Alison Gilchrist

The ‘smart cities’ movement has emphasised the contribution that technologies can make to tackling complex problems at the interface between urban institutions and the people who live and work in cities. Policy and funding has directed attention to issues such as traffic movement, air quality, social care provision, public participation, etc. within complex systems of micro-decision making and service delivery that need smooth and speedy co-ordination of demand and response. Using online or artificial intelligence, smart city models harness the latest technological developments to integrate information across a range of sources and to mobilise big data to broker diverse interests and deliver services on the ground.  But this is not enough to solve the major challenges facing many urban neighbourhoods.

Recent research in four northern European cities has revealed the crucial role played by ‘socially smart’ individuals working to improve life for the residents of challenging, but vibrant, neighbourhoods. These ‘smart urban intermediaries’ (SUIs) work with communities to devise ‘win-win’ strategies that tackle problems that both public authorities and private market forces find difficult to address.

The research team worked closely with forty individuals over nearly two years: observing their practice, exploring motivations and reflecting on some of the factors that enabled or obstructed their work. In many ways the SUIs are all different, with different motives and approaches, tailored to different times and circumstances. Nonetheless, they do have common practices and traits. The project compared experiences in similar neighbourhoods and found remarkable overlaps between how the smart urban intermediaries operate and what drives their commitment to social progress. Most have dedicated many years to improving the lives of the most disadvantaged residents of specific areas.  Two examples illustrate the courage and creativity of SUIs, using their networks to assemble the people and resources needed to improve life for residents.

In Copenhagen, a brave tenant led a campaign to rid her area of gangs openly dealing drugs and using knives and guns to threaten anyone who got in their way. She mobilised her neighbours through street protests and organised community actions to reclaim community spaces. The group also lobbied the police and city mayor to take more responsibility and to help residents to defend the neighbourhood against criminal activities.

Health problems among the Asian communities in Birmingham have caused concern for many years. A local initiative, the Saheli hub led by a community worker, has developed a range of fitness and adventure activities for women of all backgrounds to try out new experiences and challenges, such as cycling, running and kayaking.

The SUIs are passionate about improving life for their neighbours and challenging social injustices.  They nurture social relations and use these to bring together ideas, assets and expertise to develop projects that meet local needs and aspirations. This is possible because the smart urban intermediaries are trusted and respected. They invest time and effort in a web of connections with people who can provide advice, encouragement and practical help, often for free or very little financial cost. By working across sectors, traditional policy and institutional divisions, SUIs can be innovative, but sometimes struggle to maintain momentum because funding runs out, volunteers move on or they themselves experience ‘burn out’.

So, how can this vital, but hidden, role of SUIs be supported? Policy-makers and funders  might better recognise and respect their contribution to neighbourhood life. They might help to sustain the work of SUIs who are valued locally but struggle to make ends meet. And finally, they might invest in cross-sectoral initiatives that renew and align what is out there already. Smart cities rely on the latest technologies to enhance services and transform infrastructure. They also need socially smart urban intermediaries who understand local conditions and can spark community action around specific issues. Until that connection is made, smart city strategies will have a people-shaped void at their centre.

Alison Gilchrist is Research Fellow at INLOGOV as part of the Smart Urban Intermediaries project. Formerly Director of Practice development at the UK’s Community Development Foundation.

This blog originally appeared on the Smart Urban Intermediaries website. With thanks to them for allowing cross-posting. The views expressed in this blog are those of the author and not INLOGOV or the University of Birmingham.

By Milagros Gimenez and Gustavo Paniz

One of the aspects that most struck us as Latin American students while reading for our Master of Public Management at the University of Birmingham was the importance of having access to reliable data for making public policies. Current trends in public administration and the Evidence-Based Policy movement posit that the most efficient way to produce and increase the quality of public values ​​is through the rigorous and comprehensive use of “scientific evidence” (Head, 2017, p. 77).

Throughout our interaction in class with colleagues from diverse nationalities and backgrounds, we noticed that unlike other countries, a common characteristic of public administration in Argentina and Venezuela is the absence of reliable information regarding key economic and social indicators. During our dissertation research, we identified that this situation was not only due to a lack of technical or professional capacity but due to a deliberate intention of the ruling elites to hide and manipulate information in order to create narratives that support their political and economic interests.

