medical aid societies and

others (Ward, 1996). These small, local

organisations were often federated, creating

national trade union and co-operative movements.

Yet importantly, they did not merely provide

services and employment, they were also political

pressure groups fighting for worker’s rights, better

sanitary conditions and suffrage. Therefore once

networked, mutual aid groups and co-operatives

can become powerful bodies, both in their

localities but also beyond – acting as lobbying

organisations fighting for political and policy

change on a national level.

As a result decentralised networks of association,

encompassing practices of sharing, exchanging

and co-operating can actively expand both the

social and political sphere. As we see in Newcastle

Council’s new service, the state has an important

role to play in facilitating and enabling these

activities – thereby offering a challenge to

mainstream and predetermined practices of local

governance and the ‘post-democratic’ consensus

which exists in many institutions of government.

Writing about austerity, Catterall argues that what

has been exposed is the “dead social roots

beneath the green economic roots” (2014: 587).

He states that what we need is “Not only

resistance… but also actual physical restoration

and growth and regrowth, a ‘self-organised

allotment’” (2014: 588) - meaning that it is in these

moments of crisis that we need to reclaim

citizenship and to reknow each other. Practices of

mutualism offer opportunities to do so.

References

Bank of England (2020) Monetary Policy Report,

May 2020, London: Bank of England

Catterall, B. (2014) ‘What is to be done?

Redefining, re-asserting, reclaiming and re-shaping

land, labour and the city’, City, 18:4-5, pp. 583-588

Foundational Economy Collective (2018)

Foundational Economy: the infrastructure of

everyday life, Manchester: Manchester University

Press

Graham, H (2020) ‘How to get support from the

new 'CityLife line' service if you need it due to

coronavirus crisis’, The Chronicle, 29 th March 2020.

Holland, D. (2020) ‘North East 'short-changed' as

councils battle Covid-19 funding crisis, Newcastle

Labour leader warns’, The Chronicle, 29 th April

2020.

Holland, D (2020) ‘Newcastle City Council’, BBC

News, 6 th May 2020.

Kropotkin, P. (1902 [1972]) Mutual Aid: A Factor of

Evolution, New York: New York University Press

Teo, J.T.H., Bean, D.M., Bendayan, R. Dobson, R.J.B.

Shah, A.M. (2020) ‘Impact of ethnicity on outcome

of severe COVID-19 infection. Data from an

ethnically diverse UK tertiary centre’.

Ward, C. (1996) Social Policy: An Anarchist

Response (London: LSE) 23

Pandemic (Un)realities (May 2020)

Ruth Raynor, Lecturer in Urban Planning,


At first sight the Banksy artwork, which appeared in

Southhampton Hospital on the 6 th May 2020,

captures a mood of the time. Key workers, and

especially those at the front line of the NHS are

recognised super-heroes in the UK. As Davoudi

and Ormerod claim in this magazine ‘Previously

undervalued and ill paid key workers have found a

voice and a presence in the media and in our

social consciousness.’

However, another story can be found in this image:

one that also describes the contemporary

moment. In fact, the double meaning of this

painting - one sits on the surface and is connected

but somehow divergent from one that sits

underneath – is an allegory for the strange mirror

world we find ourselves in amidst the global

pandemic. A world in which public mood is spun

like the nurse in the picture.

Take a deeper look, and the painting becomes

uncanny, perhaps even disturbing. The boy is both

blank and uncomfortable. His turned down mouth

is tinted with distain, guilt, sadness. He doesn’t

know what he is doing. The nurse’s antiquated

dress is a nod to the blitz spirit that Ormerod and

Davoudi describe, and it evokes the foundations of

her current precarity: historic violence against her

gender, her class and her race. As though plucked

from the creepy mirror world in Gaiman’s ‘Coraline’

(2002) she has got buttons for eyes. She is not a

human, but an image, an idea, and a plaything. Her

arm is stiffly fixed, her mouth is covered and her

24

Image: Banksy

voice is silenced. She has no agency at all. Her

future is in the bucket with the other disposables,

and like the superheroes in many recent reboots,

perhaps she too is desperate not to be reduced to

a holding place for the nation’s hope. Oh to be a

real girl, with real eyes that see, and a mouth that

can speak, with ordinary human rights – like safety

at work.

The different layers of meaning that are held

together in this artwork reflect confusing pandemic

(un)realities. Like Coraline, or Alice I feel like I’ve

stepped through a mirror into a strange and

uncertain world, and like the boy in the Banksy, I’m

not sure what to do. Take Thursday’s ‘clapping for

key workers’ ritual: expressing support and

solidarity matters, potentially it galvanises public

feelings about what gives value and who holds

status. It provides space for a connection that is not

built on commerce. However clapping is

uncomfortable too. This brave new world does not

need heroes. It needs something much more

boring: ordinary people, able to stay safe while

they do their jobs, and to be properly paid.

