Predicting and creating the future are two sides of the same coin. We need to, if not predict, then to imagine and describe the future we want to create. Better jobs, a cleaner city, more local people in employment – these describe the what, but not the how.

The ‘how’ of urban regeneration is changing. Property-led growth in urban land values, fuelled by international capital flows, is reaching its limit. London is thought to still have room for further growth, but the inequality strain will snap at some point soon, and other UK cities have already peaked.

A market correction / crisis is widely expected, but investor sentiment always believes it will ride the wave and happily bail just before the peak falls. Saying there is froth in the market actually encourages them in, believing they will outwit other naive people.

So, beyond relying on double-digit rising land values into the future, what is the strategy now?

To some extent, the strategy to date has been post-rationalised. In Manchester it was music – Factory Records – and lofts in and around the gay village – Urban Splash – and visual culture – Granada TV – that made the city centre “vibrant” again, a word that is now estate agents code for public drunkenness. The money saw the Manchester urban wave growing, but it didn’t create it.

The recipe for urban renewal has some general ingredients – youth, risk, questioning, a constantly-new mix of cultures, room to fail and start again anyway, and shoestring ways of taking a punt. Manchester adds a powerful tolerance for diversity and difference, usually, though recent trends are a worry. Angela Merkel is the political leader best showing tolerance between communities currently.

The Victorians pretty much invented the modern city government, even as they ignored heritage. The Romans only cared for roads and water courses, and these days we are becoming more Roman than Victorian.

Public libraries, swimming baths, clean water, parks, housing standards, school boards and inspectors, tramways, and the like. Who is now re-inventing local government for our age? The fundamentals of health, of education, of working environments, of housing, of culture, need a visionary creative group of people to think – how shall we all do this now? Devolution is a good start, but it is about working the old model a bit better, fewer internal contradictions, etc.

We need to devolve the old, but more importantly we need to evolve our new. Original. Modern.

This month, January 2016, includes a new legal right, that every single-deck buses in use in the UK must have a ramp and a space for a wheelchair user. This legal right helps elderly people and adults with buggies as well. The same change will happen for double-deck buses next year, and coaches will follow.

This new legal right comes from a law passed by the EU in 2001 with a phasing-in timetable. First, all new buses had to be accessible. And now it is becoming all buses, new and old.

This campaign took over six years to change EU law, and some would say it took 20 years if you measure from the International Year of Disabled People in 1981. There is a free case study on the EU campaign for accessible buses, below.

Disclosure: I was involved in this EU campaign.

Further details:

http://www.transportforall.org.uk/news/from-january-all-single-decker-buses-must-be-accessible-to-wheelchair-users

https://tonybaldwinson.wordpress.com/2013/09/09/book-buses-for-all-europe-a-case-study-in-changing-eu-law/

A human rights social enterprise in Bradford has developed a new algorithm which can analyse satellite pictures from war zones and show the world where those missiles have been launched from.

See their site – https://rudiment.info/projects/arcade

Up to now, hostile forces could camouflage their missile launch sites from satellites and so deny any responsibility for civilian casualties. But they cannot disguise the damage the missiles do when they hit their targets. By analysis of the craters left behind, and some clever CSI-type calculations, the new ARCADE program will point the finger at the guilty parties. No longer can a government or insurgents get away with denying responsibility for missile attacks against people inside or outside a country.

I worked in Bradford in 2015 on an EU-funded project at the university re:centre to help small enterprises. I was very pleased that we could support this Rudiment social enterprise in its development. A truly worthwhile enterprise.

Well, my over-riding memory of being at UMIST was just how very international it was. Unlike most other universities in England which were very mono-cultural, at least in our eyes.

UMIST was where I went to university in the late 1970s in Manchester. Many years later it merged with the University of Manchester which is nearby. Or was taken over, depending on your point of view. Now the ‘old UMIST’ campus is to be sold off as prime city centre land, earmarked for tower blocks of student housing. The word is consolidation.

Not so many years ago I tried to get a library ticket at the university after the merger. I was an alumni I told them. Ah yes, they said, but only UMIST alumni, so no free ticket. To be fair, that rule has changed.

