Rainbow Places

I spent a couple of really useful hours last week in a meeting with professionals from a variety of disciplines, including place management and landscape design. This blog is essentially, a set of working notes on what happened, and where the originating process might lead. As is sever the case, it’s also a personal reflection of how I got here — so apologies if I lapse into self indulgence. In case anyone’s put off by the acronyms, I sometimes use GSRD interchangeably with LGBTQ+ — the link leads to a good explanation of the utility of GSRD from Meg-John Barker.

The invites that went out for the meeting set out the goal of creating a new professional LGBTQ+ network for professional members, other practitioners and employees of key organisations in the landscape, place and environment sectors.

The network, Rainbow Places, is being organised by the Landscape Institute in partnership with the Institute of Place Management (IPM), Design Council (DC) and Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management (CIEEM).

The meeting was designed to be cross disciplinary, to bring together LGBTQ+ practitioners and allies from across the disciplines, to talk about how we might form a network that would be supportive, progressive and hopefully inter-sectional in its focus and practice.

Those are ambitions that are central to how I try to work. The issue is always how we translate them into practice.

The idea of a network of professionals who care about places and diversity is fundamental to how I want to work. I am, by definition, the only person in my role at my workplace, and the majority of my peers across the county and the region are not in the same kind of organization. (My day job is as a Parish / Town clerk. There are 150 parishes in our county, approximately, and the parish I run is in the largest 5%). Not all of those parishes have place management as a strategic objective or practice — so sometimes, I can feel very alone.

One of the weaknesses of the profession I work in, and the professional groups I work in, is that I experience place management being driven by economic imperatives that are, in general, hetero normative, and exclusive. Bluntly, town centre management and development sometimes feels like something that the government thinks can be fixed by easy directives and quick messages that rely on tropes about families as units of consumption, and households as economic units. Reading Jane Jacobs writings about American cities, which are sometimes seen as foundational texts of the idea of places and place management, can feel like a paean to the joys of American liberal family values in the post war era. That doesn’t mean Jacobs is wrong, or unreliable, but that the practice of place management can feel like a recitation of normative values. (It’s not just Jacobs who makes me feel that way — reading Daniel Miller’s Theory of Shopping I was repeatedly transported to Saturday morning trips to buy the groceries with my dad, and shopping for school shoes that could stand up to the rigours of a paper round with my mam. Great memories, but possibly not reflective of all the experiences of the communities I work in and with today.)

I grew up in a small town in Wales that was distinguished by its being a statutory new town, planned and organized to the smallest detail. The amount of time and effort devoted to planning and developing Cwmbran did not actually change some of the central elements of my personal experiences. The day that I heard Bronski Beat sing about leaving in the morning with everything you own in a little black case, I experienced a thrill of understanding that my sexual and possibly gender diversity was not something that fitted in the framework of the place where I lived, but was also not unique. In fact, potentially, it was a cliche, but one that reflected the experience of being sexually diverse in a place where that was not an easy option.

I’m hugely fascinated by discussions of how places embrace diversity, and how places accommodate diversity. I’m also troubled, as any one should be, by the way we accommodate some modes of being gay or queer, but exclude others because they don’t fit with our preconceptions or, when we commodify the gay experience into identikit bars and nightclubs in a less popular corner of a city centre, our economic expectations. Bluntly, the pink pound may be the worst thing ever to happen to gender or sexually diverse communities, because, as a concept, it reifies the idea that being diverse only matters if you have pounds to spend.

My experience of being sexually diverse is that it’s much easier being someone who is coded or recognized as male than all the other alternatives, and that I have to be willing to allow others to question and explore my privilege, My experience is also that I have always been able to earn money that privileges me, and allows me access to places that are not an option for others.

That being said, we have to come back to the starting point of this blog, which is about working with colleagues and peers about how we commit to diversity and inclusion within and without our professions, our practices and the places we work in.I’ve had a huge amount of experience of work related organizations, from national roles in trades unions to sitting as a regional rep on the board of the ASDO, the professional organization for committee clerks (a group of people who’re much more fun than they sound).

Understanding how we apply our professional knowledge and our personal lived experiences to the development of a better community of practice, and a better practice, is a challenge for all of us. It’s also something that needs a strategic approach.

Let’s start with some obvious criteria. Places, as defined by place managers, are often quite narrow, quite restricted, and quite limited. Simply put, we measure and define places because someone wants us to manage them. I’m not sure how architects define landscapes (although, having spent a lot of my life in planning committees, I have an idea of how landscapes impact on development control) but I’m willing to bet there’s a similar effect — like Schrodinger’s cat, landscapes only exist because someone decides they need to be looked at. The point of this, for me, is that the power to require a place or a landscape to be looked at, to be defined or managed, is a power that has to be devolved and distributed as widely as possible if it’s not to be merely a function of normative economic activity.