And the clapping is just one of numerous

strategies, through which public mood is

manipulated. Through which shame is deflected

from the architects of a shaky COVID-19 response

and shame is deflected from the years of austerity

that has intensified vulnerability to the worst effects

of the virus. Sara Ahmed’s critical work on

complaint (forthcoming) foreshadows the silencing

of dissenting key workers: those who want to be

seen and heard, instead of given a medal (see the

Sun’s latest campaign: Rollings, 2020). Just like the

nurse in the picture, doctors are ‘gagged’ to

supress criticism over a lack of PPE (Lintern, 2020)

and they are shamed into treating patients without

sufficient protection, told instead to ‘hold their

breath’ (Campbell, 2020). Like the nurse in the

picture the impression is given that such silencing

is required for our own protection, as an act of

public spirit. This is the case too, when MP and

frontline GP Rosena Allin-Khan, is ordered by the

health secretary to ‘watch her tone,’ as though her

critique is unpatriotic: Hancock’s mask of care slips.

Key workers should be seen and not heard.

Despite all of this, moments of clarity cut through

the distortion and there is talk of hope. I have been

intrigued by a YouGov poll indicating that only 9

percent of Britons want life to go back to normal

after the lock down (reported by Wood 2020).

Respondents are enjoying space, time, connection,

bird song, and cleaner air. In 2012 Lauren Berlant

wrote about good life promises that cultural and

economic lives were built on after the Second

World War in the UK and USA. She described the

cruelty of our fraying attachments to ideals such as

upward mobility, stable work, comfortable

retirement, as those ideals became increasingly

fantasmic. The structures, which afforded those

promises, have warped more and more, until they

wreak havoc on emotional and ecological lives.

There was hope in 2008 that this would be

realised, that another way would be found. Instead

we saw austerity: a decade of entrenchment, and a

deeper unravelling of social bonds and security.

Following financial crisis, lives changed in slow and

insidious ways. Austerity was felt with different

degrees of intensity, and most severely by those

with the smallest platform. By design its

implementation was diffracted across service

providers, and local authorities. But the pandemic

has changed life-worlds so quickly, and so

dramatically that almost every aspect of the

ordinary is already touched. Everyday lives are

radically altered. Those at the heart of central

government have been unable to resist taking

centre stage, whilst simultaneously seeking to

deflect responsibility to the oft-cited ‘science,’ to

individuals and businesses. Surely, that strategy

can’t be maintained for long? And again, the pain

is felt unevenly - we only have to look at recent

findings from the office of national statistics to see

that those on the lowest incomes (Windsor-Shellard,

and Kuar, 2020) as well as those from BAME

backgrounds (Butcher and Massey) bear the

highest risk of death and hospitalisation from C-19.

Pain and injustice are exposed, brought into the

daylight, in ways, which are difficult to deny. And

many have lived, perhaps for the first time in their

lives, a kind of therapeutic pause. They have

experienced the relief of doing less, consuming

less (£3.8b of domestic debt has been cleared in

the UK amidst the lockdown, Osborne, 2020.)

Perhaps by force, attachments to the consumer

good life have been severed? Only 9% want to go

back. Ormerod and Davoudi ask ‘Is there hope that

this pandemic offers us an opportunity to change

the current political ideology under which we

are governed? Can we imagine an alternative

economic, social and environmental future that does

not see a return to or deepening of unjust forms of

austerity?’ It is of course too early to say. But

perhaps above all it is through the embodiment of

that pause, the lived reality of that quiet, and those

strengthened social bonds, that momentum may

build and new worlds may form.

If anything can be learned from the scuppered

hopes that followed the 2008 financial crisis, such

change must be worked for, hard. Already the

winds of public mood are changing. There was a

certainty to the lock down, a relief perhaps from

the endless choices and judgement calls that make

up modern life. And already in the ‘easing,’

implemented from 13 th May 2020, vagueness and

uncertainty acts as political tools. The lie of

individual responsibility explains away the death of

the poor – and hides the truths of social injustice.

Conflict folds in on a desire for resolution, for a

return to a time of relative clarity… And I wonder

now what the figures would be if people were

asked about returning to normal?

When Alice stepped through the looking glass she

entered a strange and upside-down world. She

spotted a beautiful garden in the distance, but

every time she tried to follow the path to the

garden, she found herself back at the door to her

house. My fear is that this could be our pandemic

reality. Attachments to the good life fantasy may

collapse; bonds built on mutual precarity may

strengthen, making way for new and hopeful worlds

to emerge. But there is a risk that without deep

effort, and collaboration, those worlds will remain

like the beautiful garden– always in the distance.

References

Ahmed, S (forthcoming) Complaint as diversity

work, see blogs and speeches

Butcher and Massey (07.05. 2020) Why are more

people from BAME backgrounds dying from

Coronavirus?

Campbell, D. (07.04.2020) Doctor’s lacking PPE

bullied into treating Covid-19 patients.

Caroll, L. (1897/ 2015) Alice Through the Looking

Glass Macmillan, London.

