The health of a neighbourhood can be measured in the way people enjoy visiting it, the way they’re received and the variety of activities, events and opportunities it fosters for the wider community around it. If this is missing it’s because there are people who haven’t been included.
The sale of council houses in the 80’s, 90’s, 00’s across three generations, the massive growth of the global build to let luxury around UK and international students became the template for the local economy but not in a good way.
The neighbourhood balance of residential and student housing of the post war period counterbalanced by council accreditation and accountability as well as students just getting to know their neighbours, having normal relationships with ordinary people has been lost. In the rush for the global student pound students became economic targets a fake ‘night time economy’ sprang up around them as well as people from neighbourhoods deprived of investment who’d target them for their laptops and possessions.
We’re now realising that if we value everyone’s ability to gain education, skills, experience equally then we’d have a much healthier and diverse economy. Being great at welcoming inward investors, students and sports fans into Nottingham is one thing but we’re less aware of how important it is to welcome the people who already live here into the modernising economy.
A truly modern economy includes everyone at every level and transforms itself because of this.
In the last forty years in forgetting the potential of growing local education, skills, knowledge and capacities: we’ve lost whole communities.
Some people don’t care about that but the majority of us really do.
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