After attending a couple of meetings/events very recently, the task seems to have gotten even more complex than I had anticipated – and I wasn’t expecting it to be a walk in the park either.
TL/DR? Our response has to reflect the diverse needs and the complexity of our city. Have a look at Cambridge Resilience Web to get a sense of the multiple challenges Cambridge faces, as well as the people responding to them.
Without naming the people/events/places, I was reminded by some of the people I met about the state of community facilities within the City of Cambridge – and the unequal distribution of Cambridge City Council-owned-and-run community centres.
This is strangely important to me because when I stood for election in 2014 under my Twitter Avatar Puffles, I wrote a manifesto which included far too many things (we live and learn!) one of which was to call for an audit of community centres across our city. Two years later, Cambridge found itself with a dragon slide in Coleridge Rec and a city council undertaking said audit!
Above – me and the Coleridge Dragon – inspired by Puffles and commissioned by Cambridge City Council in 2015. Photo: Cambridge Playlaws Project
(Someone posted that there’s some abusive graffiti that needs cleaning off the back of the piece!)
It was here that the issue of fairness came up – see my blogpost here. And it came up at these more recent events too. A message for ministers, developers, and University decision-makers going on about ‘the Magic of Cambridge’: The kids ain’t stoopid. They can see the inequalities in our city, and they are really not happy about it.
I put similar questions to two adults from very different social and educational backgrounds about the possibility of workshops about how Cambridge functions as a city, and got two very interesting responses back – both in terms of how different they were, but also in how similar they were. Starting with the similarities:
The first one was about the over-complicated governance structure of our city: What is the logic and reasoning behind it? That is for ministers to explain – as they were the ones that commissioned it and signed it off. They own it.
The second one was about what I can only describe as the multiple, chronic failings of the state and of our fragmented public services – and why everything was failing everywhere and why ‘they’ or ‘the council’ didn’t talk to each other.
Both have their roots in our utterly broken system of government, central and local, along with the structures of our public service organisations.
On the differences, it became clear how we all have unique relationships with this institution called ‘the state’.
Someone who is or has been in a middle-to-senior role in a public sector organisation other than in local government, who perhaps has a mortgage and can afford either to educate their children privately, or pay for additional out-of-hours tuition while inside the state system, and who seldom go to council-organised neighbourhood events because few are organised near where they live/can afford alternatives, is likely to have a very different perspective on how Cambridge functions compared to someone who say never went into higher education, who has children and perhaps grand children, and whose family for several generations has lived in council or social housing, and has participated in many council-organised events that have taken place very close to where they live.
On paper, the more affluent person has a more distant relationship with the local council compared with say someone who lives in council housing – where the relationship is more likely to be interactive simply because of the processes of housing maintenance. (i.e. contacting the council to arrange repairs rather than having to go through the open market).
The distant relationship with local council services is something that feels ever so familiar with my childhood because by the time I was old enough to notice the existence of the city council, long term austerity under Thatcher then Major’s Governments had cut services back so much that it barely existed. Discussing community centres and youth clubs, I mentioned that my generation in Queen Edith’s didn’t have a meaningful youth club so to speak of.
Some of the people I went to school with, and played football with after school in the mid-1990s lived in nearby council houses. Some of the neighbours told us to go and play at Cherry Hinton Hall, and we replied that it was too dangerous to play there. It was only in later years that I reflected how adults in decision-making organisations have very little concept or understanding of how children and teenagers see our city. Which are the places they like to be in? Which areas do they consider as ‘no go’ areas? And why? Furthermore, what improvements would they suggest given the chance to deal with these problems? That would make for a very interesting local social research project – properly funded and supported. Map our city through the eyes of our city’s children and teenagers. What does it tell us? How well does it reflect not just on the institutions of state, but on the affluent and influential institutions who have such a big impact on the state of our city.
GCSE Citizenship is still a minority subject
One of the volunteers in their early 20s had a browse through the copy of Jenny Wales’ book GCSE Citizenship Studies (2023) and told me they didn’t cover any of this at school. Which made me wonder how much citizenship education the teenagers are actually getting – and reminding myself to look this up!
Above – from the Association of Citizenship Teachers
That’s about a tenth of the numbers taking history and geography. Which then makes me wonder what impact local politicians can have in encouraging more local schools to offer it, as well as the county’s lifelong learning service offering it as an evening class (the latter of which on paper at least I’m qualified to teach! (Although it’s something I would not want to be the single tutor for)). Unless uptake from schools increases significantly, don’t expect a huge impact in the near future.
How to prepare a suitable range of options without segregating by class and income
To be honest I’m struggling with this conundrum. A workshop group full of people who are from an affluent background *and*, due to their academic and/or professional training, are able to absorb and process large amounts of complex information will have different needs and demands compared with a group of people who are from less affluent backgrounds, didn’t go through higher education, and have a more interactive relationship with local council services – for example the maintenance of council houses through to being employed in a frontline public service.
*I can explain why things are as they are, but I cannot solve their immediate problems*
Listening to several people at the Queen Edith’s Food Hub over the recent months and years, one thing that has become clear is how the broken neo-liberal model of privatised and fragmented services has utterly failed those it is supposed to help – i.e. those in the greatest need. What might ‘through competition result in the best service delivery at the lowest price’ in a public service contract completely externalises the social and time costs of the public that use those services. This is especially the case with individuals who have multiple needs that require ‘cross partnership working’.
An intellectual explanation of why we’ve ended up with the system we have, along with the processes for trying to hold ministers to account might be sufficient for an affluent professional with their own house, cleared mortgage and adult children, but it cannot suffice for those who need a much more urgent response such as a repair to a council flat that, unfixed is exacerbating the health problems of the occupants. (With the longer term impact being extra and avoidable costs to the NHS budget).
“I just want my door/window/wall repaired – I don’t care who does it, just get it done!”
No citizenship workshop or evening class will be able to deal with the ‘then and there’ problems – let’s be honest. (Unless one of the participants is a senior decision-maker with the powers to phone some emergency number and get someone on the case!) Furthermore, any suggestion that facilitators (whether me or anyone else) come up with that involve standard processes eg ‘contact your councillor to ask for XYZ’ will simply come across as patronising or ignorant – just as those who (generally in good faith) come up with a list of suggestions for those with chronic health conditions.
So part of the challenge for me is designing *something* that involves shared problem-solving – both in the identification or, and the scoping/writing down the details of, and then trying to come up with shared solutions. It can’t simply be a case of everyone ‘having their say’ followed by me pointing to https://www.writetothem.com/ and assuming a councillor will sort things out. I’d want people to come away from any event put on feeling inspired and also with a) a sense that they are not alone in their struggles; and b) that they are part of a wider collective movement across our city and beyond that seeks to improve things for all of us and for our future generations. That is something very, very difficult to generate in. the current economic and political climate.
This challenge is not going away anytime soon.
Food for thought?
The Cambridge Town Owl 