Gaiman, N (2002) Coraline Bloomsbury Children’s

books, London

Lintern, S, (30.03. 2020) Coronavirus: NHS doctors

‘gagged’ over protective equipment shortages

Osborne, H (01.05.2020) UK consumers clear

£3.8bn of debt while business loans soar since

Covid-19 crisis

Rollings, G. (21.04.2020) Campaign to give NHS

staff the George Cross

Windsor- Sheilard, B. and Kaur, J. (2020) Corona

virus (Covid—19) related deaths by occupation:

England and Wales, dated up to and including

April 20 th 2020

Wood, (17.04.2020) Britons enjoying cleaner air,

better food and stronger social bonds, say they

don’t want to return to ‘normal .’

25

Loss, Austerity and COVID-19

Esther Hitchen

Department of Geography, Durham University

At the heart of austerity is loss. The loss of children’s

centres (Jupp, 2018), the closure of public libraries

(Corble, 2019), the contraction of mental health

services (Kiely, 2019), the loss of support for

children with Special Educational Needs and

Disabilities (Warnock, 2019). But are we aware of

the extent of the losses we are suffering in austere

times? Sometimes these are hidden through the

practices and language of privatisation, cuts in

service provision, and administrative sleight of

hand. These mechanisms make many losses in

austerity ambiguous. We see it in: the restructuring

of the local state (Ormerod and MacLeod, 2019); in

the increasing privatisation of public buildings (Rex,

2019); in the “failed witnessing” of loss as

community buildings are deemed substitutable

(Robinson and Sheldon,

2019: 112). And, as Ellie

Jupp (2018) importantly

describes, we see it in the

language of ‘service

transformation.’

Yet, such hidden losses are

still losses, and are as a result

still felt: losses felt with

different intensities and

temporalities by individuals,

families, institutions,

communities. So many losses

of austerity are obscured,

made ambiguous or unknowable, yet are still

experienced. It is the relationship between individual

and collective experiences of austerity that is

particularly significant here. Austerity is felt unevenly,

showing itself to be a classed, gendered, racialised

and ableist agenda. At the societal level, this works to

sow seeds of doubt about the damaging effects of

austerity, since for many, the lived realities of austerity

simply are not tangible, palpable or felt. There is no

singularly shared experience of austerity, since many

people simply do not know how badly austerity has

affected other people’s lives because they are not

experiencing it themselves.

In light of this, how can we begin to understand the

losses of COVID-19 in the United Kingdom? How

are these entangled with the last decade of

austerity? And how can we shed light on how

COVID-19 is experienced in relation to austere

politics, when many of austerity’s effects still remain

elusive?

26

Isolation. Photo: Teresa Strachan

In many ways, loss is endemic in the pandemic:

The loss of lives and loved ones (42,647 official

deaths in the UK at the time of writing this paper);

the loss of freedom in lockdown; the loss of

routine and structure that accompanies this; the

loss of mobility (for some). However, these visible

losses require greater problematisation, and

greater attention needs to be paid to the losses

that are hidden, made unknowable as a result of

austerity, and subsequently weaponized against

the very people experiencing them.

The deaths from COVID-19 with ‘underlying health

conditions’ are an important example of this. Not

only does this language construct the deaths of

people with chronic health conditions as

expendable, this form of

lost life is made knowable

to ‘comfort’ the ‘healthy’.

This is a violent act that

constitutes a “brushing

under and away of COVID-

19 deaths” (Purnell, 2020)

and diminishes and erases

the value of those who have

died through the emphasis

on co-morbidity. In

particular, it removes their

humanity and obscures the

structural factors that

influence these ‘underlying

conditions’. Just like austerity, the COVID-19

discourse of ‘All in this together’ is a myth

designed to erase inequality. Individuals living at

the sharp end of austerity face having their

‘underlying health conditions’ weaponized against

them, both because these lives lost to COVID-19

are not deemed adequately knowable to the

healthy population, as well as COVID-19 not being

listed as the cause of death in real time due to

inadequate testing (Full Fact, 2020). The idea that

people with co-morbidity “were going to die

anyway” speaks to strategic ignorance in which

death is produced as an inevitability (McGoey,

2014). This marks both a denial of austerity and a

refraction away from austerity’s felt effects into the

issue of the ‘pre-existing health condition.’ In

doing so, this constitutes a valuation of life, and in

particular whose death counts (Purnell, 2020), but

at the same time depoliticises it, so that it is

deemed as a ‘natural’ progression.

Community responses to COVID-19 also bring to

the fore the weaponization of unknowable losses

of austerity. Throughout the pandemic,

communities have stepped in to support members

understood to be vulnerable, including an NHS

volunteer scheme that has seen more than

500,000 people sign up across England and

Wales. Many of these roles would have previously

been carried out by professional staff, such as

delivering medicines (Fiore, 2020), raising

questions around whether volunteers are

appropriate in this context. Yet, austerity has

generated a need but also an expectation of

volunteer labour, through a removal of the

professional workface, accelerated by an

individualised responsibility combined with the

pandemic as emergency conditions. Public

libraries have used their own laser cutters and 3D

printers to produce Personal Protective Equipment

for local care home and hospital staff to make up

the shortfall in PPE (Dudman, 2020). This has

raised further questions about hidden ways

emergency preparations were affected by a

decade of cuts and reduced public investment.

