Car Parks and Common Land (… or how a simple increase in car parking charges ends up in the realm of political philosophy)
In the last week I’ve come across two things which have made me change the focus of my interest in local government and communities.
Both of them are about car parking – more specifically the preservation or affordability thereof – which tends to put you on the moral back foot these days. When we drive we all turn into these other people who are destroying the planet and arejust too feckless or anti-social to use public transport.
But actually I’m looking at this from the point of view of people who depend on their car in order to maintain an independent life – doing their own shopping by parking within trolley range of a supermarket. In the end, my line of thought arrived at a set of questions about common land, local government ownership of assets, and a claustrophobic future in which the only place we have an absolute right to be is in our own house and garden. The change of focus? From the transparency and accountability of local authorities (and more generally government – in the way that open data and “e-government” enthusiasts tend to obsess) to the transparency and accountability of private companies who have come to have rights over what may well have previously been “common land”.
The more recent incident was the discovery that the Sainsburys surface car park next to Dartford’s Priory Centre had hiked its prices from 50p to £1.50 with no obvious notice, consultation or explanation. The image of a elderly lady repeatedly inserting a 50p coin and saying “it must be broken”, summed this up for me.
By turns I initiated, followed, or connected twitter conversations about the change – which followed this trajectory… “Sainsburys… why did they do that? Why WOULD they do that? It’s counter-productive, they haven’t introduced a ‘refund for bona fide customers’ scheme (which would have suggested the ‘problem’ was people parking there to go elsewhere), so maybe
it was some dumb HQ decision universally applied, or a piece of ill-considered outsourcing”. Then “Sainsburys don’t own/operate the car park. It must be the Borough Council, which would make sense given the history of the site. Perhaps they’re trying to squeeze revenue out of all their assets to cope with the cuts – and screwing up local people’s use of the town in the meantime”. Then, finally, “It’s neither – the site is owned, or at least run, by APCOA… and Sainsbuys are as unhappy about the rise as anybody else.”
Once you get into that latter territory, there are two really striking things. Firstly – it takes a lot of googling to figure out [not ‘who runs the car park’ but] who actually owns and controls the land, as opposed to leasing, having a parking franchise etc, etc – so this is the transparency point. Secondly – it makes you realise that these sorts of relationships appear to result in amorphous private entities having carte blanche to set prices… and ultimately that means control or restrict access to large expanses of land in our town centres. So this is the accountability point. [I found the website of one company – having googled “ownership of dartford priory centre” and when I clicked on ‘About Us’ to see what sort of company they were, discovered that their business was “Creating value for clients”… that’s cleared that up then.]
That brings me nicely to the earlier incident – which had already sensitised me to these issues. I read in a local free paper that a small local car park, adjacent to a block of shops, takeaways, cafe and the Co-Op, is about to be sold off. It’s only a small car park, maybe 20 cars if people park in a considerate way, but it’s where many people make a short stop, on the way home for example, to buy a paper, fish and chips, or a midweek shop. The site is “owned” by Kent County Council and ‘operated’ as a free car park by Dartford Borough Council. Sale of the site will raise up to £200,000 for KCC and, we are told, it could be operated privately as a Pay and Display car park or [subject to all necessary permissions being granted] used for a residential development.
What particularly annoyed me was that this article, probably triggered by some PR from the firm of auctioneers, was the first I knew about it and the the fact that the Borough Council has said it “won’t be using the land” after Christmas Eve.
So, before the opaque Sainsburys example came up, I was already dwelling on these points:
- It’s not the Borough Council that ‘uses’ that car park – it’s us!
- There’s something wrong with the historical process via which it’s now normal to see the County Council as just another organisation that owns and disposes of assets when, again, they are assets for the local community – including the businesses around that car park – and the Council just owns them on our behalf.
- The fact that selling the land puts it into a domain where there is no future community say in how it is used… including what charges are levied for parking,and what sanctions such as clamping and towing can reasonably be applied.
Car parks are public spaces – they aren’t glamorous or sentimentality persuasive – in the way that parks, playgrounds or natural habitats are. But if you can get past any uneasiness about “drivers” and traffic, they are at least as immediately important to the everyday lives of many people as those other spaces are.
Two things need to change.
Widespread consultation and notice should be as commonplace for these mundane changes as they are for more high profile projects. This should carry with it a re-assertion of the principle that local authorities are not enterprises which can simply sell assets on this one way journey out of public control.
Even more importantly, and we should keep sight of this when, as I say, we are obsessing about public sector transparency and accountability, it should be really really easy for someone like me to find out who actually owns a car park, to see the basis on which someone else leases or operates it and, in particular, to see whether and when it passed from public or community ownership into private control. One reason for this is that, at the time of disposal, the wheels are often oiled by applying conditions and covenants to the future use of the land, or some residual local authority or community say in this. It is these provisions which I suspect are oftenswept under the carpet… and which would be harder to treat this way if that information was easily accessed by ordinary people, with busy lives and little time for detective work.
My concern is that more and more common land becomes seen as ‘council land’ and that this in turn becomes ‘private land’… with our rights of access and use eroded in the process.
What starts out as a gripe about parking charges, probably fuelled by a sense of unfairness, ends up for me as an issue about the fundamentals of community ownership and accountability. Looking back – and I’m sorry I haven’t had time to write a more concise version of this post – it strikes me that I’m making a fairly well-aired point… but that I got there via a route that’s likely to resonate more with people than some of the grand political theory does.
For Dartford the long running saga of the big St James’/Tesco redevelopment of Lowfield Street also takes those issues and writes them even larger.
Movember Mo
Well – I started growing my Mo on a pristine top lip on 1st Movember.
Thus far only seen by my family, friends and colleagues [plus lot’s of innocent passers-by of course, who can’t claim damages for trauma because they don’t know who I am] it’s now time for me to go MO2.0 [or is that 2.Mo?] and get out there on the social web. Please visit my personal page and make a donation at http://mobro.co/grimbold
In the words of the Mo-ganisers, far more eloquent than me, here’s why you should, and what to do:
It’s Movember, the month formerly known as November, now dedicated to growing moustaches and raising awareness and funds for men’s health; specifically prostate and testicular cancer. I’m donating my top lip to the cause for 30 days in an effort to help change the face of men’s health. My Mo will spark conversations, and no doubt generate some laughs; all in the name of raising vital awareness and funds for cancers affecting men.
Why am I so passionate about men’s health?
* 1 in 9 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime
* This year 37,000 new cases of the disease will be diagnosed
* 1 in 2 men will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime
* 26% of men are less likely to go the doctor compared to women
I’m asking you to support my Movember campaign by making a donation by either:
*Donating online at: http://mobro.co/grimbold
*If you want to go old school you can write a cheque payable to ‘Movember’, reference my name and Registration Number 1067820 and send it to: Movember Europe, PO Box 68600, London, EC1P 1EF
If you’d like to find out more about the type of work you’d be helping to fund by supporting Movember, take a look at the Programmes We Fund section on the Movember website: http://uk.movember.com/about
Thank you in advance for supporting my efforts to change the face of men’s health.
I follow a lot of local news sources on Twitter. These often link through to stories and, inevitably, some of them are about accidental deaths – not least on the roads.
Online news stories often have the facility for readers to comment. So I may continue scrolling down and reading – partly as a ‘local’ and partly as a social media professional. Online comments, by the way, are a good example of why the facile identification of ‘social media’ only with Facebook, Twitter + 2-3 other platforms is just plain wrong.
What I have noticed is that in the great majority of cases (really!) the conversation takes the following course – with what I am starting to regard as saddening inevitability.
- It’s fresh news story. So a commenter will speculate about the nature of the collision, or claim to know something from an eye-witness etc.
- This often takes the form of blame assignment – the dead driver/pedestrian is at fault, the other party is at fault, the layout is at fault
- This may involve taking sides, stereotyping, and thus blaming an entire category of people – ‘lorry drivers’, ‘bikers’ etc.
- Other people get involved, possibly close to the dead person, and make angry or grief-stricken rebuttals.
- Argument and recrimination builds and the level of emotion escalates.
- Other people try to make peace, make more generic observations, sympathise to offset the accusation… and so on.
- All too often the core of this includes an assertion that it was, in some way, the dead person’s own fault… and the defending response comes from someone very close to that dead person – a parent, a sibling, or a close friend.
- All of this happens within hours of the incident, and before there are full details or an official analysis of what has happened… the whole thing resting on a foundation of speculation.
Whatever turn out to be the rights and wrongs in a particular case, this is the last thing that somebody needs when they have just (literally just) lost someone close to them. They are dealing with shock, grief, anger, lack of a full story… Of course they are likely to look at the article, to find out more, to seek some solace, to see what other people are being told. And now there’s a high risk that they will find a raging debate around the circumstances of their loved one’s death.
THEY DON’T NEED THIS!
Like those who get sucked into the argument itself – I find myself looking around for someone to blame for the fact that this spectacle is happening at all. It’s tempting to single out the individual(s) who made the baseless, or tasteless, comment in the first place. But we know these people are around. Offline – when someone we know suffers a bereavement we observe all sorts of norms – including what people used to call ‘a decent period of mourning’. This mutual respect has evolved over many generations. It is appropriate. We don’t go round their house, that day, and start a debate about road safety, or ask them if they think it was the victim’s own fault. But it’s a characteristic of social media that problems arise when the central characters are strangers, short-term ‘celebrities’ almost, and as a result some people lose the inhibitions that many (I hope) would still have in a face to face situation with ordinary people.
So I turn my thoughts to the online publishers who are providing the space in which the comments are happening. They’ve been doing this long enough to observe, just as I have, how some people will behave. Until more people have learned to apply offline standards of behaviour to social media, why don’t the media managers simply turn off the comments facility beneath stories which are reporting a very recent accidental death? This could be done for a set period of time – to spare the families this extra trauma at the worst possible moment – or until some trigger event – such as a public statement by the authorities about the circumstances of the accident. There may, at some point, be a legitimate case for a platform supporting public debate about the road layout, planning decisions etc that were relevant. But that’s not served by kicking this off within hours, and when there are only sketchy details. Nor can the media argue that the offsetting benefit of allowing some readers to post tributes, is worth the risk of instant mob inquests.
That’s the challenge to online editors of publications, large and small. Please suppress comments on items reporting recent accidental death? At least for a decent period of time? Why wouldn’t you?
UPDATE: I just revisited the most recent example which, yesterday, prompted me to write this post. It’s gratifying to see that the comments have now been suppressed. So for some editors my question is now ‘… immediately, as a matter of automatic policy. Not once you see what is written, and the harm that has already been done?’
Walking in my Street
Although I’m not going to collect lots of data, I did feel the need to at least know how many house there are in my street, how the numbering goes, where the Warren Rd address actually gives way to another at the border, and so on. I also want to be able to keep a simple tally of which households I have spoken to, and which have someone who is interested in a level of involvement.
So I found myself out in the street, with a notepad in my hand, walking slowly and making notes. It felt quite odd, and slightly uncomfortable.
I’ve walked up or down my street thousands of times – going for a walk (usually with someone else), going to the shop, visiting a friend – but I was always passing by and I always had a purpose. I’ve never lingered.
Similarly I’ve ‘done’ other people’s streets – such as when I was a census enumerator back in 1981, and perhaps first caught this slow-burning fascination with the way a hundred people with so many different stories and hobbies and jobs can live within a few yards of each other and never be mutually aware. If it’s someone else’s street and you have a reason – that’s fine too. People walk around my street, with or without badges or leaflets or notepads and data loggers. They are ‘official’ and they are strangers… so it’s OK.
For me, the discomfort came from being neither a stranger nor just an inhabitant. I was a hybrid, somewhere between not belonging enough and belonging too much to be walking so slowly past my neighbours’ houses, looking at them and writing things down. All of this was internal of course; it was a quiet time of day and the few people who were out there took no notice of me. They were doing what I normally do – “passing”. I think my most awkward moment would have been to meet a neighbour that I already knew ‘just a bit’, enough for them to wonder, but maybe not ask, what I was up to. Would I explain? Would I prematurely launch into my pitch? It never arose.
There’s a ‘close’ half way up the road – it carries the Warren Road name, whereas the continuation of the road, bending around the top to avoid the A2, has a different name, was built later. I have looked into that close as I walked past the end many many times – but I have never walked into it. I found myself doing so – in order to log the house numbers – and discovered the unusual layout, some very large front gardens at the end, and the mysterious land where the odd numbers stop and the even numbers start, but without tallying up properly. It felt odd to walk into a cul-de-sac with the purpose only of walking back out again. I would have been even more self-conscious if I hadn’t had the notebook, however small, to flourish. “Look – it’s OK – I’m not just standing and looking – in a place where I couldn’t be just passing through”. The close has a different character to the hill – I know that character now – it’s immediately become part of how I experience my street, differently, when I look out of the window and up the hill. I know it’s there, and what it’s like, and I didn’t know the latter for the last 18 years. In a very tiny way, the street will never be the same again.
I now know that there are 114 properties in Warren Road, semis and detached, bungalows and houses, and a couple of short rows. I know how the numbers work. I have noticed for the first time that the detached properties at the bottom of the road have names but not numbers, because number 1 starts further up, in one of the older-looking rows. I know that there is no number 84, but there is a gap and a fence, in the close, which hints at the missing address, like a missing tooth, and maybe a little mystery. I have walked in my street in a certain new way, attended to it differently, and in a small but perfectly noticeable way it will never be the same street again.
And that’s just the hardware! The houses, fences, signs and corners. What’s it going to be like when I start meeting more of the people, and they start meeting more of each other, and maybe doing some quite small things together? Will it change for them too? Or is this just me doing street-mindfulness?
I just saw the ‘Dartford Age Concern’ minibus disappear around the corner… after a brief thought about re-branding versus tradition – the whole ‘Age UK’ thing, I flipped back to that word ‘Concern’.
I wonder if by creating organisations we have, at least in years gone by, emphasised the notion of a problem. There are old folks to be concerned about, addicts to rehabilitate, criminals to reform and generally people to be worried about. I wonder if this can even be traced back to often shared roots in a Christian notion of ‘salvation’, or restoration to a normal state.
At the same time this tendency would populate those problem categories with stereotypical people – I come back to ‘old folks’, in the language of my youth, or to ‘disabled people’. I’ve got a tickly feeling that each of those groups has been put in an annex, however benevolent in intention, and thus distinguished from ‘ordinary life’ and ‘ordinary people’. There are all sorts of echoes of this in some articulations of The Big Society, and many challenges that result.
If I had to say where I thought this came from it would be a paternalistic, top down, hierarchical society… from an original paternalism which still persists within the culture of ‘help’, because it created the infrastructure, even though many of the responses themselves are now more democratised and grass-roots. Personally, and with the luxury of not having to mobilise a response myself, I don’t think there are groups that need help – I think that there are just people who need more or less help, or even just contact and a good listener, for combinations of reasons, and at some times in their lives more than others. I wonder if we are capable of expressing our desire to help others in ways that don’t create sectors, groups and corresponding organisations and brands… or if this could even work, what the new infrastructure would be… if any? Again – this is where transformative thinking about The Big Society has to start, and not presume anything about pre-existing institutions, channels or even habits. [Maybe especially habits!]
Catching my thought about this persisting hierarchical culture, I also wondered if this was why there were many people out there who define themselves as being ‘other’ to this; outsiders, non-participants and wielders of ‘alternative’. My initial worry was that, in doing so, they just create another group and a convenient stereotype for other people to put them in, another annex… for dreadlocks and skinny dogs, or for balaclavas and bricks. Surely that old hierarchical thing is dying – from a wound it copped some time during WWI? If so, giving it a form in order to oppose it just helps it live a little longer… The System, The Establishment,… Capitalism?
Hang on!
That last one worries me. Has an oligarchy just discarded some of the old institutions and trappings, and taken up more blatant residence in financial institutions, and holding companies, private equity firms etc. Am I naive to think that there’s a natural decentralisation doing its slow good work… because of things like literacy and, now, new communications and networks? I’ve always found ‘cock-up’ much more plausible than ‘conspiracy’ if only because of entropy. If I’m mostly right in that, then maybe the less scary conclusion is that the anti-Capitalists are just succumbing to human nature – a tendency to see intention and dark forces behind otherwise random or emergent activity… a kind of hard-wired paranoia. [Though, on reflection, not unlike the tendency which, when funneled towards Jewish people, lead to The Holocaust.]
Even if anti-Capitalists are right – and the old paternalism still holds sway through a massive conscious aggregation of commercial interests, it would be too big to tackle… by definition.
People often cope these days by not trying to tackle things that we know are overwhelmingly large. Hence the popularity of notions such as Ghandi’s “Be the change you want to see”. One such overwhelmingly large phenomenon is ‘nature’ itself. We accept it as an environment – and we deal with the bits that are most immediate to us. If it were truly human nature to be paranoid, to see intention where there is none, we would, instead, all go round thinking that there is a conspiracy behind ‘nature’ that works against. And we don’t do that do we?
Yes
We do.
A long time ago we gave that paranoia a name. ‘The Gods’.
Simple but profound example of a mash-up
Thoughts upon sitting in ye bath (part one in an occasional series of, possibly only, one*)
The world is in so many ways not what you think it is
Nor is your thinking what you think
The world is not the colour that you see it
Also it is exactly the colour that you see it – but that is another thing
You exist – as a consciousness – only because you perceive
Memory, thought, are the echoes of perception – and yet shape perception
So you re-ceive and per-member
There are things there to perceive
Only insofar as they have qualities
And it is you who give them those qualities, in your permembering
You exist by perceiving the qualities that you give to the things that you perceive… !
Get out of that.
Thou Art That.
Nick Buckley : Practically Mindful 