A new report published by Power to Change provides valuable insights in to the potential of community-owned businesses to take a widespread leadership role in the multi-purpose revitalisation of town and city centres.
The-new-high-street-playbook gives a detailed account of “community-led regeneration in action” through sharing analysis of the many successes -and some shortcomings- of five community businesses using different combinations of asset-based development, strategic influence and community activation focused on enhancing the vibrancy of town centres.
Important time for policy influence
The report is published at an important time to influence place-based policy in the U.K. Its findings have the potential to shape proposed government plans for a new High Street Strategy, with £301 million of funding to support local innovation partnerships to drive town and city centre renewal. The report focuses on a multi-purpose role of town centres through what it refers to as a “civic model of the high street that includes culture, health, enterprise, housing and community infrastructure”. The learning from the report also sits in the context of the government’s Pride in Place programme that includes putting control of local neighbourhood, town and city centre renewal in community hands.
Learning from five innovators
The five community businesses that participated in Power to Change’s Community-Led High Street Innovators (CLHSI) demonstrator are:
- Artspace Lifespace showing how a large vacant store can become a civic and cultural anchor in Bristol
- MadLab advocating for culture and community use as part of Stockport’s long-term future
- Make CIC using permanent space, cultural activity and coalition-building to strengthen local identity and participation in Birkenhead
- Southmead Development Trust bringing housing, community and retail development forward to create a more viable, healthier high street
- The Arcade Group9 using an historic asset, events and business networking to rebuild confidence in Dewsbury town centre.
Advancing a familiar approach
The community enterprise led approach advocated in the new high street playbook, advances an approach that we are familiar with at People & Places through our support for Ballinasloe Area Development Trust in County Galway in combining enterprise and community development. We have also long tracked the ‘art of asset-based development’, including the incredibly impressive Galeri Development Trust in Caernarfon, that was latterly part of the Architectural Heritage Foundation’s heritage development trust’s pilot programme. From his experience running a development trust that combined area-based revitalisation and asset ownership and development, and national networking support for place partnerships, our Director, Chris Wade, is very aware of the opportunities and challenges this involves, including the tension between combining a strategic and tactical role. Plus of course, at People & Places, we have long supported a community-led and partnership approach to what we term ‘multi-purpose, town centre centre revitalisation’. This has included partcipating in the High Street Task Force, which concluded with this ‘theory of high street change‘ focused on the role of local partnerships.
Enhancing the town centre’s multi-purpose role
At People & Places, we agree with Power for Change’s conclusions, that if carefully managed, such community businesses offer much more than filling selected empty units and can help enhance the multi-purpose role of town and city centres. They can steward community-owned assets, build local legitimacy, coordinate activity across areas and sectors, and help sustain activity over time. As such, they can be well placed to have a leading role in creating multi-purpose or more ‘civic’ town centres in ways that are more locally rooted, trusted and perhaps more durable than externally-led revitalision alone. The report advocates that such community businesses can be treated not only as delivery partners, but as co-creators of partnership-based, local renewal.
Limited by wider system
The report concludes that though community-led revitalisation may not lack ambition, ideas or energy, it can stall because the limitations of the wider system makes local stewardship too hard to sustain. The report summarises that its demonstrator approach has highlighted four sets of inter-linked opportunities and shortcomings:
- Community-led organisations can activate high streets in ways that are more locally legitimate, inclusive and durable than top-down regeneration alone.
- Common structural barriers, including poor ownership and vacancy data, insecure access to space, distant decision-making, low local authority capacity and fragmented funding.
- Meanwhile use can be valuable, though without a route to permanence it often reproduces instability rather than building stewardship.
- The strongest policy opportunities are to improve access to data, create a clearer pathway from activation to stewardship, back community influence in governance, and align capital and revenue funding around long-term local use.
Pathway for community stewardship
The report is very comprehensive in its assessment of the wider revitalisation role of these community businesses, including a schematic community stewardship pathway from pop-up or meanwhile use, to medium-term socially useful lease arrangements, to long-term stewardship or ownership. It suggests an indicative 10-year time frame for this, whilst being mindful that community enterprises can be priced out of the market, sometimes even partly because of the wider revitalisation successes of their own work.
Recommendations to Government
The report makes the following six recommendations pitched at central government:
- Make a civic high street model the explicit vision of the High Street Strategy, replacing narrow retail recovery with a strategy to deliver a mixed-use model of homes, health, culture, learning, enterprise and community space.
- Reform access to and collection of high street data, to give councils and communities access to the ownership, vacancy and property data they need to act strategically.
- Roll out support to help councils utilise their powers in practice, ensuring they can shape the high street with local communities.
- Facilitate community stewardship of the high street by designing funding and support to help communities move from temporary use to long-term stewardship and ownership.
- Support effective meanwhile use through a fairer model lease and support for landlords and tenants, so meanwhile space becomes a genuine incubator for community enterprise, not a revolving door.
- Create a route to asset acquisition by establishing a Property Holding Vehicle to provide flexible capital at pace for community-led buyouts of high street property.
Extending the thinking
Our instincts and experience at People & Places, lead to two key comments that clarify and extend the thinking in these recommendations:
Distinction between tactical and strategic roles
The recommendations combine -and arguably confuse- the two roles and tensions within a model that brings together developing assets and services within them, and a wider, more strategic role in animating places. The two can work well together, though require two distinct skill sets and approaches. Get the combination right and an owned asset can perhaps put an iconic town centre building back to a use and in ways that possibly better reflects its civic origins and ‘puts down roots’ in a place.
The trick then, is to do this in a way that creates a surplus, helps boost the wider setting and provides some funding and know-how that can be part of a more strategic push to animate the neighbourhood, town or city centre. This can be as part of a wider ‘place partnership’ involving other community, council and commercial stakeholders and adapting well established techniques for the muli-purpose revitalisation of town centres.
One of these two tasks is challenging on its own; combining the two requires a special combination of skills, tenacity and leadership.
Pitching the possibility to all levels of government
Our second comment is that the successful roll-out of such an approach, calls for a wider cultural shift that during a time of devolution and local government reform, needs to be pitched at evolving strategic, combined and remaining local authorities as well as potential local community and commercially-focued partners such as BIDs. Central government funding programmes can oblige a stronger community leadership role in programme delivery, though wider co-creation and influence depends on a more receptive and collaboarative culture with clearly shared objectives.
In line with our work on assessing the role of place management in new models of local governance, there is an opportunity to pitch this approach as a variation on the established community anchor model that combines asset development with a more overt a strategic partnership and revitalisation role. This though requires a pro-longed process of building trust, legitimacy and equality between public bodies, community enterprises and other partners.
The case for an innovative and widespread role
We believe that the new high street playbook published by Power to Change represents a significant step-forward in pulling together and articulating the case for community-owned businesses taking an innovative and more widespread leadership role in the multi-purpose revitalisation of town and city centres.
Wider roll-out and innovation through programmes such as the proposed ‘High Street Innovation Partnerships’, ‘Pride in Place’ programmes, or even the ‘Community Right to Buy’, should be supported by sharing separate learning about asset development and a partnership-based approach to wider revitalisation. Both aspects have great value in their own right, though what is needed to take forward the thinking as part of a new playbook, is to see them more reliably working together. In this way they might provide distinct elements of a combined approach of asset-based development, strategic influence and community activation that can enhance the wider vibrancy and multi-purpose role of neighbourhood, town and city centres.