There has been an overflow of gratitude and

celebration of these acts of solidarity in the current

pandemic. What is striking about the community

spaces providing outstanding responses to

COVID-19, however, is that they themselves have

continually been under threat, year after year, as a

result of austerity. It is an uncomfortable truth that

spaces like public libraries are stepping in to meet

local need in the pandemic, yet have faced visible

and invisible losses under austerity at a colossal

scale – and still face an uncertain future. Local

authorities, already forced to implement budget

reductions every year for the past decade, face

having to make further cuts at an unprecedented

scale in the wake of COVID-19.

As a result, I echo Helen Woods and Beverley

Skeggs’ (2020: 2) argument that “[a] sentimental

mood… is not enough – another affect must be

unleashed – anger mobilised by knowledge of the

litany of state-sponsored abuses.” However, the

losses of austerity that we can never truly know,

which then become a means through which to

deny and refract the affective reality of austerity at

a collective level, makes a sentimental or

celebratory mood in the pandemic even more

sinister. The UK experience of COVID-19

highlights how austerity’s hidden losses do not

disappear, but return to haunt us in encrypted

forms. As we celebrate the volunteers who are

filling in gaps left by a decade of cuts; as the

‘official’ COVID-19 death toll conceals the

‘uncountable’ deaths – in homes and care homes

through the lack of testing and the crisis in social

care (Purnell, 2020; Full Fact, 2020); and as the

classification of ‘mild’ COVID-19 conceals those

chronically suffering, largely abandoned at home

(Callard, 2020). Austerity continues to haunt

everyday life. These losses take place at multiple

temporal planes – hidden losses that cascade into

the future. Austerity haunts the future as well as the

present. These austere hauntings, therefore, are

the cries of futures lost, and beg the question of

how, and who, COVID-19 will come to haunt.

References

Corble, A. (2019) The Death and Life of English

Public Libraries: Infrastructural practices and value

in a time of crisis. Goldsmiths Research Online,

University of London.

Callard, F. (2020) Very, very mild: Covid-19

symptoms and illness classification, Somatosphere:

Science, Medicine and Anthropology.

Dudman, J. (2020) Lego, learning and laughter:

how libraries are thriving in lockdown, The

Guardian. 6 th May 2020.

Fiore, V. (2020) Courts could judge pharmacists for

volunteers' actions, experts warn, Chemist and

Druggist. 14 th April, 2020.

Full Fact (2020) What we know, and what we don’t,

about the true coronavirus death toll, Full Fact. 1 st

May 2020.

Jupp, E. (2018) Children’s centres are disappearing

– here’s what it means for the under fives and their

parents, The Conversation. 16 th April 2018.

Kiely, E. (2019) Waiting ‘without nothing’: Mental

health services and the longue durée of austerity,

RGS-IBG International Conference 2019. August,

London 2019.

McGoey, L. (2014) An Introduction to the Sociology

of Ignorance: Essays on the Limits of Knowing.

London: Routledge.

Ormerod, E. and MacLeod, G. (2019) Beyond

consensus and conflict in housing governance:

Returning to the local state, Planning Theory. 18(3):

319-338.

Purnell, K. (2020) The Body Politics of COVID-19,

The Disorder of Things. 6 th April 2020.

Rex, B. (2020) Public museums in a time of crisis:

The case of museum asset transfer, Journal of

Community Archaeology & Heritage. 7(2): 77-92.

Robinson, K. and Sheldon, R. (2019) Witnessing

loss in the everyday: Community buildings in

austerity Britain, The Sociological Review. 67(1):

111-125.

Wood, H. and Skeggs, B. (2020) Clap for carers?

From care gratitude to care justice, European

Journal of Cultural Studies.

Warnock, R. (2019) Raising a child with autism in a

time of austerity: parents' experiences of

navigating advice and support services in London,

Feminist Engagements with Austerity Symposium.

University of Bristol, January 2019.

27

Board game on the theme of urban planning .... Photo: Cat Button

PART III: PLANNING PROFESSION & PUBLIC INTEREST

28

Rethinking the planning project in troubled times

Andy Inch, Senior Lecturer in Urban Studies and Planning at Sheffield University

Being asked to write about planning,

professionalism and the public interest in the

midst of the current pandemic feels very

challenging. Faced by immediate issues of life and

death, questions about the planning profession

fade into insignificance. At the same time, it is also

apparent that this crisis might profoundly reshape

the social and political settlements we have been

living under, with potentially profound

consequences for how both planning and the

public interest are understood and pursued.

Covid-19 has tragically exposed the failures of

states guided by free-market orthodoxies to

prepare for major public risks or adequately

provide essential infrastructures of care. Urgent

responses to the virus have seen governments

ripping up ideological rulebooks, some more

reluctantly than others, as they have turned to

scientific expertise to guide them on the

introduction of unprecedented measures of public

control and economic relief. The pandemic

therefore seems certain to generate debate

between those calling for a return to some version

of ‘business as usual’ and others who advocate a

more lasting transformation of ruling ideas. There

will be much to struggle for. Indeed, it is tempting

to see this as a potentially overdue reckoning with

a moribund neoliberal order, buckling under the

weight of its own contradictions since the financial

crisis of 2007-8, and seemingly incapable of

responding to a further conjunction of crises that

will surely dominate the coming decades, from

the climate emergency to inequality and the

housing crisis.

