You can't do economic regeneration with vegetables, the head of a think tank told me last night. He'd just delivered a lecture about the lessons learned from the economies of cities in the USA, Mexico, Poland, India, Vietnam and Japan, so he should know.
I'd spent the afternoon accompanying a bunch of regeneration practitioners around the raised beds and herb gardens of the back end of Calderdale. It's true that the courgettes and fennel of Incredible Edible Todmorden have limited potential. Here today, gone tomorrow, you might say. You can't sort out poverty with plum trees or raise children with chard.
Or maybe you can. The think tank chief executive and the community activists in Todmorden have more in common than they might imagine. One talks in terms of economic resilience and governance and city-regions; the others about grabbing land, growing stuff, creating markets for local produce and 'being cheeky' - asking for what the authorities aren't usually inclined to hand over.
While politicians and academics have written tomes about placeshaping and cities have spent millions on marketing, a bunch of volunteers with minimal resources have created an image and identity for a former Pennine mill town that has captured the imagination of everyone from the Yorkshire Post to the Washington Post - not to mention several hundred local people who now grow their own produce. In marketing terms, that's worth millions.
The Incredible Edible people have made regeneration doable. No consultants, no bidding documents, no funds. Just enthusiasm and an attitude that says 'why not?' rather than 'we can't'. And growing veg gets to grips with hugely significant issues: food and energy security and climate change as well as local community development. It's the secret Muhammad Yunus discovered in India with Grameen Bank: start with very local needs and you can create a movement of people, a market and an economy.
My think tank friend was right to say that's not everything - far from it. It doesn't obviate the need for plans and strategies and investment and civic leadership. But it does capture something he described as 'the pulse of place': what makes a place different and lively and gets people off their butts and doing stuff.
Much has been written about Incredible Edible Todmorden and some of it has been fluffy and dewy-eyed, so it's right to ask hard questions.
The Incredible Edible success, I think, has its roots in that grasp of the pulse of place - what Jane Jacobs described as the choreography of the street, the multiple interactions that can happen as people's shared and individual purposes overlap.
So it's worth quoting Incredible Edible's 'cornerstones' for getting things done:
1 Creating opportunities: Finding land, using buildings, micro finance and other tools and resources.
2 Investment: The route to training in land skills and to local ways of distributing and buying food.
3 Enabling actions by public bodies: Removal of obstacles to local action - e.g. by taking away legal boundaries, soil testing, covering public liability.
4 IET Principles: Active engagement of people, around a sense of place and belonging. Shared objectives that are understandable to everyone.
5 A strong belief in ourselves: Intuitively sensing that what we do is urgently needed. Not constrained by rhetoric or fancy words, not dependent on the permission of others. There is no one solution but a jigsaw of many parts.
6 Reward for labour: The creation of jobs. Families harvesting and keeping and sharing the fruits of their labour.
7 Openness: You tell us. We are an open group.
Compare that with a government description of community development in an official report, The Community Development Challenge, issued in 2006. It said any definition should combine the following six aspects:
• helping people find common cause on issues that affect them
• helping people work together on issues under their control
• building the strength and independence of community organisations
• building equity, inclusiveness, participation and cohesion among people and their organisations
• empowering people and their organisations to influence and help transform public policies and services
• advising and informing public authorities on community needs and views, and assisting them to work in genuine partnership with them
There's a lot of common ground here. The main difference is that the government's definitions relate to public agencies 'developing' communities, while Incredible Edible's principles are self-defined (see my previous post for more on that).
Officials are often afraid that community activists will do mad, crazy things that the poor bureaucrats will have to clear up. But present communities with an issue and they'll often devise a solution that's remarkably similar to the one the authorities might come up with, with the important exception that it may be more likely to work. To get that pulse of place racing, maybe we need local authorities that behave a bit more like Todmorden's activists.
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