If you don't have its history, you can't value the practice... So we really need this long-read about the history of community development
The first Ecological Parks Trust site in 1978, built from scratch on a former lorry park at the foot of Tower Bridge in the heart of London, where visitors could explore a pond, a meadow or even a sand dune within sight of St. Paul’s cathedral. Image courtesy of John Tyler.
This is a seriously useful and interesting long read - an essay (commissioned by the Local Trust), which recounts the history of what we know as “community development”, written by the New Economics Foundation’s David Boyle.
As Boyle says, this history helps those of us who are interested in community power to root our claims in precedent, and fruitfully compare past and present opportunities. Boyle also connects references in the essay, innovatively, to a horizontal timeline.
The introduction sets up the fuller history:
David Boyle: What is community development?
Your answer to this question may just depend on when you were born. So little has been written on the history of this idea, especially perhaps in the UK, that it might anyway be hard to tell. The short answer is that it means something a little different decade by decade.
Nor has much been written about the story of the idea that local communities might manage more aspects of their people’s lives. It has been said that it began among those running the British empire in East Africa, but I can find no evidence of that [though see NOTES below - ed.]
The bundle of ideas we know as community development seems to have begun in a series of sparks from people like the Chicago activist Saul Alinksy or the Quaker ambulance driver Tony Gibson in Blitz-hit Stepney, both in the early 1940s. Or, not long afterwards, from the Catholic priest Ivan Illich in the Puerto Rican slums of New York. Or perhaps the young British architect John Turner, studying self-build housing in Peru.
Nor is it clear whether those ideas were regarded at the time as naïvely radical or backward-looking (it is hard to know what the reaction was to Tibby Clarke’s script for the Ealing comedy Passport to Pimlico back in 1949 – it was a whimsical idea). What bound them all together seems to me to have been the rise of the so-called counterculture.
We have been living in this for so long now that it is hard to see it, rather as goldfish find it difficult to perceive the water they swim in. But I use the term in the sense that it was coined by the American philosopher Theodore Roszak, in his 1959 book The Making of a Counterculture, as a gathering revolt against the prevailing technocracy.
It was that growing sense through the never-had-it-so-good years that the solution to homelessness was not just numbers of homes, but the kind of lives people could have in them. In that sense, one of the pioneering moments was the 1957 publication of Michael Young (one of the co-creators of the welfare state) and Peter Willmott’s groundbreaking study Family and Kinship in East London, which looked at the rehousing of one community in Essex and the loss of what might later be called their social capital.
Looking at our timeline set out as it is here, it is clear not that community development failed but that its purpose and objectives kept changing every decade or so. But what those objectives were, as set out here, are based on my judgement – there is no impartial measurement of any kind that one can use to write something like this. I am bound to be influenced partly by what I was doing during those years. Yet there are some facts: Colin Ward did inspire an interest in education in the 1970s, and there has been a shift of emphasis towards capacity-building and co-production since the turn of our century.
For that reason, if no other – that it may be hard to agree about the developing multiple purposes of community development – it is difficult to decide how far it succeeded in its various objectives. These were never set out clearly, and by the time they were, they had moved again.
Once you look at the timeline, some of the reasons for this shift become clearer. The difficult moments economically, like 1973 or 1992 or 2009, mean that grant funding dries up, or gets reset by a new government. It is peculiar, once you see it there in black and white, how often there are new prime ministers at the shifts in decade – in 1970, 1979, 1990, 2010 and 2019 (though Wilson, Callaghan, Blair, Brown and May all bucked this trend).
That becomes all the more important as those activists making community development happen get more dependent on grant or lottery funding – when every three years, and maybe less, they will have to abandon their institution and wield their trendiest buzzwords to invent some new project they can plausibly describe as innovative.
At Waterloo Festival in 1982 Bernie Spain explains the plans for development of co-op affordable housing, open space and small businesses on the Coin Street sites, London SE1 to Waterloo residents, aided by a 3D model of the plans. Caroline Webb Archival / Alamy Stock Photo
That may be why the labels kept changing – to ‘urban studies’, to ‘technical aid’, to ‘capacity building’ or ‘participation’, though always with the word ‘community’ tacked on the front.
That may all have been inevitable in the history of an important idea over eight decades. What was not inevitable was the abandonment, over the years, of so much know-how and so many institutions, from the Community Development Foundation (CDF) to the Association of Community Technical Aid Centres (ACTAC). I feel especially sorry about ACTAC, because writing about the annual conference in 1988 was probably the most thrilling experience of its kind I ever found.
