Featured Image: Unhealthy Neighbourhood Syndrome: A Useful Label For Analysing and Providing Advice on Urban Decision Making?
‘Landlords need to take ventilation more seriously if we are to combat damp and mould, writes Alan Siggins, managing director of Airflow’
He might well be right: he manufactures air ventilation products,
Alan knows the need, the skill shortages, his product, the markets and is a strong voice for everyone to consider ventilation as an important part of how we create a healthier atmosphere in the home. We can hear similar loud voices in glazing
There’s so much information at our fingertips that we can’t translate into solutions that help our health, wellbeing and bank balance because, well, everyone’s shouting at us to listen to them, to their bit of the story.
However, whether we live in a palace, a care home, a hospital, a school
at work: in armed services housing, a housing association flat or house:
a mortgaged home or privately rented property, in b+bs: or hotels
whether we’ve been temporarily rehoused or we’re in housing with unsafe cladding:
Or have a disability and our home hasn’t been adapted….!
Or forgotten about in one of our prisons
We’re realising that googling the answer isn’t enough: we realise that in accepting a narrow view/version of ourselves as transactors/consumers over the last thirty years our aspirations and horizons have narrowed.
In trusting that the structures and markets around us (businesses, charities, foodbanks) are what societies do, rather than are a result of lack of neighbourhood level economic development we’ve gone back fifty years.
Connection and networking at the neighbourhood level across class has been shown to improve the opportunities and quality of life chances of people from low income backgrounds. Today we’re more likely to describe ourselves as working class if we’re in a professional role where we feel that we’ve come from ‘an ordinary family’. Nostalgia for shared values maybe while the reality is that a professional person is just as precariously employed/self employed/freelancing as the cleaner they pay every week….
During the 1980’s structural changes in the way as a country we allowed access to stable housing and work, selling off and not rebuilding council houses has created an ‘underclass space’ that allows the worst forms of exploitation to flourish. The ‘underclass space’ is now on every high street as a reminder and a form of punishment to people in the homeless situation, to people who feel powerless to do anything except donate money or suggest the many charities and foodbanks that have proliferated since 2001.
Is it possible to improve communication, connection and relationships across society so that everyone has friends across class, background, culture?
If we look back to the things that were and are missing now in our online world when we look for solutions, we’re really aching for a grass roots dynamic economy that allows us to be problem solvers, together. A Shared culture that we feel part of.
We need to feel that we’re not just competitive market machines but that we need the spaces to be together to solve problems together: health, housing, education, infrastructure, crime.
Future: a word that allows us the space to repurpose traditional ways of thinking, working, including ways of re-engineering social relationships and meaning.
Holistic, reversible reactions that take us into the value of each human being and what detracts from that.
If in our future (now) we can acknowledge and feel the energy of the local, the regional, the national and international in our neighbourhood could this be the beginning of new plans for our own lives in our own neighbourhoods: new types of housing, ways of living, working?
Could collaborations, creativities, culture, opportunities help us find the ways to live to our undoubted potential?
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