Rushcliffe is fantastic at change: growing, learning, evolving.
What people we have here.
Because Rushcliffe has grown (especially over the last thirty years (see presentation below) and when it has grown it’s taken the people with its growth which gives a boost to awareness of democracy: local parish, ward, county, regional structures. This is a great resource: over the next few years our insights into the importance of the detail, the micro to the wider regional, national, international picture will be like having incredible financial resources, reserves: we’re realising that our greatest resource is our people and people live in neighbourhoods.
Above: How Inspire CIC in Rushcliffe’s Multiply Project is an amazing commitment to the conversations we all want about regeneration, new jobs, skills, opportunities in 2023.
Our neighbourhoods are becalmed by the tangled relationships we try to have in and across work, family, generations, gender, class and ethnicities where we aspire to green things (fingers, economies, education training and skills but how to bring this into every distinct neighbourhood in Rushcliffe?).
I think we need to help neighbourhoods with new kinds of events that don’t spoon feed people into more consumption but create a great space for all kinds of culture, music, entertainment.
To create new jobs we need to know ourselves and others, then motivation, enthusiasm, planning, skills, training, effort and a diverse, accessible culture. Then we can regenerate the neighbourhood.
For everyone we’re puzzled by our relation to massive inequalities across our own families, friends, generations, classes, ethnicities. These inequalities affect their health and our health.
Let us break them down.
We can do much, much better than beached neighbourhoods stuck in inequality: we’re active people, democrats, citizens, not just consumers. We all do some good and we’re all equal humans whatever our cumulative data of our life and health chances impose on our social identities.
We know this here in Rushcliffe, across all the parties there’s great conviviality on the need to regenerate intergenerational, class and ethnic histories into everything we’re thinking and planning for the economy and community. We all want the twenty minute neighbourhood.
Above: Rushcliffe Planning with an Integrated just around the corner economy with more emphasis on walking to work, reducing traffic and its pollution.
It’s because of the hard work of the schools, colleges, universities, health professionals, people who support the voluntary and charity organisations here, the leisure centres, health centres, pharmacists, opticians, supermarkets, small shops, businesses, market traders, self employed, micro businesses as well as the SMEs and the corporate companies. We don’t realise our potential because we live in economic, social, cultural, silos created after the second world war but no longer needed or wanted.
We need stories from individuals, local stories about work, life, culture so we can release our neighbourhoods from their post second world war reconstruction structural time warp.
The World as Kenneth Goldstein might have said, of Tommorrow, is us.
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