Any return to a more proactive role for the state in

responding to such challenges could have

significant implications for the troubled image,

role and status of planning. And in this sense, it

seems important for those of us interested in

pressing more progressive ideas of planning to

reflect on the forms this could take and how we

might play a part in bringing desired changes

about. A useful starting point for this is the

threefold distinction Patsy Healey (1998) makes,

drawing on the earlier work of Donald Foley

(1960), between planning as social movement,

pressing for reform in the built and natural

environment, as profession, claiming the expertise

to guide such development, and as state activity,

bound by law and government policy.

Plaintive appeals to rediscover the reformist zeal of

the early planning movement are a familiar trope

of planning scholarship in the UK. Such calls draw

on what has become a standard historical

narrative, tracing a progressive diminishing of

radical energies and heterodox thinking around

planning through professionalisation and

bureaucratisation over the course of the post-war

period. As Gordon Cherry (1974: 139), the official

historian of the planning profession put it,

“[p]lanners changed from prophets to bureaucrats

as they became the new servants of the state

machine”. More critical versions of this narrative

describe the faustian-pact through which the

planning profession has uncritically served the

political ambitions of governments in exchange for

a measure of control over job opportunities and

protection from scrutiny over the weakness of their

claims to any actual expertise.

Although the corporatist settlement between the

profession and the state has been strained under

neoliberal governments that have routinely seen

planning systems as problems, this still seems a

useful summary. Prophet, radical and reformer

have never been considered essential attributes

for membership of the Royal Town Planning

Institute or a career in local government. The

state’s drawing of the legal scope of planning

powers restricts prevailing definitions of planning

while the profession’s conservative search for

jurisdictional control over its market shelter leads it

towards a politically bland brand of technocracy.

However, like all historical accounts there are

dangers if this narrative becomes fixed into

received wisdom. Not least I sometimes worry that

planning scholarship today suffers from a version

of what Wendy Brown (1999, 20) identifies as “left

melancholia”, characterised by nostalgia for a

golden age where “attachment to the object of

one’s sorrowful loss supersedes any desire to

recover from this loss, to live free of it in the

present, to be unburdened by it”. If so, rebuilding a

more politically progressive version of what

Healey (2010) has elsewhere called the ‘planning

project’ requires an active recovery of planning’s

more diverse and radical traditions as a social

movement, not just from the bogeyman of

neoliberalism and the often restrictive ways

planning has been institutionalised but also from

the grips of ‘planning melancholia’ itself.

29

One way of doing this is to develop alternative

readings of planning’s histories, attuned to the

variety of sometimes

under-explored ways

various social

movements have

influenced planning

thought and practice.

Searching for an

archive of paths not

taken and

opportunities missed

has affinities with the

kinds of critical

historiography

developed by people

like Margo Huxley and

Leonie Sandercock. However, its aim would be less

to reveal the darker sides of the discipline’s

reformist traditions and more about recovering

possibilities for different ways of thinking about

and organising planning.

A sunny April day in Old Eldon Square. Photo: John Pendlebury

With regard to the profession and its always

contested claims to operate in the public interest

this would entail focusing less on its will to power

over the planning field and more on the limits of

its capacity to ever actually achieve control or

closure. This has been most clearly exposed by

periodic government-initiated reforms to planning

York yard turned over to growing veg. Photo by Roger Burrows

systems that have regularly reshaped the scope of

planning practice, generating sometimes

pronounced role

confusion for planners.

Even as they reveal the

power of government to

define debate, such

episodes also

demonstrate how fluid

the objects of planning

concern have been over

time.

A counter history might

also look for less widely

acknowledged

moments when the

profession was challenged, whether internally or

externally, to open itself to wider currents of

thinking. This could, for example, involve revisiting

the tail end of the RTPIs protracted ‘membership

debates’ that ran from the mid-1960s into the

1970s to view how concerns for a more social

planning were articulated as a necessary extension

of the physical focus of mainstream planning

thought, including consideration of an option to

reform the RTPI into an ‘Institute of Community

Planning’ (RTPI, 1971). Although never seriously

pursued, this option was influenced by travelling

ideas of advocacy planning emanating from the

US, alongside growing unease at public opposition

to planned redevelopment, mounting criticism of

its outcomes for the poorest in society and a wider

contemporary rediscovery of poverty as an issue.

Widely celebrated but ultimately limited forms of

‘public participation’ were not the only outcome of

these pressures. Politically committed planners and

educators, some working explicitly with more

radical, socialist and anarchist conceptions of

planning, were attracted into the field and

experimented with different ways of working with

communities to challenge disadvantage. Some

would go on to be involved in the community

development programme of the 1970s or the

workings of radical local authorities into the 1980s,

working ‘in and against’ the state and the

profession (see e.g. Thornley and Montgomery,

1990). The setting up of Planning Aid in the offices

of the Town and Country Planning Association in

the early 1970s is part of this still only patchily

recorded history of advocacy planning in the UK

too, even if its subsequent development illustrates

the challenges of finding a secure institutional

footing for such activity.

