Stuart Woodin argues for more heart and feeling in planning our neighbourhoods, to complement the mainly rational approaches of regeneration programmes. We need to rebuild the Village in Our Hearts, he says in an article for New Start Magazine, now online. I go along with much of what he says, but can't help wondering if some of us are head people about how and where we live. Maybe there's some personality preference mixed in with circumstance. Stuart writes:
In most indigenous societies, place and community still play a crucial maintenance role deep in the psyche of the individual. In these communities the link between place (neighbourhood) and the land, home, work, social system (community) and spirit is strong and seamless. Are we now just too far removed from this dynamic or is it possible for such age-old links to be understood afresh and renewed?
The problem is that for a long time now these vital interconnections have been weakening in the UK. The link between the neighbourhood (village) and land was lost forever in the agrarian and industrial revolutions. And in the 19th and 20th centuries towns and cities grew so large that work in the neighbourhood was, for most, no longer a practical option.
Stuart - who is a consultant in the regeneration field (Word download) and closely involved with his own neighhourhood in south London - says that renewal policy has generally missed the 'felt' quality of village, crucial to neighbourhood renewal and community leadership. He offers some characteristics of felt neighbourhood, including a shared use of land, a sense of belonging, order and history, and symbols that are generally honoured by all - maybe an old tree, an ancient crossing point, a view.
It is often these felt qualities of neighbourhood that not only inform conscious and unconscious decisions about how we relate to the neighbourhood, but crucially whether we stay or leave. The tipping point may be something quite simple - the realisation that arriving home lifts your spirits or conversely the feeling that the neighbourhood is unsettling, unsafe or soulless.
New Start have entitled the article "Why we all want the village life", and although I'm not sure that's what Stuart is saying, it does raise the question of whether we have preferences for place that may reflect our personality types. Do extroverts - who, according to type theory, derive energy from their interactions with the external world - prefer buzzy places much of the time? Do cities provide more opportunities for physical exploration, for those who welcome this? Then there's the question of what we may prefer at different times in our lives, and how far we may or may not want the goldfish bowl feel of a small place, or the anonymity of a larger one.
John Major, when Prime Minister , enthused about the village England of warm beer, cricket matches and old maids on bicycles in his 'back to basics' speech. We discovered later that he had been up to something rather different with fellow MP Edwina Currie back in the metropolis. Different places, different passions.
Some people have the money and personal freedom to choose where they live, others are trapped in communities from which they can't escape.
I hope New Start follow up with more articles exploring the complex mix of people's personal preferences, the dimensions of place, and the choices now available through a mix of real and virtual travel. As a Demos pamphlet argued recently, people make places.
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