e-urban's comments on rapidly changing keywords within the Babylonian Tower of urban intervention

Urban ghettos, precarious neighbourhoods, show crime, impoverishment, drugs abuse, bad schools and an apparent absence of any cultural asset. Poverty and regression are ugly things.
Ugly things make no good sell for white-paper writing bureaucrats or researchers.
That is why, amongst them, an uncommon creativity rules in the domain of words, of neologisms.
Words are powerful. Often, it is the word that defines the way of thinking, and not the thought that gives birth to a word.

That is why we try to be alert, so as not to give in to the power of words that may contaminate our thinking.

UR.Babel WORDS is about verbiage and its' eventual evil consequences. It features an etymological and Orwellian ("newspeak") approach to linguistic innovations.
As much as possible, comments are translated into the three other e-urban languages.

We are the local project managers, charged with the transformation of urban areas.
Most of the time, we have to play on different chessboards at once:

In order to make investments in schools work, we have to make sure, for instance, that streets and public spaces are designed to allow for children playing safely among each other, so that they will obtain the necessary language skills in a natural way. Even if we have a good and emancipation-oriented project to manage, we can never be sure, that schools, architects, local authorities, public transport etq., will work together on this. If they don't, many efforts will have been in vain. 

Skills
To make such things happen, certain skills are indispensable. Those invaluable skills are discussed here, in  Mission-Methods-People (left sidebar) under: "Urban Professionals" > Skills. [Not yet complete, input welcome].
Another statement about skills: We do not merely play on different tables on the same level, but we have to play at the same time on chessboards on higher and on lower levels. The essential participation by our clients in the neighbourhood, demands skills in dealing with different kinds of groups and individuals. The communication with our commissioners demands administrative and political skills. At this moment, we often have to spend (too) much time and energy on reports that are sometimes nothing more than translations from the daily practice of our work, that, with time, becomes more and more different from the image the commissioning authorities have of want to show about it.

As an advisor to the Communauté Urbaine de Lille, a multimillion strong conurbation in the North of France, with thirty local area-based regeneration projects in seven of the more than sixty cities, I visited once a colleague, project manager in a deprived area of Roubaix-Tourcoing. His office was a former classroom, and he was seated at his desk between two very high walls of cupboards, filled with hundreds of files. I asked him, if he was still able to see the real world from that place. He replied very seriously that he was practically not. 60% of his time, he said, he was busy with producing the papers wanted by the different administrations who oversaw his project, and which were in fact mere "translations" into their priorities and their wordings of their role in the project. Those papers went into the cupboard in front of him. 30% of the remaining time, he dealt with the papers behind him, which were the real-world documents of his project.

This type of skill is wonderful, but not what makes for a good project. Another skill is needed, i.e. to engage commissioners and partners in the real world of the project. Some new conditions and standards should make that possible.
They are discussed in our paper: "Empowerment of U.P.'s", where UP stands for "Urban Practitioner", under "Urban Professionals" in the right sidebar.

(Next part of this draft introduction to the e-urban Mission Statement is: E-Urban Mission 2.Tools)

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(This is the second part of our introduction series to the E-Urban Mission Statement. The first one is: Homepage [EN]: 1. Skills.) 

Tools
Under "Methods" > "Who|How|What" in the same "MMP" section (sidebar), a more general methodology is sketched, referring to researches, publications, practical examples ("good practices") and statistical & budgetary measuring of results. This could be called the tools section.[Not yet complete, input welcome].

The most important "tools" for the project, are people. The skills of the urban transformation/emancipation project management teams are a decisive asset for any urban project to succeed.

Very often, authorities and public tend to see an urban regeneration programme as if it were the construction of a building or the implementation of a public transport scheme. Come new priorities, change the driver, start all over. To us, this is as if the surgeon is recalled from the operations room in the middle of a surgery...

Other tools are, naturally, money (clear-cut, flexible project-budgets, stretching over multiple years), partnership contracts with local institutions, services, enterprises and voluntary organisations (NGO's).

Project management-, negotiating-, budget-management- and other tools heve to be adapted to the particular needs of projects under integrated urban development strategy. An exchange of knowledge and experiences on these subjects, between urban practitioners all over Europe, is essential to bring this about.

Toolboxes for this work of "uptooling" are present in the shape of URBACT, EUKN and ASC.

(Next part of this introduction series to the e-urban Mission Statement, is: Homepage [EN]: 3. Standards)

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This is the third part of a series of introductions to the drafting of the Mission Statement (Mission, Methods, People - MMP). The preceding ones are: Homepage [EN]: 1. Skills and Homepage [EN]: 2. Tools.

