Local Distinctiveness

Losing Your Place : Patina

Age has to be recognised as having been gathered, hence the paradoxical vitality of patina.

Go to Dorset, compare a deep ploughed field of a hundred acres with an area of ten tenacre fields. Read the richness in the latter perhaps neolithic strip lynchetts or medieval ridge and furrow with overlays of Enclosure hedgerows, never ploughed or strewn with herbicide or fertilizer, clear winterbournes and watercress beds : rich in history and natural history. Or go to the East End of London and compare a sixties, seventies or eighties estate with the Huguenot buildings, bagel shops, a mosque in an old synagogue and the tandoori restaurants of Brick Lane.

The crude sacrifices made by large scale and rapid change demean us. The remnants of the accumulation of activity, the layers or fragments of which can be experienced or read, can be added to without recourse to brutalism. Dynamism and vitality should be great allies for local distinctiveness. Attempts to arrest both progress and decay in a Cotswold village, or the cultural melee of Brick Lane, brings danger of reducing the richness and fermentation to leave a frozen moment, the real place and people having sunk below the waves of preciousness or poverty.

Local distinctiveness must be about history continuing through the present (not about the past) and it is about creating the future. There is a great difference in people simply dressing up in Victorian clothes and a festival such as Carnival which builds on gutsy traditions carried forth and back and changed to new circumstances.

Local distinctiveness is about not separating out the many views and many factors, but recognising their synergism. Questions should seek ever greater detail and ever ramifying connections. Yet so many decisions are made based on one dimensional argument or recognizing patterns which are then over simplified, abstracted and turned into strategies and policy statements which could be about anyplace, and will inevitably lead to the building of virtually the same village hall in a comer of Kent or Cumberland, or bypasses through fields and woods with meaning to the locality, building a stile or a scat from a national pattern book, ordering paving and railings which Carlisle, Camden or Christchurch might have, designing carparks for anywhere. It is salutary to recall that utopia means nowhere.. the philosophising which builds the ideal usually imagines nothing has been there before, and that life and culture will evolve no further.

Questing for local distinctiveness must err towards the inclusive and welcoming, it is not about designating areas more beautiful or more derelict or worthy of grants. It is about working on an idea that anyone can use to demonstrate the valuables of their place to anyone else. It is about accepting that places mean more to us than we are able to say, and beginning to talk more to each other at the local level about demanding the best of the new.

It is crucial that knowledge, new ideas and wisdom are shared. The tumbleweed expertise of the professional learnt and practised all over the place, the migrant with new cultural eyes, the indigene with generations of often undervalued place-based wisdom, all have different richnesses of perception to offer.

This implies a radical shift in the way in which we plan and prognosticate... towards more responsive, detailed, fractioned way of changing things. There never has been any need to bulldoze the whole building site, or to demand the pronunciation of your 'h's.

The forces of homogenisation rob us of visible and invisible things which have meaning to us, they devalue our longitudinal wisdom and erase the fragments from which to piece together the stories of nature and history through which our humanity is fed. They stunt our sensibilities and starve our imagination.

And as Bachelard has said 'imagination separates us from the past as well as reality, it faces the future. If we cannot imagine, we cannot foresee'. Our interest in local distinctiveness is a profound concern for our common future.

Losing Your Place
Local
Distinctiveness
Detail
Authenticity
Particularity
References

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