Let me tell you a story about how places can develop. Go back a few decades, and I got a job as doorman in a pub on Canal Street in Manchester. I’d gone there for a pint with someone who worked as a debt tracer for a company in one of the re-used commercial buildings around the canal. I left with a job as doorman. It was a well known gay pub, but at lunchtimes, it was mainly a pub for office workers and university staff from the surrounding buildings.For someone whose sexuality was a contested space that didn’t fit the available labels, that job was like being offered a course at night school. I think it’s safe to say that I grew up quickly.

At night Canal Street was a place for cruising, for kerb crawling, and for people who were trying to make an LGBTQ+ place out of a liminal space on the edge of the city centre. If you spent time in the area before and after dusk your experience was a case study in the intersections of place uses and time throughout the day and night. Since, at the time, my professional community was defined by a shared commitment to not being hit too hard in the head, I may not have appreciated this as clearly as others did. My understanding that the emergent community on Canal Street developed a sense of itself in resistance to a hostile environment — we were described as swimming in a cesspool of our own making by the then Chief Constable — was a key component in my current understanding that places are shaped by culture and ideas as well as by structures and management.

The possibility of talking to professionals who understand the story I’ve just told who have the technical skills to translate those experiences into some new, and inclusive realities, is pretty much central to how I work now. ANy practice that leads to a divide between place managers or place makers, and other professions that feed into the experience of place, like landscape architects, highways engineers or planners, seems to me to be an obstacle to progress. A public debate about the way in which we design and experience places, landscape and movements seems to me to be central to inclusion..

Let me share a personal anecdote about places. I live in a late Victorian terrace in a small town in Northumberland. My house was built on land reclaimed from the North Sea in the nineteenth century by a feudal landlord, mainly using colliery waste as infill. When I walk my dog, it’s usually onto a field that used to be the railway sidings for a local colliery, then onto a modern woodland that was planted on the remains of the colliery spoil heap and an associated railway embankment. In the aftermath of Aberfan, levelling spoil heaps was a popular activity for local councils, funded by central government. They were managing places and spaces, but in a way that was less obviously about places and spaces than it was about government’s need to avoid being blamed again in the future, so that it could say that something had been done Sometimes, I wonder if place management projects are less about creating the best places again and much more about the political needs of government; do we need to have a much more critical focus on the needs of governments?

That being said, I need to come back to Rainbow Places. If I’m in a room of people, one of my first questions is ‘why are they here’? As soon as I ask the question, it turns on its head. Why am I here?

I’m lucky, I’m in a privileged position, formed as much by my queerness as anything else, that essentially requires others to accept my lived experience, but also to accept that how I’m seen now may not be the whole story of who I’ve been or how I’ve lived. I think that’s the very definition of queerness, that my story is complicated, and also unfinished.

I’m also in a privileged position, I have spent a lot of time around the trades union movement, around the practice of party politics, and a lot of time in local government, where playing by the rules is still something that is respected. As I grow and learn, I realise that I may have become one of the people who helps define the rules, or who helps locate and move the Overton window.

So to start with, I’m the kind of person who should be able to say to peers, and colleagues, that I know a little bit about employment law and equalities, and that I can be a supportive voice when they need a friend. Half a decade coaching within a large organization, built on the base of a university diploma in coaching and a strong regional coaching network which enabled supervision and supportive working, mean that I can bring some experience and skills to the table if Rainbow Places decides that supporting colleagues is part of the offer. I suspect I’m not the only one in the emerging group who has these sorts of skills. My view is that Rainbow Places needs a way of telling peers and colleagues that there are colleagues and friends out there who will provide support and friendship, and to develop a model of mentoring that attempts to overcome the structural disadvantages that colleagues from the GSRD community experience.

The second challenge I think a group like Rainbow Places needs to do is to demonstrate how it contributes to professional development, if at all. I’m thinking about my experience of the ADSO now; I had a few happy years travelling round England teaching committee clerks how to manage committees, and my view is that an organization like Rainbow Places needs to decide if it wants to offer continuing professional development. If it does, it probably needs the support of an experienced training organization (the ADSO was superbly supported, in my experience, by a regional local government employers organization) and a clear understanding of the scope of its offer. My view is that there’s room and space within the coalition of professional bodies around Rainbow Places to run an annual conference and regular seminars that might also enable practitioners and students to grow and develop their practice and theoretical positions.

The third arena in which I think an organisation like Rainbow Places might contribute is in engaging with entrepreneurs who are developing or seeking to conserve diverse places. I’m using entrepreneur in the broadest possible sense; places are sometimes created or conserved by social or moral entrepreneurs, not just those who have a financial stake in the outcome. The support might be nothing more than a signposting process, or perhaps the facilitation of engagement with potential contractors or professionals, but it seems to me to be no different to lawyers supporting pro bono work with deserving cases.

Those are some of the opportunities I think Rainbow Places opens up; I hope it’s a dialogue that’s going to continue, and move forward.