"Are we in Danger of Losing our Communities?" Hear our Perspectives on LSE IQ's Podcast
- otheofeld
- Mar 17
- 14 min read
At the end of 2024 we were invited by LSE IQ and the lovely Jess Winterstein, to weigh in on the question of: "Are we in danger of losing our communities". Listen to us, Julia and Olivia, and two of the young women we worked with in our Lancaster West Young Ambassadors Project – Honey and Catalina– think through this question and what community means to us.
We come in at 10.09 and close off the discussion... but if you have time please listen to the whole podcast as it also includes the wonderful contributions of Professor Shani Orgad, Dr Divya Srivastava all in discussion with Jess Winterstein:
Below we've also included the transcript starting at 10:09 from our contribution to the podcast:
Catalina: [0.46-0.54] I've lived on this estate since 2014, however, I grew up around here visiting my grandparents and my family since I was a little girl. ...This community of W11 has always been a more quiet and relaxed, but also tight knit in the sense that we like to champion each other's culture ... [2.09-2.20]after the incident at Grenfell, the tragedy, the whole community came together, which was very powerful and you see that we've still tried to keep close...
Communities provide vital support, but these delicate ecosystems can be disrupted, especially when neighborhoods undergo redevelopment. With so many competing needs, every project risks designing people out of communal spaces. I visited an estate currently undergoing redevelopment to speak to two young women who have been working as researchers on a project aiming to ensure their estate’s needs are met. Located next to Grenfell Tower – the site of a devastating fire in 2017 - their community is still deeply impacted by the tragedy which claimed the lives of 72 people. Both were brimming with ideas on ways to improve their environment. But first, Catalina and then Honey explain why their home is so special.
Catalina...This area is rich in abundance with amazing artists, musicians. Everyone's creative here. And even though it seems like in the 21st century, it's a different hustle culture, trying to stifle out creativity, you can see if you walk around Ladbroke Grove, the mosaics that are giving a.Like with the green hearts and everything about Grenfell, even on this street here, there's a green band, which,with Grenfell everything's related if you see something green. It shows you that the community really came together in a time of struggle. I mean, our neighbour right there, she has a green scarf on her curtain and a green heart. It's a really big thing here...
...Also, there's certain areas that we have,like in Latimer Road, there's a shop ...[3.46-4.12]which has been around since the late seventies. So it's really nice to see that we are holding onto people who've been around our community, who live here, and we like to support them. But then you might see a random Gales pop up in Ladbroke Grove or a PAUL's Bakery, which you can see it's like a little earmark of gentrification coming in and our people being pushed away....
Honey: ...Yeah, I think same thing. In terms of community, it goes back. There's a rich history here from Windrush and things like that, and coming together for Grenfell, that community didn't come out of nowhere. We had been here. We had been supporting each other.
Jess:... ... we're outside. It's a lovely peaceful estate, .... How have you found the process of it being redeveloped?
Catalina;It's a bit disrupted, just in terms of simple walking, when we exit through the back way of this estate, ... just a simple to go to the gym, instead of just walking the normal way across the bridge, we have to cross onto the road, onto the other side. It can be a bit dangerous at night time because you have to keep your eyes out in the dark. So it does kind of disrupt.
Honey: yeah, I'd agree with that as well. I think the construction, it's definitely changed the way you move around the estate. I think certain shortcuts and kind of routes that we grew up taking are not the same anymore. We've kind of had to change the way that we use the estate. ... But, and then in terms of gentrification as well. I think we do live in a unique part of London. You can turn a corner and you go to Rich houses in Holland Park or Portobello-type place. And it does almost feel like sometimes we neglect these parts. It is a great area to live in, but we're not always portrayed in that way.
Jess: ... In terms of redeveloping ... -for some reason Rev won’t let me identify exactly where this bit starts but it’s somewhere in this timeframe]how could your day-to-day experiences be improved?
