Preparing for : Back to the Future -
Co-ops and Garden cities in Letchworth
This week Letchworth Garden City is hosting a conference on
community land trusts with the aim of putting social ownership of land and
public assets back on the political agenda.. It is bringing together leading
thinkers from the co-operative and garden city movements with architects and
social thinkers to provide progressive answers to sustainable development and
ownership. You could call it ‘big society’ thinking. To be truthful if you had
put a Labour badge on the ‘Big Society’ I would have voted for it, and I don’t
think I would have been alone. Of course the varnish on that offering has come
off as I don’t think the Tories meant the same as us especially when they
realised it was about empowerment and the real transfer of power to the people.
I think they had in mind more of a paternalistic model with charity at its
centre.
Though most of the big society thinking seems to have been
put to the back of the cupboard one idea seems to have survived -the idea of
community ownership of assets. Boris had a section in his manifesto about
community land trusts and the first London one was set in Mile End in July. To
be fair he seemed to get it but elsewhere the Tories have tried to implement a bastardised
form of it, basically withdrawing council funding from assets and asking the
communities to pay for things themselves. Not quite the same thing.
Community land trusts (CLT) like in London’s Mile End are a
good thing and derive from two great 20th century British land movements - the co-operative and garden city movements.
You may think of garden cities as being very conservative places with high
house prices that David Cameron praises. But when the Garden City movement was
founded it was anything but conservative. For instance while Lenin was in exile
in London he attended garden city meetings and even stayed for a while in
Letchworth the first garden city. It is record that ‘Ilyich
would listen attentively, and afterwards say joyfully: "They are just
bursting with socialism!”’. This is in part
because the first Garden City - Letchworth - had as its social foundation stone
the concept that the whole town would be community owned. Ie a community land
trust. The profits generated by the City as its own landlord would be used for
the benefit of the people who lived there they wouldn’t leave the city to
benefit some absent landlord. It was a
radical concept and was only adopted in Letchworth as more conservative
elements blocked its adoption on other garden cities. Yet the company that
founded Letchworth endures and still exists in a form today with a community
mandate. Though the town itself dropped for many years the suffix ‘garden city’
because of its radical connotations only to bring it back in 2003 to help with
house prices.
As with football the garden city movement and the idea of
community land ownership went abroad and is now played better in the rest of
the world. In the USA there is a burgeoning community land movement normally
combining the principles of co-op ownership in housing projects. Burlington in Vermont
is a good example but there are hundreds of others throughout the USA. The
attraction of them is that they have haven’t suffered as a result of the
sub-prime crisis - there have been few or no repossessions.
But perhaps garden cities and CLTs like football is coming
home. Prof. Yves Cabannes from the DPU Bartlett College of UCL and I have
written a pamphlet detailing what we believe are the 11 social principles
needed to build a 21st century garden city. In May this year we went to Hong
Kong, Beijing and Chengdu to discuss and present the principles. China where
they are still building new cities are very interested. We found similar
interest when we presented them at the UN Habitat World Urban Forum in Naples in
September.
This week
we have the conference in Letchworth entitled ‘Back to the future’. As noted It
is bringing together the key thinkers from the co-operative movement, garden
cities, housing and sustainability experts from throughout the country. It
doesn’t matter if you call it ‘big society’, ‘localism’ or whatever. It’s what
it does is that counts. My
hope is that this will the first of many steps of putting social ownership, not by the state but by the people is back on the
agenda. It is both radical and progressive and that’s why I support and fight
for it. If Labour is looking for a big idea, one that fits under the ‘one
nation’ heading and will see us retake the centre ground around the ‘big
society’ and is both progress and radical in nature but is at the same time
traditionally British. Well I think this is it.
(this meeting follows on from the meeting reported before at
:
