Urban design for lout-litter

Amid scenes reminiscent of Tron Legacy, Barking and Dagenham Council have painted yellow lines on the pavement, which guide where pedestrians should walk in the street.  A council spokesperson explained why: “The lines were painted to provide a marked walkthrough for pedestrians outside the shops.” 

OK, so perhaps I should have used a milder word than ‘explained’.

These BBC news vox pops provide footage of some suitably disbelieving residents (or ‘shoppers’ as they’re described by the reporter).  “Why did they not put money into the hospitals… or schools?”  A boy of about 10 demurely notes, “They could have saved their money, to spend it on something more – constructive.”  (Also – listen to the outstanding three-second snippet at 1:25 of the video.  I dearly hope someone out there will sample this.  If you do Cassette Boy sound-bite mash-ups, please take heed.)

But the interesting thing about the council’s apparent non-explanation is that it makes a certain sort of sense when accompanied by a statement on the rest of the work they’re doing in the same road:  “A number of measures have been brought in to tidy up the shopping parade near the Harrow pub. The pavement has been power washed and the railings painted by the Community Payback Team.”

(Side-note – interesting to see that the slave labour, ritual humiliation, and brutish vengeance implicit in the deployment of the ‘Community payback team’ is not so much criticised, but used to justify this project, and is presented as prudent financial management in austere times.)

So, as the Londonist notes, the programme to ‘tidy up’ the area, also “Appears to also include tidying up the people using it”.

An extensive body of town planning literature describes how to design streets so as to ‘script’ the actions of those using them -  to subtly suggest behaviours to the public that are deemed to be desirable by the authorities.  (See especially ‘Secured by Design’.)

But it must be rare for a local authority to issue a public statement that explicitly equates pedestrians with litter. 

Debord spoke of the way that the modern city is organised to bureaucratise and alienate its inhabitants, whilst streamlining their movements and interactions to better facilitate the circulation of consumption.  But even in his sinister conception, this shaping of territory was seen as necessary to prevent a potentially dangerous working class from mobilising, and challenging the status quo.

These days, we aren’t even given the credit of being oppressed to deter an uprising – or even viewed as human at all.  We’re literally seen as street litter, and are swept up accordingly, making room for more efficient navigation and consumption of the city, in just the same way that one might try to carve out a trench to facilitate the orderly departure of a swarm of mice. 

Police adopt 'no frills' crime-fighting tactics after budget cuts

Sinister street furniture

My grandparents have always loved that old joke:  “When is a door not a door?”  (“I don’t know  - when is a door not a door...?”)  “When it’s ajar!”

So, when is a public bench not a public bench?  When it’s secretly a reinforced anti-terrorist bulkhead, designed to withstand the onslaught of a 7.5 tonne articulated lorry ploughing into it at 30 mph, being exhibited at the 'Counter Terror Expo 2011'. 

Marshalls (‘Creating better landscapes’), the creator of this dubious piece of kit, also charmingly boast that their ‘Giome’ planter “Provides an elegant solution for introducing planting to the public realm, coupled with exceptional levels of security”. 

At a time when street furniture is continuously being removed in a bid to purge undesirables from town centres, (notwithstanding the odd exception), we are once more reminded of our irrelevance in our own neighbourhoods.  The only remaining justification to install civic amenities is now unrelated to public benefit, which has become merely a serendipitous bonus.  The primary function of these objects is instead to prepare for Mad Max street-battles, waged between Transformers trucks and hapless Godzilla pagodas.

This visceral vision of future security-risks, re-imagining our cities as battle-fields, is not a response to experience of any previous terrorist modus operandi, but is conceived in the realm of Hollywood blockbusters. 

It is an escalation of a trend that follows New Labour’s ‘Secured by Design’ policy, whereby since 1998, plans for new building developments must receive approval from specialist police units, which encourage the inclusion of ‘security’ features – fences, CCTV, roller grilles, barbed wire, machine gun nests, that sort of thing.   

It also chimes with the Olympic plan to militarise London policing, using unmanned drones developed for use as spy-planes in Afghanistan, to patrol the skies in 2012 – and probably beyond. 

Marshalls’ grand vision of not just putting up benches, but ‘Creating better landscapes’ and the wholesale reconfiguration of public space, also fits perfectly with the mindset of the megalomaniac authors of urban regeneration, who feel the hand of history weighing heavy on their shoulders as their Olympic legacy is forged.

It’s not a big deal that people make benches that are hard.  But the logic behind their conception is indicative of serious underlying problems in the way that planners perceive cities, and the way that they intend to shape the places we live in the future.

Keep digging

There are no ‘frontline’ services - only services

Another day, another cuts announcement.  And still, those responsible repeat their tired mantra:  “Don’t worry – ‘frontline’ services won’t be affected!” 

Last week alone, we were told by the Police Minister that there are '“Immense opportunities” to make savings in the police force without hitting the frontline'.  Amid the Arts Council funding announcements last Wednesday, the Hulture Secretary said the government had “Limited cuts to frontline arts organisations”.   

(If anyone can tell me what a back-line arts organisation is, I'd love to hear from you.  I imagine a secret chamber of painters, working away by candle light, occasionally throwing darting glances towards their bolted, oak-studded door, lest an intruder catch sight of their secret labours;  suspiciously covering their work with crooked elbows, like at a primary school spelling test.)

So, what’s a ‘frontline’ service?  And how does it differ from any other service?

First, let’s ask why we have public services.  Is it to provide sufficient office-space to house a national surplus of swivel-chairs?  Is it to create more jobs, like some bizarre Magnus Mills creation?

Or is it to fulfil a specific requirement that society has deemed to be necessary? 

                                                                                     

If the answer is the latter, and public service institutions indeed exist to provide public services, why do they employ staff?  Presumably to do the work which is required to provide that service. 

The reason that the government has to say “ ’Frontline’ services will be unaffected”, is that this bit of wordplay distances the sentence from its ugly cousin, which is simply: “ ’Services’ will be unaffected”.  Which is palpably false – since if you sack anyone, it follows that the service they previously provided will now cease to exist, whether they be telephony services, toilet-cleaning services, or teaching services. 

Most public service organisations are, by nature, huge and complex.  That means that in order to get the whole job of the organisation done, they need to employ a lot of people, doing a variety of different jobs.  The justice system wouldn’t work if it only employed judges.  The NHS wouldn’t work if it only employed nurses. 

So, what are these extraneous services being provided by public service bodies that are not ‘frontline’ services?  Is the NHS due to sack 150 croupiers from its hospital casinos, deemed unnecessary in these times of austerity?  Are the 2’600 military jobs lost today the result of a personnel audit that uncovered a hitherto unknown network of lion-tamers, drawing full-time wages but contributing little to the war-effort?

Or, to put it another way – have you, or anyone you have ever known or met, ever worked anywhere (in the public, private, or any other sector), where you and your colleagues have all gathered round and said,  “You know what?  I don’t know why we employ those extra thousand people downstairs in C division.  If they went tomorrow, we’d never notice the difference.”?

The fact that redundancies are being justified using sneaky word games instead of reasoned discussion should tell us something.  The false dichotomy between ‘frontline’ services, and other – unnamed – services, implied to be so much dead skin, is a rotten trick.  And the joke is on those of us who have need of the services that are being so cavalierly thrown to the wolves. 

Response to David Willetts on feminism

David Willetts claimed yesterday that feminism has put men out of work, essentially making the age-old argument that ‘they’re taking our jobs’. 

When I first heard about the story, although not funny enough to be an April Fool, I did wonder if it had originated in the Daily Mash - because the story relies on precisely the reverse logic that characterises their satire.  

With that in mind, let’s see what we get if we make Willietts’s argument backwards:  “Ongoing social and economic gender inequality are manifestations of centuries of patriarchy, the majority of the ill-effects of which are borne by women.  Despite many years of feminist struggle, this imbalance has yet to be redressed.”  Which, far from being Daily Mash material, seems like a bit of a platitude.

Now, let’s invert the wording of Willetts’ argument and see what we get.  “Men should be helped to get more jobs, at the expense of women, who should be encouraged to stay at home as dependents.”  Which doesn’t sound quite as reasonable as his caveat that “It is delicate territory, because it is not a bad thing that women had these opportunities”.

And even this magnanimous caveat isn’t particularly reasonable, indicating as it does that that Willetts doesn’t see women as part of society, but as an external group trying to encroach on it.  

It is significant that Willetts is the Universities Minister, and his views speak volumes about the ideology behind the government’s education cuts.  They’re not about the economy, but about keeping people in their place.  He specifically associates current male unemployment with feminism’s success in broadening women’s access to education in the 1960s.  

It is clear that the Conservative agenda is to use the cuts, particularly those to education, as a tool to roll back the advances in the rights of women and other marginalised groups, which have been made over the last four decades. 

Meanwhile, Christina “I live at the grungy end of the King’s Road in Chelsea” Odone, while actually disagreeing  with Willetts, uses media coverage of his comments as a somewhat flimsy hook on which to hang a totally unrelated attack on feminism, opting for another old favourite - “feminists hate men”.  It is the tenuousness of the link that belies the motive for her attack. 

For all the rhetoric of being ‘In this together’, conservatives across the land continue to expose the real aims of their policies – and they’re unrelated to any exceptional circumstances implied by the language of financial ‘crisis’.  The goal is to protect the status quo – the same as it’s always been.