But we didn’t lose them all. The Development Trusts Association is still with us as Locality. So is the North Kensington Amenity Trust as the Westway Trust. It is no coincidence that NKAT never had to depend on the changing vagaries of grant funding.
Then there is the problem of the lack of history. In the policy and think-tank worlds, there is little sense that their precious community-development or participation project might have fitted into a narrative history and experience. Worse, the credibility of those who remembered was sometimes on the line when they pointed back beyond the narrow horizon of institutional memory (five to ten years) to explain that it had all been done before (most people over 50 will know what I mean).
But then, it had never quite been done before. It was now being done in a different context, using different buzzwords and with subtly different objectives. In that sense, there has been some continuity. So it was that the shift into education in the 1970s was partly in response to that growing sense – confirmed by the Inner Area Studies in 1977 – that these were impoverished generations, not people who happened to be poor for a while. In the same way, the shift in the 1980s towards providing ‘technical aid’ – expertise in planning, housing or architecture – was a response to communities that also needed access to professional advice.
Even so, the story of housing lies behind community development, starting with the fatal decisions in the mid-1950s to build tower blocks or use system-build – both of them functions of absurdly high housing targets by both parties of government. Municipal architects used to design the front doors next to each other in social housing in order to force people back together. In practice, this only made matters worse.
Housing ministers such as Harold Macmillan or Richard Crossman ten years later were, in that sense, co-creators of the community development movement. The key cities that gave birth to community development – London, Liverpool and Glasgow – were also those with the worst housing crises. This central place that housing had also suggests that the twin events of the hurricane in Glasgow and the collapse of Ronan Point – both in 1968 – may be said to mark the real beginning of the movement.
By the 1980s, when environment secretary Peter Shore said he had “put away the bulldozer” and the Thatcher government was selling off housing, the issue remained. But by then the debate was not about new housing, but about refurbishment and the blight from abandoned motorway schemes that led to the 1981 riots. A generation later, under Blair, it was the New Deal for Communities and the refurbishment of housing which provided resources for so much capacity building.
And while this was all happening, new ideas were emerging, whether it was Ivan Illich and ‘deschooling’ or Robert Putnam and social capital, or Edgar Cahn and reciprocity. All of those were Americans, and – since it was another American, Saul Alinksy, who started the community development ball rolling – I have wondered whether it is in fact an alien idea for these islands, one designed to support the poorest descendants of slaves.
But then it was also, in some ways, the scriptwriter TEB Clarke who raised the curtain – on behalf of Ealing Studios, at least – by setting out his belief, in comic form, that ordinary communities, and ordinary people, could achieve, run and manage things for themselves. Whether this was a railway (The Titfield Thunderbolt) or a new nation (Passport to Pimlico), they were all done in a very British way – without deaths or burning down cities.
On the other hand, there has been a sense that, as community development gets steadily and unenthusiastically adopted by the establishment, perhaps it has become a little bloodless.
Gone are the days when the 12 offices of the Community Development Project could be closed by the Heath government on the grounds that they had become openly Marxist; or when Brian Anson invited leading members of Sinn Fein – then illegal – to lobby parliament about their homes in the Divis flats in Belfast; or when the inhabitants of blighted Weller Street, Liverpool, invaded a private dinner given by the housing corporation chairman, and stuck their fingers in his soup.
Perhaps with more reason, one might be nostalgic about the 1984 decision to sell the Thames-side site for Coin Street to the community – making possible another long-lasting institution for our list.
Only a month ago, I might have said that we won’t see its like again. But after a year of lockdowns, I’m not completely sure.
NOTES
We think we can help here… The community educator Colin Kirkwood’s book Vulgar Eloquence, from the late 80s Scottish publisher Polygon, has a chapter entitled “Community Development and Popular Participation” (available here at Archive.org’s internet library. From p.175, Kirkwood begins to show how “community development” became part of the imperial mission to civilise “tropical Africa”.
Kirkwood also relates how figures like Jomo Kenyatta objected to the patronising effects of these techniques, as expressed in 1948 Colonial Office papers like The Encouragement of Initiative in African Society, where it does seem like the phrase “community development” (or CD) was first coined. In the 70s and 80s, Kirkwood was involved, as a follower of the Brazilian educator Paulo Friere, in a furious tussle with authorities about the educational needs of communities. - A/UK.