Standards 
In order to create a set of correct conditions under which we can do our work, certain standards should be agreed upon, or, if necessary, imposed, pertaining to the quality of the projects and the sustainability of their results, as well as the position of the urban practitioners engaged in the policy. Those standards should deal with

• minimum flexibility of the project budgets, (for dealing with private partners, with public services and non-profit partners requires that the project team can dispose of its own budget),
  
• minimum duration of the projects, (for, as we are working with people in order to activate them and develop their skills, a minimum delay of more than four years should be allowed, to get sustainable transformations in the behaviour and the social structure of the area concerned),
• and sufficient dispositions for enabling a permanent self-evaluation process, with regular feed-back from the local partners and population as well as from the authorities acting as principals for the project (for, as the work progresses, new problems tend to come up as well as new possibilities, discovered in the interaction with the population and the partners in the project. This enables the project team to share responsibilities on an ever growing scale with the inhabitants and the partners, inciting them to see themselves as owners of the different elements of the project, and thus assuring a better sustainability of the outcomes.)

This is what is discussed in the "Standards" paper under "Urban Professionals" in the Mission-Methods-People department here on e-urban. [Not yet complete, input welcome].

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This is the fourth part of a series of introductions to the drafting of the Mission Statement (Mission, Methods, People - MMP). The preceding ones are: Homepage [EN]:1. Skills, Homepage [EN]: 2. Tools and Homepage [EN]: 3. Standards.

Empowerment
However, in order to get to these better conditions, we have to standardise our own special and particular skills as well! We cannot expect from our commissioners that they limit their precious political elbow room for the sake of our blue eyes. That is why we need to organise, probably by ourselves,

• a standard European licence for project leaders in urban regeneration, based upon an evaluation by a competent and respected international jury.

Why European? - It is true, that bigger countries like the UK (which has the longest experience in integrally approaching inner city problems and partnerships, and who are at this moment organising a "Skills Academy" that will issue diplomas), as well as France and Germany, could do it on their own. But a better solution for them and for the smaller countries lies with the European Union, who are co-financing on a large scale urban regeneration projects and are looking for criteria and standards to spend their money more efficiently.

In order to maintain the quality standards and to overcome the isolation in which most of us have to work, a system of supervision and intervision has to be put in place, between colleagues from all over Europe.

Ideally, this should be shouldered by an university-level set of courses (for researchers and senior UPs) and an academical one for practitioners in the field. But up to now, the academic world, stuck in its traditional sectors, has proven unable to scientifically master the requirements for such a new "specialisation", although there are lucky exceptions.

This matter is discussed in the paper under "Empowerment of U.P.'s" in the sidebar.

Mission and Strategy
This kind of transformations doesn't come about from launching an idea in the air.

• Discussions with colleagues all over Europe,
  
• experiences with the city-networks under URBACT and former Europe-inspired networks,
  
• and my own career in city government,
  
• with NGO's and as a civil servant charged with managing the first Dutch integral area-based regeneration projects, as well as, lastly,
  
• an European consultant to local urban projects and
  
• engagements in research,
  

all those, underpin the "Mission Statement" under Mission-Methods-People (sidebar).
In that paper, we try to design a road to the above discussed transformations.

< Back to the English Homepage 

This is the fifth and last part of a series of introductions to the drafting of the Mission Statement (Mission, Methods, People - MMP). The preceding ones are: Homepage [EN]:1. Skills, Homepage [EN]: 2. Tools, Homepage [EN]: 3. Standards and Homepage [EN]: 4. Empowerment & Mission.

How e-urban works
For the moment (October 2006), we make a soft start, like we do as urban project managers when we tackle a new area, planting some scrubs and painting hope on ugly walls.
The e-urban website tries to do this, by:

• sharing images of our daily practice (sidebar, under "IMAGES": Workplaces by Flickr and Photo-Galleries of events and cities, f.i.: Rencontres 2006),
• highlighting some forerunners in Urban Regeneration (Profiles in Competence, sidebar), first victim of e-urban is Jean Hurstel from Strasbourg (photo),
  
• discussing the value of some upcoming (mainly international European-) events (Agenda-Upcoming Events shows the English-language posts in the Agenda),
• maintaining a central news and discussion blog, the Journal (Main), where you'll also find articles on background issues and more theoretical publications. By clicking on Journal > News [EN], you'll get all Journal posts written in English.
• designing, discussing and developing papers that resume in a more authoritative way the urban practitioners' skills, tools, strategies, standards and ambitions. They are under MISSION METHODS PEOPLE in the Sidebar and can also be accessed through their introductions, as linked to the Homepage.
  
• maintaining a number of individual blogs, called "UrBlogs", like the Regenera UrBlog (that deals with a specific project) and Huib's UrBlog, dealing with his his personal impressions, doubts, failures and accomplishments as an European urban adviser and as administrator of e-urban,
• while slightly more ambition lies behind the Urbipedia- and Babel-sections of e-urban: Our aim is, to build an encyclopaedic collection of topics, elaborated for the use of urban practitioners (Urbipedia), and, at the same time to intervene into the often "Babylonic" confusion of tongues, as old and new words are constantly (re-)invented for aspects of urban policies, that do not mean what they seem to mean to foreign colleagues, or what they used to mean some years ago (Babel),
  
• and, finally, some communication and information facilities like the Forum, the Guestbook, visitors' statistics, blogrolls and links to sites of interest to urban practitioners. (All in the Sidebar).

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