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Urban Environment Today, 5 October 2000
Ever since the words 'regeneration' and 'redevelopment' were coined by the first developer, there has been one intractable problem about the whole idea.
While the fabric, the buildings and the roads of a rundown neighbourhood are relatively easy to regenerate, the community that lives there are considerably more difficult.
Successive generations have dealt with the problem differently. Some just pretended it didn't exist, like Mrs Thatcher, and rebuilt whole swathes of cities - then wondered why the poor inhabitants went elsewhere.
Others kept their heads down and tried to involve local people as little as possible. Then they wondered by their gleaming concrete was vandalised and their dinky trees uprooted.
The problem of reviving communities is now the central problem of regeneration. We have terms like 'social inclusion' to describe the elusive ideal and 'social capital' to describe the missing quality that can achieve it. But still the unrevitalised communities remain as a living memorial to the puny attempts of developers, planners and architects alike.
Worse, there is surprisingly little in policy terms to offer as a solution.
Even Tony Blair's original pamphlet The Third Way skirts around the question. It makes sensible noises about re-discovering a sense of personal responsibility, but you turn the page to find out how he's going to achieve it and all you find are worryingly authoritarian ideas like curfews and prison.
But one recent arrival from the USA does at least claim to be part of the answer to rebuilding neighbourhoods - as its proponents put it - relationship by relationship.
It uses time as a kind of money. And it culminates in an ambitious proposal by the New Economics Foundation for a London Time Bank, an infrastructure of local 'time banks' that measure and reward the efforts people put in for each other at a local level.
The idea is that people build credits for time they put into voluntary activities in providing health or social care and other worthwhile work in their communities. Everybody's time is equally valued. Communities which are 'cash poor, time rich' are able to trade their time providing each other with valued goods and services.
They provide communities with a means of trading services which they are denied by the conventional economy, and they enable more health and social care to be provided to the most socially disadvantaged people who experience the worst health.
In Rushey Green in South East London, local residents earn and spend 'time', opening an account in the time bank held at a neighbourhood health centre. One participant - we'll call her Mary - is a wheelchair user who spends her time money being taken out of her house on trips. In exchange she bakes cakes for local events.
Hyacinth builds up credit in the time bank by visiting an elderly blind woman. She has spent some of her time savings on getting her garden shed fixed. And it's not only people who can trade time credits - organisations can join and use the time bank system to access additional hours and expertise from other local groups.
The man behind the idea, civil rights lawyer Edgar Cahn, the author of a new book on the subject No More Throwaway People, put it like this: "I don't like feeling useless - society declares a lot of people useless - the unemployed, the elderly and the young. My local time bank values what I can do, and it rewards me for it."
"Market economics values what is scarce," he says. "Not the real work of society, which is caring, loving, being a citizen, a neighbour and a human being. That work will, I hope, never be so scarce that the market value goes high, so we have to find a way of rewarding contributions to it."
The Rushey Green Health Centre can refer patients to the time bank as well as - and may be eventually instead of - prescribing anti-depressants. Getting them involved isiting local people, shopping for them, helping in local schools - whatever they want to do - seems to make them feel better.
Researh in the USA also shows that in increases local trust. It certainly involves people who never normally volunteer, often people who are normally pigeon-holed by professionals as 'the prob;em' but who turn out to be a vital resoure.
A joy of the time money system is that its benefits can be widely felt. Healthier local people build healthier communities. Time banks encourage community involvement. Participants in public consultations can be paid in time 'credits' - older people in Watford earn time credits helping the council design and deliver local services. Local authorities and voluntary organisations can use the time bank network to channel and reward those who champion local development and regeneration.
It may seem small-scale, though it's working in London SE6 and the other 14 or so time banks so far started in the UK. But it can be the basis of a much bigger network, building the kind of volunteering in the capital city where neighbour helps neighbour, building on experience where time banks are highly developed as in St Louis and Chicago.
Time banks use some of the principles of volunteering to put forgotten human assets to use meeting the forgotten needs, but networks of time banks can also create a reciprocal relationship between people and institutions, as well as between people and people, which ordinary volunteering finds it harder to achieve.
Together they are a mechanism for involving people as equal partners in the work of rgeneration, as well as allowing almost anybody in society, including the elderly and housebound, to give something back. And the evidence is that feeling needed is a critical missing piece of the social capital jigsaw.
The London Time Bank will be able to guarantee time credits earned so that they could be spent in all the time banks rather than just the local one. It will also broker volunteer time between different organisations, if particular specialist help is available in one neighbourhood but needed in another - and allow participants to check their balances online.
But it can also administer a stream of recycled or surplus goods - like refurbished computers - via the internet or catalogues, to encourage people to spend their time credits. And it will link into training programmes so that people can provide themselves with new skills - paid for with their own time and effort helping others.
The ratcheting Landfill Tax means that it is increasingly cost-effective for companies to make sure their old furniture, electrical equipment and computers are recycled rather than simply dumped.
A new infrastructure, organised by groups like Community Logistics in their Cyber-Cycle project, is emerging which is recycling unwanted equipment, and providing training for young people by doing so. They are also then putting this equipment back on the market.
The problem is - as the government has found out giving computer equipment away through Computers Within Reach - the people who need it most often don't have the money to buy it at even much-reduced prices. But if it is simply given away, it isn't valued. To get round this dilemma, the London Time Bank can funnel this recycled equipment back into the community, so that it can be earned with time.
It's all about finding resources that have no money value - something economics isn't very good at - and building them into regeneration.
"As a nation we're rich in many things, but perhaps our greatest wealth lies in the talent, the character and idealism of the millions of people who make their communities work," said Tony Blair, little knowing what he was saying, perhaps. "Everyone - however rich or poor - has time to give. Let us give generously, in the two currencies of time and money."
Edgar Cahn is speaking at the London School of Economics at 7pm on 17 October. Tickets �12.50 including a free copy of his book No More Throwaway People. Details from [email protected]
More information about time banks from Time Banks UK, a joint venture by the New Economics Foundation and Fair Shares, funded by the government's Active Community Unit (web) www.timebanks.co.uk
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