Community Focus - A political space

Tony Hawkhead believes that artists and planners share a responsibility to place the arts at the heart of sustainable communities.

Those who say there are not enough police on the streets clearly weren?t in Manchester at the start of February. For three days, it was virtually impossible to walk more than ten yards in the city centre without running into one. The reason for turning the centre of Manchester into a fortress was the arrival in town of the Sustainable Communities summit, a jamboree bringing together more than 2,000 delegates and visitors ? among them the Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Minister, Chancellor and Home Secretary, accompanied by a cavalcade of junior ministers and mandarins.

The summit was used as a platform for a wide range of government announcements and progress reports on meeting the need for housing, delivering regeneration and making the areas where we live, work and play cleaner, safer and greener. It was also used at least in part to attempt to answer the vexed questions of ?What exactly is a sustainable community?? and ?What does one look like??

One response I overheard was that a sustainable community must be one that requires three forms of identification in order to get in and comes equipped with airport-style security! However, there were also some rather more optimistic and creative answers on show. One of these was provided by the ?central square?, a large area of open space at the heart of the summit exhibition. In a truly enlightened move, the summit organisers at the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister chose not to fill every inch of the cavernous GMEX Centre with corporate stands and glossy displays. Instead, they filled the centre of the exhibition with ? well, with open space. The space ? a combination of seating and greenery ? was designed by Groundwork to serve the same purpose that a clean, safe and green open space might serve in any community: providing a place for people to sit, think, meet, play, grow and live. More refreshing still, the space was used for a range of activities developed and delivered by artists as part of a partnership between Groundwork and Arts Council England.

The brief to these artists was to find a way of connecting this high-profile public space ? populated by well-heeled delegates to a high level conference ? directly and physically with the hopes, aspirations and achievements of local community groups across England. This was achieved through a combination of fixed features in the landscape and more transient keepsakes ? designed to be taken away and to stimulate discussion beyond the conference hall. Moulded benches carried images of natural and man-made objects, while, nearby, a cairn was constructed from twigs, each wrapped with stories told by local community groups involved in projects as diverse as building skateparks and protecting ancient earthworks. A sound piece meanwhile captured the atmosphere of an oasis of calm in an urban area. Conference delegates were encouraged to take with them a carnation or a pin badge connecting them directly with one of the local groups ? effectively twinning those who attended with people trying to put the policies being discussed at the summit into practical action on the ground.

The interventions helped create a space that was visually harmonious, full of meaning and buzzing with activity. They also demonstrated the huge potential that exists for artists to be engaged more fully in the design, construction and management of public spaces. Of course, it?s impossible to say how many of those people who perched on a bench in the square listening to the string quartet in between conference sessions appreciated the effort and skill of the artists involved. The arts and artists are finding their way onto the regeneration agenda but are still too often seen as an added-extra, a luxury item that can always be dispensed with if it proves too expensive or too difficult to accommodate.

Now is the time for these attitudes to be challenged. At the heart of the Sustainable Communities summit were renewed promises and plans to develop major areas of the South and East and to halt the decline evident in other areas of the country. Throughout the summit, identity and culture were referred to as integral elements in building pride in individual localities and developing the assets of whole cities and regions.

The only mention of the arts in these debates, however, centred on the prestigious cultural attractions that so often act as beacons of regeneration, such as the Lowry or the Baltic centres in Salford and Gateshead. In order to develop truly sustainable communities, we need to make much more effort to link the arts with our everyday experience of life in our communities. The way we conceive, plan and design our shared spaces is an obvious starting point. People make places but places make people. It is to be hoped that next time the government holds a summit on sustainable communities delegates are not surprised to encounter an artist but disappointed if they don?t.