Seeing like a place

Place-based work can be smarter and less bureaucratic, but can it rise to the political moment?

There’s growing momentum behind place-based approaches to governance and delivery, often talked about in the UK via the shorthand of ‘neighbourhoods’.

This is welcome but I’m not sure we’re always clear why place-based work is important. I also notice that people often suggest that place-based work entails a trade-off. It’s seen as good for tackling issues like democratic disengagement, or for reasons of fairness — helping ‘left behind’ places — but it’s implied to be less efficient, empirical, and muscular than top down and mechanical approaches to delivery and scale.

This week I attended a summit on place-based approaches to child poverty in Birmingham, organised by Place Matters, which helped to clarify why place-based work is important, and to correct this framing.

It helped me pin down two reasons we need a more distributed, ‘mass localist’ way of tackling big and complex societal challenges.

In short, place-based work is often (a) more intelligent and (b) more intentional than top down approaches. This means, for complex problems, it tends to make better use of resources and is more likely to gain traction, so in the medium-term it moves faster.

However, the conversation also left me with a question to chew on, as to whether place-based work can meet the gravity of the political moment. I’ll come to that at the end. But first, with apologies to James C Scott, some reflections on the value of ‘seeing like a place’.

Distributed intelligence

Whenever I’m in a room with people leading work in communities, as I was in Birmingham this week, I’m struck by a sense of seeing collective intelligence in action.

This week’s summit on place-based approaches to child poverty brought together many brilliant practitioners. It showed that if you approach a complex problem like poverty simultaneously, in thousands of localities, you will see the problem in higher resolution, and you will be able to respond in more dexterous ways. This makes better use of resources and gives the system as a whole more traction.

Place-based work acts as a form of distributed intelligence, feeling and moving its way through complex terrain like an octopus. This week’s summit was packed with examples — stories from people fighting poverty in communities, who were able to respond to the lived texture of poverty in ways a top down strategy couldn’t.

We heard about projects across Britain, Canada, and Australia that had:

• Seen in granular detail what was keeping people in poverty. For example, we heard examples from Mary Brennan and others working with Poverty Truth Commissions, of local programmes that had spotted a lack of ESOL provision, or a lack of healthy food, or a bus that never arrives (“we called it the ghost bus”) — and worked with a community to fix the problem. Working locally made it possible to engage in more preventative work on the drivers of poverty.

• Communicated in more human ways. Scott MacAfee of the Canadian National Advisory Council on Poverty told us about a project to narrow outcome gaps for kids at school called the Super Duper Fun Fun Fun club. It achieved much higher engagement rates than formal programmes, which were frankly more boring. It has just entered its 16th year and has helped 500 kids, achieving amazing outcomes.

• Been agile and opportunistic, spotting local assets to build on. We heard again from Mary how her local community had transformed the area around an old railway into a community garden (they even borrowed a digger from a local retrofit project to clear the land). Local kids got involved, learning practical skills, and this became a route into apprenticeships.

• Listened deeply to what matters to people, building trust. One project noticed the importance of holidays and days out for kids living in poverty. Many of the kids they worked with had never seen the sea (when they saw it for the first time, they were so excited they ran straight in with their clothes on). Naomi Eisenstadt talked about the way early SureStart centres listened deeply to their local communities. Parents told one local SureStart centre their priority wasn’t health visitors, it was cleaning up the needles in the local park. The team promptly did this. By listening and responding, these programmes built trust, which led to better long-term outcomes.

• Were culturally perceptive. Amanda Smith, Founder and CEO of Maternity Engagement Action, talked about kids living in poverty in British Afro-Caribbean families who were turned out impeccably (“Our children are shiny; hair done. We’re always under surveillance — we can’t afford to look poverty-stricken”). Knowing this, her charity could be wise about who to help, while respecting people’s pride.

• Knew the language that would resonate. We heard about people’s distaste for the demeaning word ‘poverty’ (“it sounds Dickensian”). Amanda talked about using the word hardship instead because it resonated from Reggae songs (“hardship just passing through”). They ran a ‘Sa-ti-deh Soup’ club, tapping into cultural memory to bring together local women who were experiencing hardship.

• Acheived a different quality of relationship by taking the time needed to build trust and meaningful relationships. (“In this space there is freedom and care”.) This again led to better long-term outcomes.

Each of these stories was a reminder that seeing poverty like a place, and not like a state, can enable more intelligent and responsive work, which achieves better outcomes and makes better use of resources.

Escaping old behaviours

So far I’ve talked about place-based working as more intelligent and responsive. But I also think it’s increasingly clear that seeing work through the lens of a place can serve a more radical function. It can give us a wholly fresh perpsective, freeing us from the bureaucratic ways of seeing that hinder progress on wicked problems.

When we talk about place-based working, it doesn’t just mean doing the same thing but in a local area, rather than nationally. Good place-based work achieves a more radical reset. People from a community and from local organisations, including government, taking a fresh look at a problem, working as equals. This means not just breaking out of national, top down bureaucracies, but also breaking away from the bureaucracies that characterise Local Government.

