Why Our Places Need Us

My originally planned post for this week was slightly hijacked by an incredibly inspirational trip to Liverpool and the Wirral.

Apr 23, 2023

I’ve had the good fortune of spending some time with other founding members of Platform Places. If you’re not aware of Platform Places, it started as a regular Zoom call in 2021 with stakeholders and actors involved in the world of high street property and has since developed into a delivery vehicle with contracts and partnerships across the UK.

The main mission is “to unlock town centre buildings for amazing ideas that help us live affordably, sustainably, and together”.

I’ve felt a great sense of privilege in being a part of it in my role at TownSq, but we have senior politicians, property investors, social enterprises, architects, designers, entrepreneurs, policy advisors, civil servants, lawyers, and others who don’t fit neatly into a box.

The beauty of the diversity of the group is that conversations quickly turn from “why doesn’t someone do something about that?” into very specific and logical reasons as to why investors, entrepreneurs, or councillors can’t practically or legally do something about it.

It is built on a solid foundation of empathy and challenge, which quickly moves the conversation away from blaming “them” (so often the way that things go in any neighbourhood or town centre Facebook group) to trying to understand how the incentives or barriers can be influenced in order to get past that.

Platform Places is doing a couple of things, from building a platform to raise awareness of where this is happening already, for example in Oxford where social entreprise Makespace Oxford are working to unlock empty spaces for local entrepreneurs, Sheffield where the council is prioritising engagement with community-based founders, and Belfast where a private developer is bringing the community into spaces and decision-making processes.

Alongside this, there are now a number of direct partnerships with towns, cities, regions, and local authorities to do epic things such as acquiring key buildings to preserve them for future generations of local people.

This idea was really framed in an exceptional way by Dan Davies, founder of CPL Training Group and more recently the sponsor and benefactor of the regeneration of New Brighton, a historic seaside town on the North Wirral coast.

He referenced a chat he has with one of the founders of a major high street F&B chain. When asked why he would invest in a place like New Brighton when the demographic reports don’t add up, it highlighted how much decisions are made by spreadsheets now.

The Illusion of Choice

It’s not always that people don’t have nice places to eat and shop, but someone in an office (most likely a hundred miles away from the town itself) is choosing what brands we have on our high streets based on what their demographic reports tell us.

You can see this for yourself on your doorstep. What you have is likely to be dictated by the kind of area in which you live.

All of the brands are inevitably owned by a single organisation and whether you get a Hungry Horse, a Chef & Brewer, or a Loch Fyne will be dictated by whether your demographic report permits it.

The illusion of choice is just that (and isn’t restricted just to high streets - as the above infographic shows).

Everything from what snacks we eat, what tea we drink, what fast food options we have are all decided for us by a system. Increasingly, this applies to “green” options too.

This is, of course, a very sensible approach. You wouldn’t open a Michelin-starred restaurant in the middle of a council estate.

But equally that removes the very idea that Michelin-starred quality should exist within that social setting. It isn’t a decision being made by the community, but instead by an officer armed with a spreadsheet of vacant properties and a demographic report of likely demand.

This isn’t new, supermarkets have been using demographic reports to anticipate future turnover for decades, and they are very accurate.

There are significant consequences, but the people who face them don’t have much of a voice.

Just Deserts

We have a term now for urban areas where there is limited access to fresh, affordable and nutritious food. They’re called food deserts, and it’s estimated that in the United States there are more than 19 million people living in one.

19 million people who have to go way out of their way to get the food that will truly nourish them.

Right now in Chicago, Walmart are closing half of their stores, including three in the South and West Side neighbourhoods, areas which are predominantly less affluent and made up of minority communities.

Anyone who has kids knows the immediate consequence on their behaviour of letting them have one slightly bad meal or snack, and we make bad decisions when we’re tired or malnourished, so you can see how the cycles persist.

This lack of accountability creates conditions where the demographic reports are absolutely not going to back up opening a new fresh food supermarket in that neighbourhood, and supermarkets aren’t charities so they’re not going to do it out of the goodness of their hearts.

Now, in the UK we have twice as many food banks as we have McDonalds branches. We also have 350 food banks for every one food bank in countries like Norway.

This is a cycle which will not end without action. But as this one example proves, it is incredibly complicated, involves many stakeholders, and is not showing any signs of improvement.

This is not to point the finger of blame. It’s a separate post for one day, but I’d recommend reading the “Blame Game” section in Matthew Syed’s excellent Black Box Thinking to avoid this. If we start blaming, then people will back away from wanting to be involved in the solution.

We need more movements like Platform Places to raise awareness of these issues and create the conditions for a better alternative.

Why Do I Care?

I’ve written about it before, but my interest in this is in getting people to develop a sense of entrepreneurship that can help them to play more of a role in building an alternative vision.

I deeply believe that learned helplessness and our total lack of agency is unsettling us, and the sense of inevitability is giving people no belief that it could be any other way.

If we can give more local people an opportunity to break free and create a new narrative then there is hope.

Every win will build momentum. Right now, we don’t have enough community entrepreneurs winning.

How Much Do We Need Jeopardy To Drive us?

I originally gave this post a working title of jeopardy, and wanted to focus on the conditions in which the current social entrepreneurs are working, but in the end what you’ve already read pretty much wrote itself.

I wonder whether this jeopardy is part of the motivation, but I’ll instead write more about that in a future post!

Even if people don’t win on their first attempt (I’ve written a lot on failure in the past if you’re new to this series: one, two, three) then they should be in a better place as a result of trying. They will have new skills, new experience, and - vitally - new networks.

If they can try, win or fail, and still feel like it was a valuable experience then we will make progress.

I remember way back when we were first trying to convince people that we should launch ICE over a decade ago, I kept getting that question of “what if people fail?”

It was posed (and still regularly is) like as if there is a role in society for someone to squash ideas before people waste any more time, energy, effort, and money on them.

It isn’t wasted time, why do we think that?

Is it any more a waste of money than any other educational experience?

The only justified comment is on making sure that the person doesn’t lose more than they can afford to, but there are plenty of other ways people can do that in society right now that are promoted on the front of football shirts week in, week out.

If we keep holding people back, then the cycle will persist. We need to let loose the potential that we have bottled up right now.

One final example of this is the established advantage. I’ll write more about prove it again bias in the future, but while in Liverpool I stayed in a lovely, newly refurbished hotel just off Concert Square.

The more that property on our high streets is left to crumble, the higher the barrier to entry gets as the refurbishment and fit-out costs continually increase.

Now, in many town centres, it feels a mile-high and growing.

We need barriers to entry to protect incumbents from decimated markets, but not where there’s an opportunity to create wealth building in our communities.

If everyone could open a coffee shop tomorrow for £1,000 then we could never drink enough coffee to keep them all open, and those that might do well end up suffering. But to open a hotel right now would be impossible as a start-up unless you have a background working in the financial sector.

It is even more difficult if the asset is owned by an international pension fund that has never stepped foot on that high street and who has no interested in the wider value creation.

This one has run on a bit, so I’ll wrap up there!

In the meantime, head to Platform Places, give them a follow on socials and - if you’re passionate about this big hairy problem - reach out and get involved.

(You can read more about the trip here)

Apologies to any new subscribers who were expecting a write-up from my workshop on Wednesday! That will come next week unless something else winds me up in the meantime!