Marinaleda - an inspirational story

The Observer newspaper has recently carried a fascinating article about a new book - The Village Against the World published by Verso. This tells the story of Marinaleda, a village in Spain, which has responded to the turmoil of Spanish history over the last three or four decades in a quite distinctive way. It seems to be based in a particular form of socialist politics. The Mayor, Juan Manuel Sanchez Gordillo, has represented the village since 1979, standing for his own party, the Collective for Worker's Unity and originally winning 76% of the vote. Under his leadership, the village engaged in protest politics in the 1980s, a key claim being to land around the village belonging to the Duke of Infantado. In 1991 the Andalucian government granted the village 1,200 hectares of this land and this formed the basis of the village's collective farm together with facilities such as a swimming pool, sports centre, school, gardens and some 350 new homes (all 'mortgage-free' according to the paper). The collective basis of the local economy has meant that the villagers have survived even during the austerity budgets of the post-2008 period and the bond-crisis of the Spanish government. Unemployment is reported at 5% compared to the regional level of 36%.
Clearly this can be read as a triumph of oppositional politics and of separation from the capitalist economy. But the important elements, to my mind, of this story are twofold. First, there is the central role that the transfer of land-ownership played. Here we have community landownership underpinning local economic activity and housing development. This just reinforces how little we use this resource in the UK. Second, this is not a village in isolation from the wider capitalist economy. If it has managed to keep unemployment so low, it must be trading its agricultural products with that wider economy. Rather this story seems to fit well with many other stories from lower-income countries where the benefits of collective forms of economic ownership and production enable a 'third' economy - neither the formal economy nor the black economy - to operate successfully. We have often lost sight of this 'third' economy in European countries but it could be ripe for a revival.

Town and parish councils

If community-based planning is to work at all, it requires an institutional base, a way of organising local communities so generate ideas for the local area, harness resources from within the community and maintain open and transparent lines of accountability. The Government has undertaken a consultation exercise on making it easier to create new town or parish councils. So are these the right institutions for community-based planning, management and action? Clearly, given the legislative changes implementing the Localism agenda, there are considerable benefits in having such a council in your neighbourhood. These councils have a General Power of Competence and can exercise the Community Right to Challenge and the Community Right to Bid (in relation to community assets). They hold the new neighbourhood planning powers and also will receive a share of the Community Infrastructure Levy from new development; they can even levy a local tax (or precept) although this will not raise much.
The concern with any such institution must be about its representativeness and transparency. One does not need to believe that everything in "The Archers" is fact rather than fiction to believe some of its portrayal of parish politics. Capture of such councils by a small minority is always a possibility and indeed, representing all elements of a local community (across age, gender, class and ethnicity) may be almost impossible. Consensus cannot always be generated and some form of leadership is necessary for change to be driven through. But the danger of focussing on the 'ease' of creating councils is that the dynamics that have to be put in place to make such councils effective and just may be forgotten.
It is not just about setting up the institution 'vessel' through which community planning will occur. It is also about creating, building, managing, resolving conflicts with the local people - residential and business - who make up that community or amalgam of communities. In the UK we put far too little emphasis on community building, assuming that it will somehow happen in civil society. But such community building can be a vital way of ensuring inclusion and justice in how such parish and town councils operate and we need investment in making this happen.

Community pubs again

Community pubs are in the news once again as some 100 have been reported as achieving community asset status under the Localism Act. This sounds very positive. It gives local communities the right to delay any sale of the community asset for up to 6 months and gives them the opportunity then to raise funds to buy the asset and to do so as current use value, excluding any development gain from a change of use, say to residential. There is the prospects of the pub building be used not just as a hostelry but for a variety of local needs. But the sting in the tail is that funding for the purchase and subsequent running of the building still has to be raised. Only the wealthier communities will find it easy to find such funds. Elsewhere this potential will depend on much creativity and innovation in finding resources to make the building a true community asset. Where might such resources be found? Sweat equity is always a possibility, particularly for refurbishment. Community time banks might help with ongoing running of the asset. Crowd-funding and peer-to-peer lending  are two options that are making innovative use of the internet to provide small businesses and social enterprises with low cost loans. There are possibilities here but communities are going to need some basic business planning and financial advice to understand how to access them. A future of community-owned and managed assets is possible but it will require a clever and imaginative mix of expertise and ideas to become a reality.

