Who makes a real local?

Over the last few years in community engagement there’s been a real sway (which we’ve largely been pushing for) towards authentic conversations with ‘local people’ in order to identify meaningful ways for people to shape their area.

But I’ve started to wonder, what makes someone local?

For a couple of recent Street Space community engagement projects based in areas where we haven’t worked before our approach has been to recruit and pay, local, young producers aged 18–25 to join our engagement team who we support to lead creative engagement activities both inside and outside their own networks.

We feel this makes lots of sense in terms of fostering authentic participation and you can hear two Young Producers outline some of the impacts of this approach beautifully in this short film.

A key insight emerging from our engagement in Bruce Grove illustrated by Lucy Davidson

Both Carlos and Isha were born and raised in Tottenham, living minutes away from the council funded project we’re working on in collaboration with If Do,to create a new workspace and community cafe. Over six months they’ve engaged hundreds of Bruce Grove residents and created a powerful platform of conversations around what this space should look and feel like on instagram — we’re incredibly proud of all they’ve achieved.

But it’s got me wondering — their voices matter greatly because they’re the future and generally haven’t been or felt a part of conversations to influence and shape any of the many regeneration projects growing up all around them, in their area. Do their voices matter more than people who’ve more recently moved to the Bruce Grove area in the last 5 years or so, often from Hackney, edging northwards and giving birth to small children in the area and making it their home?

These questions don’t need to be answered but are more of a provocation. We’ve tended to sway more towards seeking out the truly ‘local’ voices, keen to hear an impression of an area from people who’ve lived somewhere most or all of their lives, who have perhaps felt marginalised by previous decision making processes or let down by the council on more instances than they can count on one hand.

But there’s a niggle deep down. How is this different from moving towards a society that values time or longevity in one place over anything else? Giving that person more power and authority to influence a place’s need or future aspiration?

I’ve seen conversations of these types leveraged in a number of ways about the recent round of rollouts of Low Traffic Neighbourhood schemes — hearing from people who feel a strong claim to an area - from growing up in a place, seeing it shift to a place they no longer recognise. Suddenly an authority is actively making it easier to cycle and harder to drive, they see a change and perceive it’s not for them. They are angry and hurt, they haven’t been a part of a process and how they move around is being dramatically affected. This can easily form the basis of a line of argument about one persons voice being more important than another. About who has more right to space than others, about who has more say over what a place does or doesn’t become, what kind of place somewhere can be.

London has a proud history of welcoming migrants from all corners of the world and UK, enabling them to call this city home, to belong, to have a voice in shaping that place or are we returning to a system that puts birthright over all else? If we are doing this in a move to counteract the power dynamics at play in society favouring the mobile middle classes with the assumed confidence and affluence to get their voices heard no matter what then that’s one thing, but we should acknowledge it openly if that’s the case.

How can we continue to have conversations that both challenge and sustain the conversation around the importance of ‘local’ whilst recognising the power dynamics at play in a place as it continues to change and evolve over time? The consequences of government policy playing out, widening inequality, rising cost of living, brain drains in smaller towns, housing shortage, competing expectations of your right to stay in a place where you’ve grown up or have family, and the ability to be mobile in all senses of the word, at the same time, is one complex mess.

Let’s not try and hide the mess by making someone’s right to shape a place a correlation of how long they’ve lived there, or by allowing one group or voice to dominate a conversation to the exclusion of others who may not feel welcome.