Why is this reset important? It’s important because a lot of the biggest problems we face today are complex and intrinsically human, and not amenable to bureaucratic solutions.

This goes deeper than needing less hierarchical approaches. It means we also need to free ourselves from the other ways bureaucracy shapes our view of the world. This includes the instinct to use control and compliance mechanisms, the tendency to work via time-limited projects and point solutions, the narrow evidence requirements, the emphasis on problem-solving as opposed to building on assets, the impersonal and transactional style, the emphasis on procedure over outcomes, and so on.

What’s increasingly clear is that bureaucratic ways of seeing were right for the major problems of the early 20th century, which were typically technocratic in nature — e.g. sanitising water and prescribing antibiotics — and so demanded predictable, routine procedures. But these same approaches are wrong for many of the biggest challenges we face today, from loneliness, to living well with chronic conditions, to supporting mental well-being and building communities of dignity and belonging.

In a sense, these contemporary challenges require an opposite way of seeing things. In a domain like care, for example, or mental well-being, personal relationships are everything, and a felt sense of agency, or of dignity, is central in a way it simply isn’t if the problem you’re trying to solve is piping clean drinking water into homes, or curing infections.

The trouble is, bureaucratic ways of seeing have a very, very strong hold on us (in part because we’ve forgotten we’re even wearing bureaucratic glasses). It’s therefore increasingly important to find ways to take off these glasses and put on different ones. And this is where place comes in.

By approaching an issue not through the organising logic of bureaucracy — ‘long-term worklessness’, or ‘mental health’ — but through the logic of a place — how do we make Toxteth a great place to live? — we can step out of bureaucracy into a more human logic of community and society.

A lot of the best examples we heard at this week’s child poverty summit spoke to this idea of creating fresh spaces for problem-solving.

One technique we heard about is coalition-building. In Australia, for example, a partnership has been formed between major foundations and the Australian government to support place-based work in 50 communities by 2030 to improve childhood outcomes. This unconventional coalition is acting as a new space, which people are entering on new terms — not just acting out their transactional roles as ‘bureaucrat’, ‘funder’, and ‘community’. It’s opening up more human, intentional behaviour.

Beyond this, there are now lots of organisations that specialise in precisely this science and craft of bringing people together in a place, to find a fresh approach to a complex problem, as humans. There are protocols, like the 100 Day Challenge, and there are conveners, like Civic Square and indeed Place Matters. This is an increasingly mature discipline, with a growing number of expert practitioners skilled at creating spaces like these, often with backgrounds in mediation and even conflict-resolution.

So the second value in seeing like a place is that it helps us take off the bureaucratic lenses that hinder progress on complex societal challenges.

The gravity of the moment

So far so positive. But the summit also left me mulling a question about the seriousness of the moment we’re in.

One thing we didn’t talk much in Birmingham was politics. Partly the summit was a non-partisan space and partly politics is just a bit depressing right now. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder: what would it take for place-based work to rise to the gravity of the political moment?

On some level, I’ve long felt that a revival of localism and civic life must be part of the progressive response to a ‘tear-it-down’ brand of populism.

I say this partly because local places, and even local institutions, are the one part of our struggling settlement that still commands faith and even affection. Surveys show that people are sceptical of abstract, far away institutions — ‘the government’ — but they think more positively about local institutions, from schools to hospitals, and also about the place they live in.

Beyond this, there is the simple fact that place-based work is more enjoyable than interacting with generic, formal institutions. It tends to be more relational and less transactional, and less procedural and therefore less boring. This is closely tied to the fact that place-based work more often happens in person, so we meet people as rounded humans. Place-based work reminds us what it feels like to be active citizens. As one person put it at the summit, when we come together in a local area and make the place better, it just feels so good.

So I do think place-based work can offer a progressive counter to a destructive populist agenda. It lets us diagnose the failure of our governing institutions, while acknowledging their ongoing importance for technical problems. And it gets us beyond simply being DOGE-lite, or saying AI will save us, to arguing that the big goal is to restore our depleted local and social capacities. It says we need a Marshall Plan to rehabilitate civic life.

Still, if that’s the right direction, I worry about the speed we can move at. If we’re honest, we’ve been talking for decades about this agenda, and in some senses things have gone backwards. People still talk fondly of old programmes, from Total Place pilots to the New Deal for Communities.

In this sense, the summit left me mulling how we could be bolder.

This speaks partly to the strength of our narrative. Can we tell a story about place and community that is plain enough and sharp enough to cut through our impressionistic information environment, and speak to the intensity of people’s anger?

But more importantly, can we do the work boldly enough? Can we change the way people experience politics, so that millions of people start feeling for themselves the messy joy of making their neighbourhood better together? And, in the process, can we remind ourselves of the truth of John Dewey’s dictum that the home of democracy is the neighbourly community?

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I’m a writer and strategic consultant helping organisations to adopt more human and contemporary ways of doing things. There’s more context at the bottom of this post on the energy at the edges. Feel free to drop me a line if you’d like to work together, or follow my writing on Blue Sky, Medium, or Substack.