York yard turned over to growing veg. Photo: Roger Burrows

30

Painting rainbows with the children to go in the window.

People read them walking past before they faded and the

edges curled. Photo: Emma Ormerod

The profession’s somewhat belated discovery of

sustainable development as a rationale for

planning in the 1990s might also be reconsidered

in similar terms. Although perhaps less radical in

its politics, the positioning of planning in relation

to the environmental movement, and new

opportunities generated by initiatives like Local

Agenda 21, arguably represented a moment of

opening, not just to new ideas but to more activist

possibilities for planners, in turn attracting new

entrants and forging new organisational networks

advocating very different priorities for planning

and development. Institutionalisation and

conservative political co-optation may have

drained energy from this movement but there

might still be something to learn from a careful

rereading of such moments.

Renewing the planning project as part of any more

progressive politics seems a daunting challenge at

present. Political pressures allied to the

profession’s instinctive conservatism have led to a

narrowing of thinking. Planning has come to be

defined as a regulatory cog in the property

development machine rather than a means of

democratising development, realising badly

needed land reform or shaping just transitions out

of the climate and housing crises. The historical

record suggests that the planning profession is

unlikely to be a source of new ideas or to take on

the political work of rebuilding a planning

movement. However, it also shows that neither the

profession or government have ever succeeded in

closing the field completely. The planning project

has been periodically energised when it has been

opened up to wider social movements. By reexamining

the overlooked history of such

openings we might begin to see new possibilities

in and beyond currently constrained horizons.

References

Brown, W (1999) Resisting Left Melancholia,

Boundary 2, Number 3, 19-27

Cherry, G. (1974) The Evolution of British Town

Planning, Leighton Buzzard, Leonard Hill Books.

Foley, D (1960) British Town Planning: One

ideology or three? British Journal of Sociology, 11,

211-31

Healey, P. (1998) Collaborative Planning in a

Stakeholder Society, Town Planning Review, 69 (1),

1-21

Healey, P (2010) Making Better Places: The

Planning Project in the 21 st Century, Basingstoke,

Palgrave MacMillan.

Thornley, A. and Montgomery, J (1990) Radical

Planning Initiatives, Aldershot, Avebury.

Roitman, J. (2014) Anti-crisis, London, Duke

University Press.

Royal Town Planning Institute (1971) Town Planners

and their Future: A discussion paper, London,

Royal Town Planning Institute.

Backyard Classroom. Photo: Ruth Raynor

31

Rethinking the planning project in troubled times:

reflecting on recent research encounters

Abigail Schoneboom, Research Associate, Geoff Vigar, Deputy Head of School,

and Zan Gunn, Director of Planning, School of Architecture, Planning and

Landscape, Newcastle University

The Working in the Public Interest project has

given us a unique opportunity to explore what

planners do all day. Responding to Andy’s call, we

take this opportunity to reflect playfully on our

data, paying particular attention to what it can tell

us, at the micro level, about ‘openings’ that happen

in office life, or during an individual planner’s

career trajectory. Meditating on the profession’s

ability to challenge itself, we draw here on two

vignettes, one from our ethnographic fieldwork

and another adapted from the biographical

interviews we conducted. First, we consider the

vibrant intellectual culture that keeps the ‘big

ideas’ alive in an austerity-driven planning

department and, second, we examine a planner’s

decision to specialise in neighbourhood planning

and how community encounters therein

completely changed their view of how planning

should function.

We find, on the one hand, signs of an immanent

commitment to doing ‘good’ planning that is

rooted in planning education and on the job

learning and is, for those who planners who are

able to cling onto a critical sensibility, sharpened

by neoliberalism’s crushing tendency. On the other

hand, our reflections lead us to a ‘business as usual’

sense of the profession as boxed in and so heavily

circumscribed that would-be prophets are stifled.

Vignette 1: “Even the footnotes”

This fieldnote extract is taken from our fieldwork in

the offices of a local authority that has been heavily

privatised and hard-hit by austerity. It celebrates

the spirit of lively intellectual debate that endures

in spite of or, perhaps, in response to forces that

seek to operationalise the planning project.

Following Andy’s provocation, we ask whether this

intellectual capacity carries potential for reviving

planning’s radical project or is merely fodder for

our leftist melancholia, a vestige of a bygone era

when planners had time to think and talk:

Intellectual banter on topics such as the pros and

cons of brutalism or critique of Heather Campbell’s

take on the profession is fairly customary in the

office. Cameron, one of the senior planners, is the

resident expert on parliamentary matters. As the

Brexit debates became heated, Cameron’s

predictions about what would happen next

provided a frequent current of office discussion:

“There’s a constitutional crisis and I’m supposed to

plan towns,” he exclaimed after one such bout,

pulling himself back on-task. During our fieldwork,

he attended a lecture on the state of planning by

Hugh Ellis, assiduously carrying out Ellis’s

homework assignment and working his way

carefully through the Raynsford Review on his own

time – “I’m even reading the footnotes,” he shared.