And now the university is running a small project to try and preserve the memories and meanings of UMIST, asking on LinkedIn for nostalgic postings on what UMIST meant to its former students and staff. Well, some thoughts…

Of course, these days every university is chasing the overseas market and their fees. And even back in the day, post-graduate students in many places were from more diverse backgrounds than the undergraduates. But UMIST stood out as being highly international at all levels.

My extra-curricula interests ranged from the Socialist Society to Community Action, becoming the elected Welfare Officer with a sabbatical year after my graduation. The debates in the Students Union were wide-ranging, well informed, and keenly felt. The Iraq-Iran war directly affected people’s families and home towns. The ethnic Chinese students with families in Singapore knew what colonialism meant.

More recently I worked for the University of Salford, and curiously its high level of diversity amongst undergraduates was a pleasing reminder of the culture of UMIST.

I guess my point is, that notwithstanding all the marketing requirements that universities now have to never admit any weakness, it would be intellectually and personally satisfying to see some measure of recognition of the strength that was UMIST’s international culture.

You might think that newer buildings would be better for disabled people than older buildings. Better access. Easier movement inside. More ramps and fewer steps, and so on. So why, increasingly, does it not feel like that when you actually visit a new building?

The devil is in the detail
The details of building design are controlled by the Building Regulations, through a process called Building Control. This process is different to Planning Permission, which looks at the outside design and how it looks to passers-by, the impact of parking on neighbours, and so on. The Building Regulations control what goes on inside. For example, making sure that the electricity sockets are safely away from any water taps, or that the bannisters are close enough together so that a toddler cannot fall downstairs through a gap.

Computer says OK
A few years ago the Government at the time gave into pressure from businesses for less red tape, less regulation, less burden on business as they claimed. Up to then, Building Control was something that the local council did, usually on the same corridor as Planning Permission. Well, said business, let us do our own Building Control. Don’t worry, they said, we will hire independent professionals, so we are not marking our own homework. And the Government let it happen.

Two bad changes then followed, one cultural and one technical. The cultural change is that the independent professionals challenge less often than a council official would, because they need the work, the next contract. It is a world of hire and fire. And the technical change is, to save money, that building designers use computer programs more often. So the computer counts up the turning circles and the accessible toilets, checks the ramp gradients and gives the design a green light. Even if it makes no sense to humans.

The result too often is, for disabled people, new buildings that are increasingly chaotic and hostile.

The emphasis on a rolling news agenda, on 24/7 coverage, is producing some silly journalism such as the above headline this week broadcast on a respected news website.

Ah, but we are told, journalism is different now. It’s not like the old days of newspaper deadlines only once or twice a day. Well, up to a point. Remember, in the old days there was a Stop Press column for breaking news. But the journalism back then would say, “Major Earthquake in x. Many feared dead.”

And this is the point. In the early stages we need information and intelligence, not silly numbers. You can almost imagine the scene, the frantic phone call from duty editors in London to the nearest office of a news organisation – “Look out the window! How many are dead? A bus has just crashed outside? Great! Six dead, must be! Get me pictures! Shaking buildings, falling bridges! (hangs up)”.

I’d like to think we can do better than this next time. In the early stages after such a disaster we need intelligence. You would want to hear from a competent seismologist – what kind of area is it? Usually remote, but where are the populations? Then, what is the local health infrastructure like? What might be the likely physical aftermath in that region – flooding, landslips, aftershocks, crop losses, what are the night-time temperatures outdoors for the next month?

Later that day, maybe something on the local politics. What level of resources do the authorities have, and what competences do they have in deploying those resources effectively? Are humanitarian organisations in the area, and frankly what are their competences too?

Journalism, please, not instant daft numbers.

We read a lot about the dangers of social media. That people now get their news “in a bubble” from like-minded people. That opposing views and objectivity are lost. What does this mean for journalism?

