Communitarianism v individualism

Dundee's Evening Telegraph had an interesting double page spread last week on the Ardler area of the city, which "used to be one of Dundee's most deprived areas, but has been transformed by regeneration into a flourishing community". Crime has reduced significantly, and the estate is now the safest in the city.

Of course, it would be difficult to spend millions bulldozing the old "high-density" concrete blocks and multis, and replacing them with more traditional houses, and not have some additional impact on the area, but how precisely has the transformation been achieved? And how did the area's various problems arise in the first place?

The articles quote various of the powers that be, with eminently predictable feelgood words and phrases such as "efforts of the community themselves in taking pride" and "a remarkable spirit and dedication in their pursuit of a better future", neatly encompassed in the headline "Community spirit praised", while some of the actual residents quoted are equally predictably slightly more circumspect.

However, the detail in the articles outline how the change was achieved. Police work closely with the local community safety panel - more feelgood phraseology - and the housing authorities, and any problems are nipped in the bud. Ah, so it was a failure of organisation and policing which caused the problems?

Or perhaps it was environmental factors. One resident mentions the absence of the old tenement buildings: "When someone went in you didn't know what door they were going into." By the same token, another resident attributes the changing population as being a significant factor: "I think a lot of the bad ones moved on when the multis came down."

Oh, so the problem has just been moved on elsewhere? Not the kind of thing that councillors would suggest, of course. Interestingly, and perhaps instructively, a couple of pages away on the Tele's letters page, a resident of a street elsewhere in Dundee complains that it: ...used to be a nice area. It is now being destroyed by troublemakers. There have been flats given to anti-social people and there are large numbers of young people who come into the area and end up fighting." I wonder where they might have come from?

And, of course, the overarching community spirit explanation begs the question, where was this ethos in the past? Equally, the 'community' that is talked of is likely to consist of the small proportion of local residents who get involved in local politics, and when the chair of the Ardler Village Trust and residents' association says that the community policeman "knew everybody", she more than likely means members of the neighbourhood's miniature political bubble rather than the population generally.

Which leads on nicely to an accompanying Tele editorial which, amid the feelgood stuff, says:

People have obviously responded well to the fact that they were given real homes with a front and back garden. Simple things, such as being given the responsibility to look after your own green space, can have a massive impact.

Of course, even the Tories seem to be jumping onto the more collectivist-leaning bandwagon these days - although whether the Big Society is a left wing con or a right wing plot is another question - but perhaps the front and back gardens in Ardler demonstrate that individual responsibility and all that is the key to many of society's ills?

On the other hand, the analysis above clearly shows that the explanation for Ardler's transformation is multi-faceted. Community spirit is no doubt a factor, but however much the politicians like to emphasise it it's perhaps individuals and families and their own little piece of real estate that provides the overriding rationale.

And, of course, the multis were all shiny and new and held up as high-rise communities for the future, once upon a time...