Some of the other planners, while perhaps not

quite as vocal, share this deep critical engagement

with the profession. One of the younger recruits

recalls that he thought he had gone a bit off the

deep end about planning ethics during his

interview but was pleased that showing he had a

taste for this sort of debate was in fact valued by the

team and helped him get the position.

1970s neighbourhood development officers in Lambeth with public

sector workers joining anti-eviction protests in Islington, from Harris,

P (1973) Community Work and Local Government, The Planner, 59

(8), Sept/ Oct, 359. Photo: Unknown

32

The planners function in a context where their

practice is increasingly commercialised, something

that is a product of wider neoliberalism. At a recent

Council visioning event that he and some of the

others attended, Cameron recalls, the goals being

laid out were very instrumental, things like “process

300 applications per time period.” He urged the

A planner’s desk.Photo: Working in the Public Interest

group to add what he calls “noble goals,” stuff like

making safe, affordable places. He was not

opposed by those at the meeting but feels he was

pushing against the current of how success, in the

current system, is measured.

Andy has asked for a re-examination of the planning

project that moves beyond ‘left melancholia’ and

focuses on “active recovery of planning’s more

diverse and radical traditions.” As this vignette shows,

there persists in local authorities a vibrant culture of

critical office dialogue that keeps these traditions

alive; it flourishes in the interstices of a neoliberal

social order. Assessing its transformative potential

becomes a sociological question of agency versus

structure but, in troubled times, it presents an

intriguing basis for hope.

Vignette 2: Neighbourhood planning as a

gateway to a new mode of planning

As one of a series of biographical interviews, we

interviewed a late-ish career planner, Jim Allen,

whose journey into planning was conventional for

the 1980s – a geography degree, a postgraduate

degree earned part-time while working as a

planning technician in a local authority. A career in

local government had made Jim cynical about local

authorities and he was clear that his loyalty was not

to the Council but to the places he planned for/in.

Jim moved into a role with a neighbourhood

planning element principally for instrumental

reasons – seeing austerity coming he hitched

himself to something that had an income stream as

an act of job self-preservation. But slowly, working

directly with communities, new ways of doing

planning work, and by connection, not doing it as

it had been done previously, came to the fore:

INT: So how about neighbourhood planning in that

sense, are you perhaps more optimistic about …[it

than]… spending hours and hours producing

strategic plans?

M:Yes, I am. I believe very strongly in community

involvement . It’s just getting people involved in

planning and thinking about what they want,

thinking about what they would like the world to

look like. I think it’s a useful change, rather than

attempting just to deal with the usual suspects and

shaping what your local plan might look like. So I

do think that’s quite a positive thing, particularly

when neighbourhood plans end up creating things

that the planners don’t want to see happen which is

still very much the case with the first

neighbourhood plan that we worked on…

Only last week, I had a conversation with

somebody in development management who was

praising the new draft local plan … because that

would take things back to normal and get rid of this

nonsense that the Parish Council invented whereby

we’re supposed to be allowing houses in the

countryside …. she was really taken aback,

affronted by the notion that this parish council

would come up with something that’s different to

the acknowledged, national approach to planning

for housing in the countryside. The members tend

to get it, actually, whereas I'm afraid officers, a lot of

officers, still want to take the old approach which is

‘we know best’. The prevailing attitude is heaven

forfend anybody might come along and challenge

development control principles but that’s exactly

the sort of thing I would now try to promote.

For Jim, the whole idea of planning was turned on

its head through a sort of enforced learning on the

job. He now sees the whole edifice of local planmaking

as a sort of elite game which takes a lot of

resource and contributes very little. He sees

neighbourhood plans, by contrast, providing

policies that could make a real difference to

communities while often challenging planners’

conventional wisdom. Despite decades of

theoretical work providing models of ‘citizens-first’

planning, it took direct experience to convince Jim

of the merits of such an approach, yet he is now

passionately committed to it.

The edge of the greenbelt. Photo: Working in the Public Interest

33

Looking to the future

Each of these vignettes point to hopeful ‘openings’

yet also point to a rather worrying status quo. On

the one hand, our conversations in the field reveal

planners who critically question the system and

use their agency to find acting space within it. Yet,

there is also a sense that such planners find

themselves heavily outnumbered, that they are

mavericks or outliers in a system undergirded by

obdurate economic and professional logics.

Looking ahead in these troubled times is

challenging and there are many ways to forecast

the profession’s impotence or obsolescence.

However, in an intellectual tradition that finds hope

at moments when progressive outcomes seem

most foreclosed, we also find reasons to anticipate

a future planning profession that is mobilised and

refreshingly intractable.

Access to a new retail development. Photo: Working in the Public

Interest

34

Protest and Policing under

“lockdown”

Miranda Iossifidis, Research Associate,

School of Architecture, Planning and

Landscape

Between March and May, whilst the UK was

ostensibly under lockdown, the equivalent of 30%

of all young black men in London were stopped by

the police. 21,950 searches took place, and 80% of

them led to no further action. I was researching

stop and search in Lewisham ten years ago. The

situation today is even worse. In May, footage

circulated of an off-duty ambulance driver being

handcuffed and searched for drugs, while he was

“just chilling, getting some fresh air” and in

another part of the borough, a woman was pinned

down by six police officers during a car search.