Well, firstly let’s not kid ourselves – newspapers can be just as much a bubble machine as social media. Would a teenager read the Daily Express? Would a socialist read the Daily Telegraph? The newspaper with possibly the broadest demographic appeal (but not sales) is arguably the Financial Times, being read by billionaires and trade union shop stewards everywhere.

But, the argument continues, journalism has certain standards. Truthfulness, honesty, integrity, accuracy. Speaking truth to power. The cub reporter on the local newspaper faithfully reporting from the Magistrates Court. And in some newspapers it was possible to ignore their leader articles and commentary and focus on the hard news, reported well. Of course, phone hacking has left its mark, even though the public perception is that it was mostly the fault of tabloids.

Blagging has always been a necessary tool for the investigative journalist, getting past a switchboard or a reception desk to gather information or confront a wrong-doer. It is interesting that many such investigations now post video alongside the story. News editors know that we sometimes will only believe what we see, no longer what we are told, and that in an age of skimming and multiple screens we gaze at pictures more than we readparagraphs.

Hence the argument for quality news and public broadcasting, like the BBC. It is meant to be our village water well, where everyone meets to talk, listen, learn, argue. Where there is no bubble, no sub-group, no hidden agenda.

But the BBC and its ilk are competition for newspapers, who also face competition from “free” social media. Essentially this is about how advertising has gone online, leaving newspapers behind. Advertising was always a substantial source of income for newspapers, from the houses-for-sale in the local paper to the fancy cars in the nationals. But Google and Facebook and Twitter are where the advertising money is now being spend, so that you see “sponsored” and “promoted” selling items inserted between the real stuff by real people.

In a market economy, one of the roles of taxes (and laws) is to promote social goods which the self-interested market, left to itself, would fail to produce. Stopping pollution is one example. Educating the workforce is another.

So, just a thought, but why not tax online advertising (beyond VAT) to fund the social good it threatens to destroy, namely a non-bubble, no-ads unpartisan sources of quality news? There could even be subsidies (tax allowances) for local newspapers with a decent amount of news coverage.

I guess the answer is that the struggling newspapers, trying to move online themselves and grab people’s time away from Facebook, would kick off against it. But somehow we have to find a way to tax the internet’s revenues, as well as trying to fairly tax the offshore internet companies themselves.

In many organisations, the idea of an archive has little or no traction with their leaders. This impacts in the short term on the reduced level of resources made available to archives, and in the long term on the lost legacy and diminished collective memory of organisations.

The idea of an archive has developed over they years. It’s origins can be found in the practices of libraries and museums, and an archive is still sometimes a storage room within one of these institutions. Similarly, the early archival processes tended to follow classification systems used by librarians and by museum curators. More recently, the structures and processes around archiving have matured, developing their own international standards which learn from some of the previous assumptions, mistakes and short-cuts.

Perhaps the key concept to the modern archive is that of provenance. Previously, the contents of an archive were often rearranged to make them ‘tidy’, to provide a semblance of order and structure. Everything to do with old cars got put in box A, and so on. Unwittingly a massive amount of connected or tacit knowledge was lost by doing this, sometimes irretrievably. Today the archive is carefully kept ‘as found’, and we find the individual items of interest by indexes or catalogues or search engines; the so-called finding aids, as well as by old-fashioned browsing. Some changes to found materials are essential, such as removing any unstable chemicals and infestations, but the essential shape and order of the materials is left unaltered. If there is a structure, then it is imposed on the finding aid, the metadata, and not on the material itself.

A good introduction to the work involved in making and keeping an archive is given in the book, Managing Archives by Caroline Williams (Chandos, 2006). She explains in detail how not every object is suitable for an archive, probably to the disappointment of hoarders everywhere. Uncle Fred’s old tin cans are just that, not a wider comment on a lost social history. But then some items are worth keeping. Not just on paper, there is also useful knowledge in photographs, video tapes, audio cassettes, vinyl records, as well as on old parchments and ancient clay tablets. Parts of an archive can also remain designated closed to public access for a number of years. One example is for 100 years to protect the privacy of people still alive; another typical example is for 20 years to protect commercial, government and political secrets.

