There are many potential uses for former shops including office space, residential, community facilities and so on. It doesn’t have to be solely about retail space. We need to get all stakeholders including landlords and local authorities thinking about this and creating new opportunities for re-imagining the high street.
The time for silly caricatures must pass. The public sector is not in the main bureaucratic, whilst the private sector are not ‘greedy’. The idea that business was fettered by public policy was silly. All businesses and the wider economy need public sector inputs.
We have to accept the result and move on but we now need to move into a phase where we explain what local government achieves and what we would lose should power be placed in the wrong hands.
Retweet For Towns Day will see the UK come together for a day of collaboration to openly discuss what was once and still can be the heart of our communities.
At a time when mainstream bank lending is ever harder to come by and exploitative lenders are burgeoning, CDFIs can, with the right kind of sustained and strategic support, play a pivotal role in supporting less-well-off communities and the economic recovery of the nation.
It’s clear that engendering a sense of interdependency is essential. Rather than neighbouring towns seeing themselves as rivals, it would be far more productive to understand how they fit into that broader local economy.
Unemployment on the increase, poverty growing, local economies in melt down. I am tired of hearing the descriptions, and disappointed by the lack of real policy action. In particular, I am disappointed by ongoing orthodoxies in economic development, which are hampering new thinking as regards addressing unemployment. With Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) in particular, there is too much of a focus on austerity, trickle down and supply-side economics, when they should be thinking about trickle up and stimulating local demand.
Rather than simply focus on driving up productivity and encouraging everyone to work longer hours now is the time to examine the case for a shorter and more flexible working week in the UK, where paid work is redistributed as part of a wider drive towards tackling inequalities.
The book questions the need for permanent uses and solutions for sites and argues that we need to increasingly look for short and medium term uses, rather than obsess about the long term.
To really fix the problem, start thinking about the conditions necessary for that problem not to exist. Think ‘create health’.
