Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
A reading list for new councillors?
The Economist recently regretted that in the General Election, the main parties lacked big new ideas. It looked back to 1997 and Will Hutton's The State We're In. And 1979 when Sir Keith Joseph gave his officials a reading list to help them understand the ideology of the new Government.
From time to time and far less ambitiously, I've gently suggested some browsing for my fellow Labour councillors.
We now have a new national political landscape and seventeen new Haringey councillors. So I wonder whether HoL members could come up with a reading/viewing list for them - and even for those re-elected. How about a couple of essential and above all practical suggestions for books, articles and of course, useful blogs and online videos?
Top of my own current list is Heather Brooke: The Silent State. Which should be compulsory ─ if only for people to think through what they disagree with and why.
(Tottenham Hale ward councillor)
From time to time and far less ambitiously, I've gently suggested some browsing for my fellow Labour councillors.
We now have a new national political landscape and seventeen new Haringey councillors. So I wonder whether HoL members could come up with a reading/viewing list for them - and even for those re-elected. How about a couple of essential and above all practical suggestions for books, articles and of course, useful blogs and online videos?
Top of my own current list is Heather Brooke: The Silent State. Which should be compulsory ─ if only for people to think through what they disagree with and why.
(Tottenham Hale ward councillor)
Tags for Forum Posts: Haringey, council, councillors, reading list, viewing list
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Liz on
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Interesting idea Alan...and not just for councillors. Have to think about blogs but a few books spring to mind.
I expect Anna Minton's Ground Control is on your list too, as well as Clay Shirky Here Comes Everybody for those who still don't get social media. For a little history, how about Patrick Wright's still amazing book A Journey through Ruins: The Last Days of London ?
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Permalink Reply by Old-Age-Emporium(OAE) on
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For all the newly elect, but especially for those who have inherited the mantle of four and a half decades of Haringey dominance, Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire comes to mind. Lest the weight of his original six volumes crush our new councillors' confidently ubiquitous use of the tweet, the flicker, the hol, the mobile and the facebook a gibbous soundbite from Chapter XXXVIII may suffice:
'The decline of (Labour) was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay . . . . the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. The story of its ruin is simple and obvious; and instead of inquiring why its Empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long.'
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Permalink Reply by Alan Stanton on
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Unfortunately the windows of River Park House can't be opened. Otherwise a few thick volumes might have been handy as wedges to let in lots of fresh air.
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Can't resist the challenge, Alan:
Nudge: Improving Decisions by Cass Sunstein with Richard Thaler
and
Red Tory by Philip Blond.
You've probably read them - but all the others would get a great deal as the new coalition has based its programme on these tomes.
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Aesops fables.
'The Prince' and 'The Art of War' By Niccolò Machiavelli.
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Straight and Crooked Thinking, by Robert H Thouless. The first and still the best popular book on how to think logically. And maybe Aristotle on Rhetoric - the persuasive advocate requires facts and logic, the ability to express feeling and at least the appearance of good character. Such a difficult trinity to achieve, as we see from the current Council.
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Permalink Reply by Chris Setz on
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I don't know, but would have thought that the main thing representatives need to learn more about is how to represent. I don't know what they already get though, do you, Alan?
a quick google gives the direct.gov page, which contains little:
Local Councillors
Shows how little I know!
When new, are councillors given stuff to read?
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Having got a third of the way through Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities, I'm already thinking it should be required reading for councillors and top policy wallahs at LBH. Although written in 1961, it's already challenging me to look very differently at my streets.
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That's interesting, Liz. Especially as I know you as someone who was taking a Jane Jacobs-style approach before reading her.
As you know, she loved cities and the life on their streets - but without sentimentalising or constructing a "narrative" (i.e. partisan fiction). Instead she observed carefully, and thought deeply and with insight about what she saw. Here's a video of her, a few years before she died age 89, describing just that.
Another clip is from 1969, a year after Jane and her husband moved from New York to Toronto.
For people who haven't come across Jane Jacobs, that first book is still a great place to start. There's so much in it which we now see as commonsense. For example: about what makes the public realm of cities attractive and enjoyable for city dwellers. With insights about parks; about "dead spaces" along blank walls. And the vital need for density and diversity. She wanted streets walkable; and campaigned against the threat posed by cars and city motorways.
Over the years we've bought and loaned / given away so many paperback copies that Zena and I decided to buy a hardback copy - just to keep and reread!
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Another brief Jane Jacobs video - from 2002. I like the quote:
"Any city at all that's worth learning from or considering has parts that work. And so what should we study? The parts that work and the parts that people use. All hypotheses get tested in the real world."
Should The Death and Life of Great American Cities go on a reading list for councillors? Sure.
But maybe it'll be easier if these busy people have a click-through viewing list?
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It is a wonderfully easy read as she was a journalist and so even someone who doesn't get a lot of time can put a couple of chapters in the bag on a bus or train ride. For me, mixed up with the common sense of observing people and what works is the way she challenges a few beliefs about certain sacred cows - such as the idea that green space is always good. As she says, if it is not a part of a wider community and people are not given a reason to use it at all times: crossing it to work, taking kids to play, holding events, crossing it to get back from work, it will fail. Parks need public eyes all the time.
I think that some of this lesson has been learned from the redesign of Harringay's local parks. Very simple things can completely change the dynamic e.g. Chestnuts Park - bringing the deserted and derelict playground next to the cafe and overlooked by the road means that at all times of the day, the playground has eyes on it, discouraging the kind of anti-social behaviour (and school truants) that characterised it before. Fairland-sandwiched between two roads and right in the middle of the Ladder (and two schools), overlooked on both sides, regular events and a way to cross it for passersby who are just on their way somewhere else...
I think she would be disturbed by the Finsbury Park proposal. The ground is currently given over to people to do with as they wish and they come in droves. One morning, I observed a child getting a bike lesson, some teens playing basketball, a young couple admiring the view from the back fence, some Dads and sons kicking a ball about and LOTS of other people casually watching them do it (like me). I feel that Jane Jacobs would argue that this use for the space is the most value you can get and ensures safety. Enclosing it, giving it over to a small part of the population and taking away people's reason for going to that side of the park will decrease safety, no matter how much light you put in. It's no use saying, they can go to "another bit of tarmac near the Tennis courts". If that bit of tarmac gave the same value to people, they would already be using it. There's also been some interesting studies in America about what happens to a park's dynamics when you drive away the casual users. They do go elsewhere, out of the park or to a place where they disturb others.
I'm getting to the neighbourhoods section now which I'm starting to see has some valuable commentary on how people connect, how cities differ from towns in the concept of neighbourhood and how the new 'orthodoxy' social capital might work very differently in a large city compared to a small place. Thanks for pointing me in her direction by the way Alan...
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Reading her, I first realised how much we needed some 'Park Theory'. But not based on an idealised view of parks as 'natural', nor as heritage. But theory-in-practice, based on evidence and observation. Which helps us understand why some parks are 'working' well, while others don't. And what we could do about it.
Which led me to appreciate some of Ken Worpole's writing. Someone else I haven't enough time to read and re-read!
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