Professional archivists often get offered far more collections of materials than they are able to accept. The judgements on which collections to acquire for an archive are sometimes very practical around space and preservation requirements, but there is also the question of will anyone learn anything from this in the future? If Uncle Fred kept every different label design of tomato soup cans for fifty years, then yes maybe. If he just kept every label regardless, or whatever, for fifty years, then no.

It is this thought – will anyone learn anything from this collection in the future – which I suggest is difficult for many leaders today. The focus for success is too often centred on getting your message across, managing expectations, quarterly performance targets, good publicity, reducing costs, and similar requirements. And sometimes like football club managers, the lifecycle of a leader is all too short and who can blame them for making their hay while the sun shines. There will be plenty of time to look back on the legacy later. Except, no-one else really knows the details of that legacy because all that remains are a few leaflets, press cuttings and slides.

Being a leader who values and nurtures the organisation’s archive is a brave and a generous decision. Brave because who knows what people might learn in the future? While others were busy shredding their files, you have put them ‘out there’, and for sure at least a few people will use the archive to criticise the organisation and all who were involved in it.

And generous because it costs leaders some time and effort to create and sustain a lasting archive, to persuade others to go along with it, when there is no short term return. It is one thing to try and create a shallow legacy of statues and boardroom wall photographs, it is far better to allow a rich legacy which is to be explored and written by others many years on.

The NHS is not what it used to be.

In the early days, an ambulance driver was asked to report for work with a jacket and tie. They were given a hat to wear and the keys to the ambulance. It was the days of scoop and run. If they looked like lasting at the job it was suggested they should take a course in first aid. In their own time, if they were interested.

Now, paramedics arrive at the scene with more skills and equipment than were found in the early Casualty departments.

We know that the growing number of elderly people is a pressure on the NHS. As is the growing number of people with chronic (long term) conditions. We are getting better at keeping ourselves alive for much longer.

We also know that the bulk of our health care is given by GPs and community nurses. They provide 90% of our contact time with the NHS but using only 10% of the budget. Many hospitals are underused and expensive to run. Planned day surgery is now very efficient, but many older hospitals continue to exist with huge estates, heating bills, and wards which are little different to nursing homes – but free.

But any politician worth their salt knows that they must be very careful if they say that hospital X needs to change, and to never say it needs to close. Even government ministers will defend every hospital in their constituency, even against their own collective policy. Why would you give up any part of the hospital, especially if any savings go back to the Department of Health, never to be seen again.

So, devolving budgets on NHS spending to local areas in England is the latest attempt to square this circle. The promise is, if you go through the political pain of changing hospitals, you will be allowed to keep the money saved to spend on other parts of the NHS, especially in community health and social care.

In Greater Manchester we can already see this emerging, for example with the proposal to change Wythenshawe Hospital to only do planned surgery and no more emergency care, which is concentrated at Manchester Royal Infirmary. If you believe that emergency care starts with the paramedics, and that travelling a few extra miles for expert care doesn’t matter because your care has already started, and that the money saved from an underused hospital will stay in the local NHS, then maybe you will support this decision, or at least not vote against the politician on the TV next time.

But if your children were born at that hospital, if your grandparents died there, if your sister survived her appendicitis there, then you might feel differently, even if you agree with the logic of spending more money on people and less on old boilers and heating systems.

If politics is the art of the possible, then devolved NHS budgets is an experiment in whether it is possibly to reconfigure health care with the support of local communities.

And a big factor will be the Department of Health itself. If devolution is just about “managed decline” in the provinces while the department happily gives new money to other places, usually the so-called elite hospitals in London, then the political setback will be for generations to come.

The big question in devolution, it seems, is not so much whether you trust the local politicians, but rather do you trust the national ministers and departments to not be devious?

And looking at the Northern Powerhouse idea and Network Rail’s “pausing” for maybe five years of major improvements across the north of England, the omens appear to be getting worse rather than better.

You could say that there is not exactly an abundant supply of good faith from government to local areas at the moment, and this risks undermining the idea of devolution if it just another way of making cuts. Transparent budgets and decision making at the national level is the missing key.