Criminologists see stop and search as a useless

but nevertheless “sacred cow”, even after research

on the 2011 uprisings following the police murder

of Mark Duggan demonstrated how widespread,

violent, and racially unjust the practice is. Duggan

is one of 1745 people who have died in police

custody in the UK since 1990.

In response to the murder of George Floyd on May

25 th by police in Minneapolis, the resurgent global

Black Lives Matter movement has produced the

largest anti-racist protests in British history. In

cities, towns and rural areas across the UK, almost

100,000 people have taken to the streets.

Demands for prison – and penal – abolition and

defunding the police have never been more

urgent. After days of protests in Minneapolis, the

city announced that the police department would

be eliminated and replaced with a “department of

community safety and violence prevention”.

If abolition is about a horizon, and ‘working towards

a world where the police are not seen as the answer

to our social problems’ (Begum, 2020), then it is

clear that reform is not the answer: as Alex Vitale

has argued, ‘the alternative is not more money for

police training programs, hardware or oversight. It

is to dramatically shrink their function’ (2020).

Mariame Kabe notes that all ‘“reforms” that focus on

strengthening the police or “morphing” policing

into something more invisible but still as deadly

should be opposed’ (2014). Central to abolitionist

work is ‘chipping away at the power of that system

and completely reconfiguring how society

understands the need for police’ (Kaur, 2020). A

useful guide by Critical Resistance outlines reformist

reforms vs abolitionist steps in policing.

When so many health, social and educational

services – the NHS, community arts, youth centres,

libraries – have been defunded under the guise of

austerity, is it so impossible to consider defunding

the police? Adam Elliott-Cooper has outlined the

case for defunding the in the UK, which has ‘the

second largest policing budget per capita in

Europe,’ (2020) and Begum points to three

concrete demands: removing police from schools,

scrapping stop and search and abolishing Prevent

(2020).

Entering June under “lockdown”, the carceral

spaces of the city continued to proliferate: people

as young as twelve were kettled for hours after a

BLM protests. The following week, fascists and the

Far Right gathered in central London to “protect

the statues” and threw Nazi salutes at the junction

of Whitehall and the Mall. A black teenager who

was attacked by a far-right demonstrator was

searched by the police when he sought help. On

the 14 th of June, the anniversary of Grenfell could

not be remembered with a silent walk, so instead

we had to remember from our own homes, in the

knowledge that for many, the home is not safe. The

words “we can’t breathe” – the last words of some

of those who died that night – were illuminated

onto the side of the building.

As the months go on, we can see the myriad ways

in which the state is using premise of the pandemic

to ramp up policing in the city; racial profiling in

working class neighbourhoods, targeting specific

wards and housing estates, helicopters constantly

hovering. Blanket section 60s– a tool for gathering

data and surveillance - have been put in place

numerous times since the pandemic began,

covering large parts of boroughs, sometimes

whole boroughs, for 12-24 hours, as well as during

Black Lives Matter protests. Meanwhile, the “night

time economy,” parks in gentrified

neighbourhoods and exploitative workplaces are

left well alone; the latter we know from the UK, US

and Germany are infection hotspots.

In early July, Netpol – the Network for Police

Monitoring – launched an investigation into the

policing of Black Lives Matter protests in Britain, to

support BLM campaigners and their right to protest.

Dunston Staiths. Photo by Cat Button

As we continue living in and through a pandemic

with no immediate end in sight, it is vital to draw

on feminist abolitionist approaches if we are

serious about seeking social justice in the city. A

discussion in June, “Revolution is not a one-time

event” organised by Silver Press and chaired by

Akwugo Emejulu, brought together decades of

experience of community organising and feminist

scholarship; Amrit Wilson, Lola Olufemi, Ru Kaur

and Che Gossett discussed redefinitions of harm,

accountability and justice. Their wide-ranging

exchange asked us to reconsider notions of justice

predicated on life instead of death, (Olufemi); the

divestment not only of funding, but in ways of

being, in our relations with others and ourselves

(Kaur and Emejulu); and a wider conceptualisation

of harm as involving both intimate partner

violence, as well as much broader acts of violence,

such as the Iraq war (Wilson). Lola Olufemi’s

remarks bear profound resonance for our

consideration of the harmfulness of urban

planning. Abolition feminism, she observes, ‘asks

us not to reproduce the harm that we seek to end

… [and] to give up this idea of deservingness, give

up this idea that some people deserve to have a

claim to a liveable life, have a claim to a family, a

safe place to be, care, and others deserve to be

disappeared by the state’ (2020).

As protests are suppressed across the country –

including through harsh bail conditions on BLM

protesters in Newcastle – and we are encouraged

to go shopping and go back to the pub, it has

never been more important to remember and

honour those who have died. Now more than ever

we must support radically transformative

campaigns in our neighbourhoods, workplaces,

schools and institutions to collectively re-imagine

futures without and beyond carceral geographies

(Gilmore 2020).

35

36

Camberwell Green, London Borough of Southwark. Photo: Miranda Iossifidis

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