In Argentina during 2007-2015, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s government is said to have manipulated official statistics such as inflation and growth rates and directly stopped measuring poverty rates to hide the country’s serious social crisis (Economist, 2016; Lanacion.com, 2016). In Venezuela, the government stopped publishing the main macroeconomic indicators for four years to hide a hyperinflationary spiral that exceeded 1,000,000% in 2018 (Casey, 2018) reaching inflation rates similar to Germany in 1923 or Zimbabwe in 2000.

It is undeniable that distorting social and macroeconomic indicators causes irreparable damage to society because of the direct impact of indicators on public services. Without data it is impossible to properly target the coverage of services, the frequency of provision and ensure quality of service, for example. Thus, hindering the possibility of learning from practice, being accountable for performance and being able to research how to improve the services. The lack of data might provide insight and contribute to why countries such as Argentina and Venezuela rank among the most unequal countries in the world (worldbank, 2019). This inequality means in practice very few people have access to high-quality public service provision and most of the country experience insufficient access to basic public services. For example, in the author’s experience in their Argentinian home town, having stable electricity is the exception during the summer (where average temperatures reach 34°-40°C), and power outages and water supply cuts are normal. As there is no access to public data to report and then monitor this type of situation, holding people to account for these issues remains difficult and the situation continues.

As it was explained, public statistics with reliable information are the starting point to address any wicked issue (poverty and inequality being two important ones).  Restoring the system of statistical indicators is not a simple task but it certainly needs political will combined with technical capacity and organized civil society playing an active role in the supervision and control of the political system.

Milagros Gimenez and Gustavo Paniz are both Chevening Scholars and recent graduates of the INLOGOV MSc in Public Management.

The views in this blog are those of the authors and not those of INLOGOV or the University of Birmingham.

Nathalie Colasanti discusses her award winning journal article:

When my coauthors and I started researching democratic confederalism in Northern Syria, we found that it wasn’t a well-known topic in the Western academic community; today, I’m sure most will have heard about it following the recent military operation conducted by Turkey across the Syrian border.

We carried out our investigation with the objective of raising awareness on this innovative, inclusive model which is based on three key pillars: grassroots democracy, ecology and women’s liberation. The difference between democratic confederalism and previous experiments with grass-roots democracy is that its evolutionary pattern aims to include heterogeneous local communities living in the same territories, with the objective of becoming an administrative model for the whole Syrian country, without shattering its national constitution. In fact, the evolution of the political and administrative system and the introduction of the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria were specifically aimed at including all ethnicities and not focusing on the Kurdish population only. Democratic participation is ensured by the bottom-up organisation of the administrative model, which is based on communes (the most “local” level, usually the size of a village or a neighbourhood). These are autonomous in decision-making and self-organisation, and they coordinate through various levels of higher administrative and federal structures. The main idea of democratic confederalism is that the commune is the democratic centre, and higher institutions tend to serve as coordinating structures. The continuous educational work led by activists, aimed at commune residents, allows them to overcome the “democratic problem” according to which the people are not educated and conscious enough of their choices to positively participate in direct democratic processes. In fact, the structure of democratic confederalism allows them to eliminate the disconnection between participatory practices and formal decision-making forums as the two coincide and participation results in decision-making.

Another very interesting aspect is the role of women and the principle of dual leadership, according to which any leadership position has to be jointly held by a man and a woman. Moreover, a 50% presence of women is mandatory is any assembly or committee. In parallel with people’s assemblies and councils, there are women-only councils at all organisational levels, which are responsible for any issue regarding women. Thus, women’s self-determination is truly possible, and their participation is motivated by the acknowledgement of their previous marginalisation.

Democratic confederalism provides an innovative model that is based on participation to decision-making and the centrality of the local, grassroots level. Democracy is defined as an element that is organic to society, that shapes every aspect of organisational and administrative institutions and that is practised on a daily, continuous basis by all those who want to be involved. Everyone can participate to democratic processes and decision-making in their communities, and in fact the greater the participation, the more the common interest for effective and representative decisions is reached. The experience of Northern Syria overcomes limitations linked to the lack of inclusion in participatory experiences, as everyone is encouraged to take part in decision-making. At the same time, democratic confederalism presents itself as an alternative public management system, providing interesting insight for reflecting on the current crisis that democracy is facing at a global level.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge the invaluable support provided by UIKI Onlus (uikionlus.com), the Italian Office for Information on Kurdistan, in helping me to access first-hand data and interviews.

Nathalie Colasanti is a post-doc researcher at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata”. Her research interests include public management and governance, the commons, workers’ self-management and platform cooperativism. Her article, with co-authors, Grassroots democracy and local government in Northern Syria recently won the prize for best article of Vol 44 of Local Government Studies, by an early career researcher.

