Sustaining Learning

I congratulated Beam for their work at the recent launch of their 10 year retrospective exhibition ‘Illuminate’. It was also an occasion to mark our joint efforts to develop the Orangery Academy that will complement IntegreatPLUS’s long term collaboration with local authorities in the Regen Academy programme, supporting regeneration and place making teams to achieve Great Places.

 

I also spoke about how we should look at ways to sustain Yorkshire’s long term investment in place-based learning and skills development, in order to achieve the places we all wish to live in and to deliver sustainable growth.

This Coalition Government’s surge of policy and infrastructure shake out has resulted in a loss of capacity, skills, expertise and experience from the regeneration and built environment sectors, but more critically diminished Yorkshire’s collective memory.

 

If localism is to do anything, let alone be successful, a locally-based approach to regeneration and place-making needs to build capacity and to respond resiliently to the many diverse challenges our cities and neighbourhoods will face.

 

For a very perceptive analysis of the Localism Bill see Professor Gerald Frug’s LSE presentation entitled “Architecture of Governance”:

 

 

Perhaps in the future we will be able to tell if regeneration is working not by a place’s ability to rise in prosperous times, but by its capacity to sustain itself, survive, and refresh in hard times. How do we ensure in such a hostile context that we continue to build on previous progress and ensure learning is not lost?

 

The evidence of what has worked is mixed.

 

Looking back, the landmark moments in regeneration are:

But the approach to focused learning and the evaluations of lessons learnt has now abruptly run into the sand. The Regional Centres of Excellence advocated by the Urban Task Force have been removed with indecent haste, especially given the demands of the Localism agenda.

While the Labour government’s record was stuttering, and overly micro-managed, the Coalition’s approach seems to have bypassed the value of evidence based learning and evaluation altogether. 

 

There is scant acknowledgement within Coalition thinking on the complexity of regeneration and the importance of a holistic understanding of place; the continuing marginalisation of CABE and the rapid downsizing  of the Homes and Communities Agency, coupled with the breathtaking deficit reduction squeeze on public services , higher education and on local government, risks creating a generation of local practioners with greater responsibility but much less knowledge.

So there is a strong case for sustaining the support infrastructure that we have, but also to look for new models to understand, disseminate, and critique the learning of the past, and prefigure the next phase in the story of regeneration. 

 

In these challenging times we need to combine to, develop smarter collaboration, strengthen our partnerships, look for continuity, sharpen our advocacy, and argue for coherent legacy planning as our regional structures are dismantled.

 

This is the reason we transitioned the work of Integreat Yorkshire, Yorkshire Forward’s Centre for Regeneration, Renaissance and Place-Making Skills into IntegreatPLUS, with an expanded delivery capacity allowing us to be more than a learning and skills organisation, but to act as a delivery support mechanism for our partners in making Great Places. 

 

We continue our work operating with the Design Council - the CABE affiliated Yorkshire and Humber Design Review Service, which is set to support neighbourhood plans as they emerge and help planning authorities around climate change issues. 

 

The Regen Academy continues to develop with City of York Council launching its’ Academy at the end of May. 

 

IntegreatPLUS is pleased to work with Beam on the forthcoming Orangery Academy which will further assist in sharing knowledge and best practice in achieving quality place-based outcomes.

 

We will continue to work with partners in Sheffield on developing the City’s ‘Urban Think Tank’, a knowledge transfer project between the two universities, ourselves, the City Council and the private sector, with a focus on regeneration practice, research, and case studies with a view to fund and disseminate new and user-friendly material which is accessible to professionals and the public. 

 

So much work to continue…