Catalina from the lens of as a woman, definitely increased visibility... in regards to lighting, ...Because if we walk around in the nighttime, a lot of these lamps around us, they don't work, which is a shame because you want everyone to feel like it's accessible for people of all abilities and genders and ages. And I would say maybe having people around the neighbourhood where people look after each other, helping to foster a safer environment.
Honey: so I agree. To be honest, I think it does come back to the basics like lighting and I just think sometimes they have the right ideas, but they're not always finished and it's like they do a halfway job. So I think just finishing what you started and doing it to just the bare minimum, I think, would make a huge difference....
... there were certain activities in this project, and I think one of them was where do you go on the estate? And I realised that I actually don't stay on the estate or in the area. It's more working my way through to get out. And I felt why is that? I wouldn't mind staying close. No one really wants to trek outwards to go and chill somewhere. So I think it is just having communal spaces, but we don't really have them. And it as basic as just having a seat in which is just nice to be in, feel safe, feel comfortable, but we don't really have that in the area. [14.04-14.06]And yeah, it's just a bit like "Why?"
...... I think as well, I never met Catalina or Kayla before the project, but we all have similar ideas and pretty much the same foundation. ...]so it's not like I'm having these ideas but no one else wants them. It's a communal thing. We all want the same thing.
It's easy to take something as simple as a seat for granted – until of course it’s gone. As Catalina and Honey point out, improvements don’t need to be dramatic or expensive. A simple, well thought-through walking route, or the use of art, can make a huge difference.
Catalina: We have just behind us, in Hurstway walk, there's a green space, but it's nice and peaceful as we saw, but it's not really encouraged that people use it a lot. It's quite abandoned unfortunately. So we thought maybe having walking loops in the green space, even around the area, simple things like tracking, "Oh, you've walked this many amount of meters," to encourage healthy habits and also maybe you don't want to walk really far out alone in the dark. You feel a bit unsafe, especially with what's going on in the news. You would want to get your walk around, but also feel closer to the area, safer in a safe distance from home and outside.
Honey: ... I think art is kind of like a universal language and there are so many different cultures here.... Even if you're not artistic, even if ...You don't necessarily understand English or you can't read. ...I think bringing art into the community, it just gives it a different kind of life and a different kind of colour and I think that is a way of bringing it back to life and bringing people out.
As these ideas highlight, there are many ways to foster community cohesion. But what works for Honey and Catalina’s estate may not meet the needs of another. Understanding what a particular space needs, requires connecting with its residents – including those challenging to reach. Dr Julia King and Olivia Theocharides-Feldman, who worked together at LSE before founding the consultancy Social Place, understand this challenge. Their participatory research methods – which include bringing community members like Catalina and Honey onto projects as paid researchers - aim to give a voice to groups that are often marginalised in urban development processes. Here’s Julia, then Olivia.
Julia; ...consultation is, I would say pretty standard practice, but what kind of consultation that is is I think where we come in because a lot of forms of consultation tends to be unfortunately quite tokenistic. A lot of it is tick box exercises where the communities in which a project is happening are often said, "Would you rather A or B?" And there isn't any kind of actual decision-making or shaping the place that happens .... We really value the sort of tacit everyday experiences of people. And often that involves unlearning your own assumptions around a space or relearning things that you might think of as sort of banal, that someone might not even be interested in that, sort of how you walk from a bus stop to home. And so our process allows these sort of everyday life stories to come in....
Olivia: ..There are always going to be certain compromises that have to be made, but when those compromises are made, people are left out of that conversation and then feel like things are just being done to their areas, things are happening at them rather than with them. And so I think one of the things that we try to do in our work is kind of have that continuity run through it. So we involve young people in conversations with architects as we're working through a project, we try to involve them with whoever the stakeholder or the client is so that there is that back and forth and so that there is an understanding of what conversations are happening, whether that's budgeting or planning constraints or whatever it is....
