Land Developments With Trust Deficits
Over the last 3 years Camden Giving has worked with developers to uncover new ways to bring about equality in communities where trust is dwindling, here’s what we’ve learnt and a call out to the entire development sector to steal our ideas.
A steady decline in trust of institutions is now a feature of our lives, it fills us all with a little sadness. And whilst a decline in trust is sad in it’s own right, it’s more crucial than we give it credit and trust is especially crucial to communities who are undergoing rapid change. Because 68% of the UK population say they have a ‘desire for change’ (Edelman 2019 Trust Barometer) and trust is a key ingredient in creating change.
Trust is a human shortcut to get things done efficiently. For example, today I’ve been able to achieve things at work because I’ve put trust in others, I trust that whilst I am at work my small children are safe and happy, I trust that the things my colleagues told me today are true.
My day at work is a relatively simple in comparison to building a large development in a complex community, this is made harder by the news that only 2% of people trust developers and 7% have trust in local authorities when it comes to planning for large scale developments (2019 YouGov Survey). This is sad, but it’s also not helpful in getting anything useful done, for either communities or developers. The good news is, in working with developers who are aware of these issues we’ve uncovered new ways for developers to build trust, below are approaches that have worked in Camden and recommendations made by Camden’s communities:
Trust Communities
Developers, on the whole, are very aware that they aren’t trusted, what they are less aware of is their own lack of trust in communities. Unsurprisingly no one is surveying how many people in decision-making roles, have trust in the people living in communities they are developing, but I’ll make a guess that it’s around the same 2% mark. It’s very hard to trust people who don’t trust you, but someone has to make the first step and we’ve been really excited by the approach taken by Camden Council and Argent, who are developing the Kings Cross estate in Camden, together they worked to allow for £860,000 to be spent on grants for community projects benefitting people who live on and around the development*. These grants are for what the community say they need and the final say is given to a rolling panel of residents who Camden Giving pay and train to make decisions about what the priority should be for the area. The overwhelming response from residents has been surprise and real appreciation that they are trusteed, with one young man telling us how important it made him feel. This process avoids the time old tradition of bad consultation and replaces it with genuine community empowerment.
Don’t just live in 2020
If developers wish to build places that benefit everyone, then they need to have a very hard and painful look at the historical context their development is sitting in. That historical context is going to involve people with wealth, power and privilege using other people to make them even wealthier. The work developers are doing can not be taken away from this historical context, like it or not, your company is a the latest in a long line of people who has done things to communities without power, this stings and you can’t build trust until you feel and understand why it stings. I’d heartedly recommend reading Declonizing Wealth by Edgar Villanueva, which isn’t aimed at the development sector, but could be.
Work with what is there
Despite the overall decline in trust, there are institutions that have community trust. In most communities that’s small charities. The charity sector has much it needs to do to improve trust, but it remains more trusted than for-profit businesses. I recently had a long chat with a 19 year old Camden resident about who he trusted, and the answer was pretty much no one, not his parents, not the police, not businesses, certainly not the local authority, BUT, he did trust 2 people, one a local youth workers and another I’m proud to say is one of my colleagues. If you want to build trust with communities, either by trusting them to give grants, like we’ve done at Camden Giving, or improving engagement in consultation, then local charities will be able to unlock new ways to building more trusting relationships. There are 2 caveats to this: Firstly, no charity can or should paste over bad practices by developers. Secondly, it’s not a good time to be a small charity, so if you need them to build trust (you do), then put a bit of budget behind this.
Don’t just ask people what they need
Communities who have experienced being “handed down to”, have learnt over time the “correct” answers to questions, the answers that people want to hear. So ask a community in London “how do you want to benefit from development?”, you’ll often hear “access to jobs” in response, maybe affordable housing, maybe community space. - We need to find new ways to ask communities what they want and need. One way we are doing this is by putting them in complete control of how funding is spent locally, by paying and training people who aren’t used to being trusted to spend time working out what their community needs from developers. When we’ve worked with developers to do this in Camden, the answer has been different, with more emphasis on community cohesion, bridging divides between generations, faiths, class and backgrounds. This creates a more holistic and complex “community benefit” that goes beyond the usual narrative. The image above shows a social enterprise called Speak Street who are working with migrant and refugee communities in Camden, they were chosen by a resident-led panel to receive funding from HS2 Ltd. because residents felt it was important for the health of their communities that their newest neighbours are being supported. Ultimately, we trust communities to make good decisions and follow through on their decisions 100% of the time.
The hardest things about shifting power to communities is making it ok for mistakes to happen, because they do and will, just as they do when the power sits with decision-makers at developments companies. But this is the sort of work developers need to embrace if they are to build trust.
*You can read more about Camden Giving’s new approach to participatory funding here.