Where we stand in common
I love a questionnaire, and so yes, I rushed to The National Conversation.
Amongst the tick boxes there are four deceptively simple questions: what most unites the country, what most divides it, and the same of my own local community. While they are separate in their aske, I found myself responding along a line – that of place, and of a perhaps ambivalent position of ‘unite vs divide’ as identity positions.
What most unites the United Kingdom, I think, is not a symbol or a sentiment but a shared everyday public realm. The high street, the park, the bus, the library, the GP waiting room, the coastal path, the corner of the pub. These are the places where people unlike one another are co-present without having to agree on anything. I'd resist the more obvious answers, because they don't hold. The monarchy divides as much as it binds. Football fractures along club and nation. Even the NHS unites us partly through anxiety about its survival. Cohesion here is not consensus. It is proximity.
And what most divides us is the other side of exactly that coin. Not opinion, but geography: where you happen to live and what that place is allowed to become. If the shared public realm is what holds the country together, then its uneven distribution is what pulls it apart. The decent school, the reliable bus, the cared-for park exist abundantly in some places and have been hollowed out in others, and that gap maps with brutal precision onto earnings, health and trust in the idea that the country works for you at all. We are divided less by what we believe than by the unequal worth assigned to where we live.
I was asked to think of the same, but at the scale of my residential neighbourhood.
The same pattern holds closer to home. What unites my own small community is not that we all know one another - even in a place the size of a small village that can't be assumed - but that we share the keeping of a landscape bigger and older than any of us. And what divides it is money: the gulf between those for whom the place is a chosen idyll and those for whom it is simply where they live and work, increasingly on sufferance as prices and second homes quietly sort who gets to stay. A shared love of the land can paper over that. Custodianship can become the language of those with the security to indulge it, while the people who actually sustain a place through their labour are the most exposed to losing their stake in it.
The lesson I keep arriving at, at every scale, is this. Belonging is not equally available, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of division. I’ve known that before, The National Conversation was a timely reminder. And as to placemaking - the work of placemaking is not to manufacture consensus or invoke a cosy sense of community. It is to defend and equalise the shared places in which people who differ can still stand side by side.
Put most plainly: we are held together less by what we believe in common than by where we stand in common. Which means the quiet erosion of our shared places is not a loss of services. It is a loss of the one form of unity we reliably have.
#Placemaking #PlaceLeadership #CulturalStrategy #Community #PublicRealm #TheNationalConversation