Friday, February 16, 2018

'The Alternatives' by Aditya Chakrabortty

16 February 2018

‘The Alternatives’ is a new series of articles and podcasts from The Guardian which looks at communities who are working out their own answers. Two weeks ago Guardian journalist Aditya Chakrabortty interviewed Preston councillor Matthew Brown about how the city has successfully adopted ‘guerrilla localism’ (see: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/31/preston-hit-rock-bottom-took-back-control and: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/commentisfree/audio/2018/jan/31/the-alternatives-how-preston-took-back-control-podcast). And this week he spoke to Hazel Tilley, a long-time resident of the Liverpool neighbourhood of Granby, about the remarkable regeneration of the area sparked by a few individual citizens taking it upon themselves to clean up the street where they live. This led to the securing of substantial public and private investment, the development of a community land trust to take houses into collective community ownership and the involvement of architects Assemble – who went on to win the Turner Prize for their work on Granby Four Streets. (See: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/14/community-liverpool-residents-granby and https://www.theguardian.com/politics/commentisfree/audio/2018/feb/14/the-alternatives-how-liverpool-suburb-upended-housing-market-podcast.) It’s a fascinating story – all the more powerful for hearing it (on the podcast) through the voice of one of the local people who made it happen. And there are clearly many parallels with Voluntary Arts’ ‘Our Cultural Commons’ series of articles (see: https://www.voluntaryarts.org/Pages/Category/our-cultural-commons).

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