Name: Connected Communities: Urban Design I Fellows Festival 2025
Uploaded: 2025-10-07T18:04:00.000Z
Duration: 54 min 46 s
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We are going to get started pretty promptly because we've got 45 minutes and this is a big topic and there's lots to discuss and so let's not waste any time.

未来進行形

People will be shuffling in and out, we'll just talk through it.

There'll be a bit of time at the end for questions.

Today's session and in fact the one going on in the great room at the same time is on Connected Communities.

And what we're going to focus on down here is urban design.

And for want of a better way of putting how thoughtful planning can shape inclusive, accessible, connected, thriving communities.

My name is Tom Stratton, I look after both our Places and Connections programs and I'll tell you a little bit more about that.

So this discussion is particularly opportune for me because we are at the threshold of launching something called Connected Places here.

The backdrop to this, as many of you will know, was that in March we had Professor Robert Putnam, who was, who is the godfather of social capital, come and deliver our patron's lecture.

And at the same time we also co published some research on the role of social connections on people's life chances.

And there was lots of interesting stuff in there.

But one of the key things that came out of it is that connections between children from low income households and high income households can have a big bearing on the life chances and particularly the income prospects of those children from low income households.

Up to 38% difference in income, £5,000 between those that live in very connected areas and have a lot of connections versus those that don't.

And we are taking some of the insights from that and trying to build out our understanding of both how you nurture those connections and the sorts of impact that they have.

And we are doing that in conjunction with a number of places, one of which is Ealing.

And we are lucky to have the chief executive of that council on our panel.

This is a fantastic panel to have this discussion.

So immediately to my left is Lucy Musgrave, rdi.

She is the founder and director of Publica and an expert in urbanism and design policy.

Their website is replete with all sorts of stuff on the topic we're going to be discussing today.

She focuses on cities becoming more people centered and socially responsive.

Tony Clements in the middle here is chief Executive of Ealing Council, among one of many things, an RSA Connected Places partner.

But also I'M sure he will talk more about the connected communities agenda in Ealing there.

And last but not least, at the far end here is Matt Leach who until very, very recently was the CEO of Local Trust, which is a National Lottery community fund endowed organisation tasked with supporting long term place based community led change in 150 deprived neighbourhoods across England.

Again, in researching this I knew about Local Trust, but

going back to it, it is a really innovative initiative and very much worthwhile going and having a look at what they do.

So let's not spend any longer getting into it.

What we thought we'd do to start off with is just to make the connections we are talking about today a little bit more tangible.

So if I might start perhaps at the far end of you working back this way, if you could just give us a flavor of what connections in a connected community sense mean to you, that would be fantastic.

I guess for the last year, give or take, as part of Hilary Armstrong's commission on neighbourhoods and actually immediately after lunch, do go and listen to Hilary, because she's going to be talking some more about that.

But also over the last decade as Chief Exec of Local Trust, I've been traveling the country going to places and listening to people and trying to get a sense of the stories they tell.

And often the stories that people tell in places, whether they're successful communities, communities on the edge of, whether they're coastal communities or failing estates on the edge of post industrial towns, are stories that are based around notions of connectedness, of identity, of coming together.

Often they're stories which reach back into history, which tell stories about how people's identities have changed over time, but

I think it's, it's particularly true in some of the left behind communities or the mission critical neighbourhoods, which are furthest away from meeting some of the Government's ambitions, you can see that these are places that have not just lost economic purpose, but

also have lost social purpose, have lost places of connection and as a consequence their experience of deprivation and indeed their experience of day to day life is much less rich and is often much worse than other places that have those connecting enablers, whether it's transport to other places or community centres, or pubs and clubs where people can come together.

And I think when we think about connectedness, and

particularly connectedness in the context of urban design, it's very easy to get focused on how you build things and what it looks like at the outset to focus on Ideas of public participation, connectedness to the design process on day one.

But there's probably much less thought given to how people in those places connect on day 10 or indeed on day 1000.

And I think at the heart of any conversations about connectedness for me has got to be that.

That thinking about what makes a difference in communities as they mature, as they succeed.

I'll just finish by saying, you know, we've done a lot of research at Local Trust, a lot of work on the commission looking at connectedness as an issue.

But probably the most compelling bit of research I've seen in recent years came from the American Enterprise Institute in 2019, 20, when they surveyed tens of thousands of people, people across the United States, to find out what made places feel normal.

And they found overwhelmingly that the factor that made a difference in rich communities and poor communities was whether you could go to a place near your house where you recognized people and people there recognized you, and

that was that there wasn't anything else to it.

And they wrote a rather fine paper which called it, named it the Cheers Factor.

And then Covid happened and everybody forgot about all that stuff.

But I think we do need a bit of a Cheers factor when it comes to thinking about this as an issue and certainly thinking about designing new communities for the future.

As a chief Executive council, the first thing you've got to do with any audience is find out if there's any Ealing residents in the room.

That's to see if the first question to me is about a pothole or a miss Bin collection, But

So for us, as an organization, we've put social connection at the heart of our purpose.

And what we're seeking to do in Ealing and connection for us runs from a really wide sort of gamut of social connection.

So in some of our services, I might think of children's services or adult social care.

The sort of connections we're talking about are the connections of family, kinship, very close community that might help keep a child safe or help them to thrive.

We're involved in really sort of deep relationships there.

Towards the other end of the spectrum, I think, are the sort of relationships that we can foster through a better urban realm.

So who are the people that you can strike up a conversation with in a.

In a park or a square, and how does the environment foster that?

And I think while we recognize in policy terms the importance of relationships in some of those acute and intense environments.

I often think that we underestimate the power of the contacts, weaker ties we make during the sort of everyday.

I think the research in social connection, as Matt said, is strong in that regard.

And ultimately, with those sort of weaker ties, you don't know which ones might turn into stronger ties.

And the things that sort of support and bolster us and help us.

So for us, putting social connection at the heart of our work is all and every type of connection.

And I guess what we aim for is an abundance of value in all those types of connection.

I'm not an urbanist, but from Jane Jacobs, famous American urbanist, and

puts it quite poetically, lowly unpurposeful and random as they may appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which the city's wealth of public life grows.

The humble pavement is the place where we actually.

This is our symbolic and functional aspect of the public realm.

It's actually the social infrastructure in terms of where we all meet.

And I was very moved by the last discussion, which was in the great room and Amy Vaughan talking about what it meant to be the custodian of an old town hall.

So the town halls and our libraries and our community centres and our GP surgeries and our ambulance stations and the gateways and thresholds and entrances were for all of us.

And therefore, in terms of our collective symbolic ownership of civic amenity and civic urbanism, it's spatial and it's social and it's cultural and it's about identity, exactly as you're describing.

So what I wanted to say is that there's a completely new field of practice which is really exciting in civic urbanism, and

it is a process that's been going on in the built environment over the last couple of decades with many people, both in the UK and internationally.

There are some massive gaps in urban planning and urban design of things that are sitting in plain sight, which means that what we're building and what we need as a society are literally going further and further apart.

So what are those gaps we've been lucky enough to develop over a long period of time?

A methodology about participative fieldwork and how you actually can understand that any city or any town is made up of neighbourhoods.

Exactly what you're saying, Matt, that actually there's a scale to it.

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Connected Communities: Urban Design I Fellows Festival 2025

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