From the Dublin conference

Last week planning academics from across the world met at the joint congress organised by UCD in a very sunny Dublin  for the European and North American associations of planning schools: http://aesop-acspdublin2013.com/. Around a thousand people attended so difficult to summarise the discussions or even the main themes! There was plenty of continuing evidence that market-led development often failed to deliver for local communities and, further, that it was running into problems as a strategy in current economic climates. But there were also a couple of interesting papers that linked very directly to the arguments and proposals in The Future of Planning.
A fascinating paper by David Adams, of Glasgow University, discussed urban land reform in Scotland - where he is advising the Scottish Government - and proposed a Community Right to Sell. This would be a measure whereby a community could force a plot of vacant or derelict land in their area to go to auction and be sold. The idea is that the auction process would result in the land being sold for a beneficial use even if this was a price below that desired by the current landowner. David's view is that often this lower price would enable communities to buy the land; even if they were outbid, land would be brought into use rather than being blocked by landowners.
Another interesting analysis was put forward by Peter Phibbs of the University of Sydney. His paper outlined the ACT Land Rent Scheme under which households are able to rent land and then buy a building to put on it, purchasing the land at a later stage to unify the two elements. There is an annual land rent fixed at 2% of the land value for lower income households and 4% for others. This seems an innovative idea which Peter describes as a government CLT and as having some significant success. He also points though to the opposition that it faced at the outset, a reminder of the need to build wide coalitions of support to challenge the existing growth-dependent paradigm.
Two ideas to watch....

More on neighbourhood planning

Neighbourhood planning has been with us for well over a year now, ever since the Localism Act was passed in later 2011. But it has taken time for the first neighbourhood plans to be prepared, voted in on local referenda and accepted as local development plan documents. In theory, this was a radical move towards greater involvement of local communities in the planning of their localities - a genuine form of bottom-up planning. Town and parish councils and newly-formed neighbourhood forums could emerge from a variety of local groupings and be given the authority to draft such a plan. Local residents would be given a final say through a referendum, although only a bare majority was needed to pass the neighbourhood plan; note, though, that local businesses are potentially eligible to vote on any business-led plan. But in practice, this seems less radical than at first hoped or feared. Any such neighbourhood plan has to be in conformity with the Local Plan which potentially heads off conflict between neighbourhood forums and local planning authorities but may also demotivate community action. These plans are primarily about where and how to permit new development in the locality, which is a rather restricted perspective on what local communities may actually want to do with their areas. Local visioning, of the sort I mentioned in my last post, may well go beyond this particular concern of the statutory planning system. Recent research by DEFRA (yes, the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs not that for Communities and Local Government) found - at least in rural areas - the process of preparing plans was quite protracted and expensive. The demands on local authority planning staff can be considerable - particularly as they have to fit into the statutory planning system and be shown to be 'evidence-based'. So perhaps this is more business-as-usual that might be wished (as is often the case when one tinkers with the statutory planning system). But one interesting item in the DEFRA research is that at least one plan - in the tourist area of Lynmouth and Lynton - has been used to focus housing on meeting local needs through a 'primary residence' policy; if this is not the case, then the housing has to be offered for rent or sale as affordable housing. Quite how this will implemented will be interesting to watch.

Community-based visioning

One of the arguments of the book is that an important option in areas that are experiencing a lack of economic growth is to foster community-based planning using the valuable resources (non-financial) of local communities. There are an increasing number of community-based initiatives and one interesting example is Clear Village: www.clear-village.org
They operate on a 80:20 principle whereby local residents and external advisers are combined in the ratio of 80% to 20%. But the over-riding principle is that everyone is an expert; this is not a combination of lay people with external experts. Rather everyone is pooling their expertise. Clear Village see 'locals' as offering knowledge of the place and how it works in detail, while 'globals' bring their own specific expertise, often disciplinary  together with a 'fresh pair of eyes'. The aim is to jointly re-envision an area and then put in place initiatives for change. This is an appealing approach. Could it work for neighbourhood planning? Could local residents and businesses work with planners on a neighbourhood plan for their area in this way? The problem here seems two-fold. First, the initial wave of neighbourhood plans seem to be disproportionately located in areas of greater rather than less wealth and not being used to address problems of disadvantage. Second, it is clear that neighbourhood planning has to operate within the rules and guidelines for preparing a statutory development plan and that these can constrain the whole process. However, as I shall explore at another time, this does not mean neighbourhood planning could not be reformed to incorporate more of the spirit of the Clear Village approach.