..]basically all the young women that we worked with, a lot of the time they were leaving their area and going home, they had to traverse through an area that they thought was quite sketchy or dodgy and they kind of had these techniques to get home. So like, "Oh actually I would get the bus if it was dark and I would get off at that stop because that stop is less sketchy than the next stop," or whatever it is. And that even though they had to incorporate that into their routine, it was still more valuable to them to leave their local area to hang out than to stay in their local area. So I think one of the things that really struck me is how can the place where you live also be the place where you socialize and the place where you hang out? And if you have a friend from the estate, where do you both go? You're living five minutes from one another. It would be amazing to have something five minutes from the both of you where you could just go and spend time...
Julia: ... which is actually a really good point that ties into how consultation typically happens, is that, and sometimes you might consult with a certain demographic and group who say, "Get rid of all the benches, we hate them." And you kind of take that as the sort of gospel as a client team and then you say, "Right, we're going to get rid of all the benches." But you haven't spoken to a demographic who actually really value them and really like them. So I think also we know that young people are not engaged with broadly in planning and design and decision-making. It's a huge gap in how decision-making happens. And so getting this demographic involved is I think eye-opening and just brings a whole new set of experiences to which we should be designing for.
Jess: ...how would you suggest balancing the needs of the community at large in terms of keeping [please cut out ‘them’ here] ...safe ... and the need to ensure that all kind of age ranges within a community can get what they need out of the community...
Julia: So the safest place that anyone can be in is a place with other people around. It's just sort of obvious. So if you have a piece of public space that's being used, that's being loved, that different types of demographics will use it, after-school kids, dog walkers, people hanging around, that fundamentally is the best way to get a place safe. It's better than CCTV, it's better than anything else you can do. It is fundamentally the best way that you can achieve safety. And so when you design out people, you're, in my opinion, designing in an unsafe environment. Across all of our work, maintenance is understood as a proxy for safety. So when you take away the hand of stewardship, people read it as, "Okay, this is now unsafe for me.
Olivia: also, I guess, when those opinions come out of let's remove the bench, there's antisocial behavior, to me that kind of goes back to those consultation processes that are very short where you tell people, "Okay, what's the issue?" And someone says the bench, but what has the bench actually done in terms of crime? So I think it also speaks to a process of thinking about what is it about the bench that is causing you to feel that that needs to be removed in order to address crime? So is it that there are only groups of men that hang out at that bench and you as a young woman feel intimidated? Okay, that's a valid concern that you feel intimidated, but how can we address intimidation without removing the bench? Because removing the bench doesn't necessarily mean that you've removed this one group. Maybe it's okay, well can the dog park be expanded to be closer to the bench so that you get the dog walkers in the morning and at night and then you get kind of a mix of people coming through? Or is the bench near the playground a little bit more inviting? Jess: ...one of the things that has come up quite a lot recently is the issue of loneliness ... with the internet and social media ..]it can be easy to ...forget about the importance of the physical landscape that we're all living in. ...
Julia: we do a lot of work with a charity called Make Space for Girls who've been making a lot of noise around public provision for teens, which is an insane amount of money and resources goes to building a very small set of typologies, largely, this is awful, they're called MUGAs or cages, sort of caged football and basketball pitches. And these just aren't really great public spaces. And I think the design world has moved forward so much in terms of exactly what you were talking about, like healthy public spaces and getting people out and about. And we have amazing companies that produce amazing social seating and furniture, but when it comes to teens, we just give them this caged football pitch. And I often think, what are we telling our young people when that's the thing that we provide them with? And so a lot of our work is actually just trying to think more expansively about what a teen provision is and should be. ...
Olivia: [21.23-22.03]I also think in terms of long-term use there is that desire to work with young people right now because it takes just going to a park and looking at who's using those facilities to realize that there are some groups that are just not using those facilities, that just in terms of will your space be used, it is in everyone's best interest to be working with who those potential users might be because I think sometimes we try to guess what people want and we just get that wrong. And like Julia was saying for teenage girls, we have consistently gotten that wrong.
