Reshaping the city

In an age when academics have scarcely any influence on government policy, Professor Richard Sennett stands out. Tony Blair quoted Sennett's book Respect at last month's launch of his crusade to crack down on antisocial behaviour. He even phoned up the London School of Economics professor afterwards to check out his reaction.

The American-born Sennett grew up on one of Chicago's toughest neighbourhoods, the Cabrini Green project. Nine years ago, the pipe-smoking academic left his native USA to take up a professorship at the LSE, where he is a director of the Cities Programme. Since then, in a series of books, the former New Labour urban adviser has described the downside of what he terms the New Capitalism.

Richard Sennett. Credit: Julian Anderson

Dermot Finch, by contrast, is the young gun on the regeneration block, comfortable with the world of flexible work that Sennett worries about. Born and raised in Blackburn, he worked at the Treasury for Kenneth Clarke and then Gordon Brown. After spending a few years as Brown's man in Washington DC, he set up the Centre for Cities at the Institute for Public Policy and Research think-tank last year. Today, the centre launches a new report on city leadership.

But until earlier this month, despite working a stone's throw from one another in London's Covent Garden, Finch and Sennett had never met. Regenerate brought them together to discuss the implications for cities of the ideas outlined in Sennett's eagerly awaited new book The Culture of the New Capitalism, which was published earlier this week by Yale University Press. During a wide-ranging debate, Sennett reveals his despair at the UK government's slavish adherence to US policies and his radical ideas on how we must reshape our cities to help people cope with the massive social changes that he has charted.

We started at Cabrini Green. The estate has recently been torn down under the US government's flagship Hope VI regeneration programme, the model for the government's new mixed communities initiative to transform England's worst sink estates.

Credit: Credit: Julian Anderson

Dermot Finch

RS Hope VI destroyed Cabrini Green, and the promises that people who had lived there would continue to live and work in the neighbourhood were not delivered. But the ambiguity about it is that since this housing or sink estate had problems of some severity, many people were glad to leave for very modest housing, but very far away from the centre of the city.

Mixed-income housing in the US has largely failed as a project, but it’s not causing people grief

Richard Sennett

Mixed-income housing in the US has largely failed as a project, but it's not a failure that is causing people grief. The problem, and it's familiar to London, is that land in the centre is simply too valuable, unless it is heroically protected. But it can work if you can sell your flat and still manage to get to work in the centre.

DF In some areas Hope VI was good and in other places not. It was picked up by Gordon Brown as a flagship regeneration project and I was asked many times about it when I worked in Washington. You had to explain it was a major federal demolition grant programme and that only by subsidising low-income tenants or homeowners could mixed communities work. Just demolishing does not achieve much. That's what Hope VI is - federally financed demolition and I don't think ministers liked what they saw.

Do you think that mixed communities is an unachievable ambition?

RS It can be achieved but not using American models. The challenge for us is to stop looking at the US to see how mixed communities can operate. We should look to ourselves. There's a whole mindset that the US leads, that it's the innovative country and that Britain tags along like a dog. This is nonsense. The possibility of government playing a more active role in mixing communities is much greater in the UK.

DF I'm going to try and redress that a bit by writing a book with Bruce Katz [of Washington DC's somewhat left-of-centre Brookings Institution]. From a government standpoint, I find it hilarious bordering on the insane the amount of policy that was derived from the US almost without question. When you go to the US, people like Bruce say don't come here, we've got it wrong, look at some place else. There are some things that have been done well in the States, but cities are not one of them.

But I don't think policy here has been total demolition and it's unfair to characterise it as such. There are severe cases where that's required where there's total abandonment. Housing market renewal is not just about demolition. Do you worry about sprawl?

RS The thing about British cities is that they are not dense in the way that Paris or New York are. We have a transport infrastructure. London's population density is less than half of that in New York City. It's a much bigger spread and yet it has a wonderful transport network compared with New York. It's got a green belt and New York does not. Nobody here would willingly commute in the way that the entire middle class of Chicago does. We have resources that American cities don't have. Americans never learned to live in cities, except for the elites. The only truly urban city is New York.

DF You are worried about the new economy and the dislocation of work patterns. Do you see cities as an antidote in that they have a concentration of leisure and cultural facilities?

Blair is at risk of saying that antisocial behaviour is a new problem that requires crisis action

Dermot Finch

RS They exacerbate the problem in that the new capitalism has provided a new, young upper-middle class with the money to displace traditional city dwellers from the centre. But I mostly see cities as an antidote. Making cultural and leisure resources close by work is a way of countervailing the thinness of the experience that people have in their jobs.

I've been talking to Rem Koolhaas about the BBC at White City and how you could have crèches and schools and make some community in a place that is a non-local employer in which everybody is on short-term contracts. It doesn't mean having a shopping centre there, it might mean having a clinic next to where people work. Rem has a shot to make something that looks more like a city and less like a mono-functional environment.

We got it wrong when we identified community with where people sleep. That's a big shift we need to make. We shouldn't have these community resources following the bedroom, they should be following the office. If you have got two people working 10 hours a day and the kids are 40 minutes away, wouldn't it be better to have a creche near the office, than far away? Would it not be better to build things where people spend their waking lives? Those people don't experience community in a traditional way, but around where they work.

DF What's interesting is the extinction of skills and the bias of youth over experience. It's true of the Treasury where the age profile has gone down. You have people moving from one job to the other and not being there long enough to become experts.

RS One thing that has struck me about Blair is that the ceaseless project of churning out reform means that very few of the old reforms bed in.

DF The constant churning out of policies devalues them which is where the "Respect" thing comes up against a problem because antisocial behaviour is not new. But you would imagine from the past few months that it was. I'm suspicious of any government policy that requires every Cabinet minister to be fielded at Charlton FC or a housing estate in Oldham. If the policy is good enough to stand up on its own, why do you need all that fanfare? Blair is almost at risk of saying that it's a new problem that requires crisis action instead of saying we know that this behaviour is of real concern to people living their daily lives and requires an everyday response.

RS My problem is how institutions can treat people with more respect; his problem is how people can be more respectful of institutions. We are looking down the problem at exactly the opposite ends of the telescope. Antisocial behaviour is a real problem on housing estates, but the number of antisocial people is very small. The bigger problem is how you treat ordinary workers with more respect. Some of it - the moral panic about antisocial behaviour - has to do with media. But as a new Brit, there is one element which is quite specific and that is large numbers of people get drunk to get rid of ordinary prohibitions.

DF But we've always been like that - look at Gin Lane. I learned to drink in Belfast; this has been going on for a long time.