The views in this blog are those of the author and not those of INLOGOV or the University of Birmingham.

by Jon Bloomfield

In Britain and across Europe, the social alliances that sustained progressive politics for a century are disintegrating. The financial crisis of 2007–8 showed that Labour and its ‘third way’ European followers had got the economics of modern capitalism wrong. With the mainstream left compromised, it has been the nationalist right that has benefitted, re‐defining politics around issues of nation, culture and identity. What is surprising is the number of influential voices across the centre and left of politics who have accepted much of this far‐right analysis and adopted its language and terminology.

These trends, especially post‐Brexit, have crystallised in the UK around the label of ‘Blue Labour’. They have bought into this binary divide: the choice is either neoliberal hyper‐globalisation or a patriotic nationalism. The Brexit argument has served to crystallise and harden these divisions. The possibility of any different types of globalisation has been denied. Rather, there has been a variant of the Thatcherite mantra: there is no alternative to globalisation, the only option is to reject it.

As popular doubts about the UK’s headlong embrace of neoliberal globalisation grew, elements of left opinion such as Maurice Glasman shaped their critiques within this nationalist framework. Whatever its initial concerns, this new way of framing politics quickly gave primacy to cultural and national identity rather than the economic or social. The initial flurry of interest within Labour waned, as did its brief ‘Red Tory’ counterpart, Phillip Blond. However, the Brexit debate, with its focus on national sovereignty, has given the label new vigour and a purchase stretching well beyond Labour’s ranks. David Goodhart has been the leading protagonist. His 2017 book The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics ,develops this argument and provides the bedrock of Blue Labour thinking post‐Brexit.

For Goodhart, the world is basically divided between the ‘Anywheres’, ‘the upper professional class’ with their global world outlook and the ‘Somewheres’, with their preference for place, stability and nation. These are Britain’s ‘two value blocs’ and the book is a paean of praise for the preferences and prejudices of the latter. Paul Collier, a development economist, articulates similar views as does Matthew Goodwin and they find increasing space in the New Statesman.

My recent article in Political Quarterly examines the fallacies and flaws of the Blue Labour tendency in four key areas—class, economy, family and race.  To take one example on the family.  Blue Labour asserts that there is an essential, unchanging bedrock of common sense and small “c” conservative views on social and cultural issues at the core of the working class, which Anywheres do not understand and that this marks a key fault line between the ‘metropolitan elite’  and the working class living in industrial towns. It is a frequently repeated but false assertion. The reality is that vast swathes of the population have shifted their attitudes over the last half‐century and that the key determinant has been age.

I take two indicators from the last census: the numbers of people co‐habiting and the number of lone parent households and look at the figures for the big metropolitan cities and their smaller industrial neighbours. They are broadly comparable. In Birmingham, co‐habitation stands at 8 per cent of all households, a little below the figure for Wolverhampton, Sandwell, Walsall and Dudley. In Manchester, the co‐habitation rate of 10.9 per cent is below that for Wigan at 11.4 per cent, while in Leeds, at 10.6 per cent it is below that of Wakefield’s 11.5 per cent. The figures for lone parents tell a similar story. The Birmingham rate 14.6 per cent is slightly higher than its neighbours, notably Dudley at 10.6 per cent, but similar to Wolverhampton’s 14.0 per cent; while Manchester’s at 14.0 per cent is slightly above Oldham at 13.1 per cent and Wigan at 12.1 per cent. Leeds at 10.9 per cent is a touch below Wakefield at 11.0 per cent. What this data suggest is that the trends towards greater variety of family forms, people living together outside marriage, more divorce, separation and single parent households are broadly common across urban England. The Blue Labour story that there is a gulf between the hedonistic big cities and the socially conservative, working class industrial towns is a myth.

I challenge Blue Labour claims similarly on class, the economy and race, explain how Brexit has crystallised these arguments and led Blue Labour into the welcoming arms of the hard Right. I conclude by suggesting that alternative ways forward should seek to forge rather than disrupt alliances between the working class and new social movements.

Those interested in the full read can find it here.

Jon Bloomfield is an INLOGOV Associate. He is an expert on a range of European issues including cities, climate change and migration, who advises European agencies, carries out research in the EU and contributes to post-graduate programmes.

The views in this blog are those of the author and not those of INLOGOV or the University of Birmingham.