Julia: I also think that there is sort of this idea that, oh, well, girls don't like to play football, which we now know is totally incorrect. ...what we've found is that actually they do want to use these spaces, but maybe what needs to happen is you need to change the markings on the ground. It's actually sometimes really subtle things that can really change how the public will use the public spaces.
Marking pitches so a range of sports or games can be played, or re-thinking the size and position of benches to facilitate conversation are just two ways to open up green spaces to different groups. The lockdowns of the pandemic highlighted how crucial access to the outdoors is to our wellbeing, Now, Julia argues, is the time for planners to think innovatively.
Julia:... if you take any kind of major, the Spanish flu, tuberculosis, these kind of major health events, global health events, they have triggered massive innovations. The entire modernist movement was a reaction to tuberculosis and thinking we need to house people in ways that air can flow through them. And I keep on thinking with COVID, I'm like, this has never happened. We know the value of public space oh so well when we were trapped in our homes and couldn't leave, but yet where's this renaissance in our public lives? On the contrary, our public lives are being completely eroded, completely underfunded. We've lost 50% of public toilets in the last decade alone.
So I think there is this sort of umbrella desire and we really want to shout about how important our public spaces are, how this is what stitches us together, this is what binds us as a society. And if you under-invest in those spaces, you're under-investing in people and places. And I think we're seeing the many consequences of what it is when you don't invest in public life. ...
Even when investment is made, however, it’s all too easy to repeat what’s been done before. By bringing residents from marginalised groups into the redevelopment process, Julia and Olivia aim to encourage a more inclusive approach to public space design. This, however, is just one part of the equation, particularly at a time when even standing still comes at a cost. With both funding pressures and the cost of living still high, are we in danger of losing our communities? Here's Shani, then Divya
Shani .. think we are in huge danger of stripping our communities of their vital kind of virtue. And this fundamentally has to do with money ... the reality is ... we had people work in local charities and also people who themselves used to volunteer, for instance, in food banks, but can no longer do that. So for local communities to stay alive, some of the money needs to be kept within the local community and to come back to the local community.... People, however huge their heart is, with no state funding, the whole system crumbles and collapses...
Divya: ...Locating the focus groups in the community centers, I think to us brought ...useful nuances and understanding of local Londoners' lives and where they live. ...around them, the local councils are struggling, the charities are struggling... community centers ..are really central to these people's lives.... [32.45-32.53] the expectation hearing the focus group participants is that they expect these community centers to be around after we met them. So I think there is ...an opportunity here to ...leverage what these community centers offer, the local populations and how they could ...better address their needs.
And finally, Julia, reminding us of Catalina and Honey’s experiences, and Olivia.
Julia: -you heard the young women talking about the tragedy of Grenfell, that ... -they really felt a community response ... but that could only happen because they already were a community. And so I think sometimes we don't see community when it's there. But having said that, I do think communities are fractured in certain environments. ...When you spend 50% of your salary on a terrible rental accommodation, ...that makes it really hard to feel like I'm a valued member of this place. I think you feel extracted upon and stood upon. And so yeah, I think communities everywhere, if you look, but under so many pressures that it makes it really hard for that to materialize.
Olivia: Yeah, I would completely agree with that. I think it would be also unfair and quite wrong to say that we're at danger of losing our communities because I think that that strips people of any agency to have the connections and be embedded in the worlds that they're embedded in. But equally, ...there are these great pressures on people that do put some of those connections at risk, and that can have quite serious consequences on communities. ... [26.28-27.05]one of the things that's really important for the both of us is that while we think that design does impact communities and does impact how community can be built, we're not saying that design is going to create communities. Architects tried to do that. The modernists tried to do that. It did not work. You cannot just create a society, create a community. But if you don't have those physical things like parks, like public toilets, like a place to hang out in a public space that is free, that is open, then yeah, it is going to be more of a struggle to create or to maintain a community.
