Community garden project growing out of control?
Over a year ago the IWCA offered to help the organisers of the community garden at Gillians Park by organising a team to carry out the digging work. It was clear that the available funding of £20,000 wouldn’t go very far and the idea was to save labour costs. Little did we know how the project would develop in the ensuing months.
Over a year ago the IWCA offered to help the organisers of the community garden at Gillians Park by organising a team to carry out the digging work. It was clear that the available funding of £20,000 wouldn’t go very far and the idea was to save labour costs. Little did we know how the project would develop in the ensuing months.
What was originally intended as a small scale venture with a five-figure budget has mushroomed into a major development with a projected cost of £200,000 and a wider remit—security of the park in general. Recognition of the problems occurring in and around the park, such as drug abuse and antisocial behaviour, only confirms that the IWCA was fully justified in highlighting the concerns voiced by residents in relation to the park and in conducting campaigns on these issues over the last few years.
However, although problems in the park are finally being acknowledged this doesn’t guarantee that the outcome of the new project will make any real difference. A major portion of the funding for the initiative is expected to be spent on redesigning security aspects of the park. Yet when the park was originally laid out consideration would no doubt have been given to designing out potential criminal and antisocial behaviour.
This was standard practice among planners at the time, with the local polytechnic (now Oxford Brookes) having its own urban design department that had developed a model to take the social realities of an area into account.
We don’t know how much attention the original designers of Greater Leys paid to such matters but if they did then the measures put in place have been easily circumvented by those who want to misuse the park. The question that has to be asked now is: how and why will it be any different this time around?
It is hardly reassuring to learn that an extra cost to the project will be a community consultation exercise of the type that seems to be essential to any project these days.
Naturally the IWCA has nothing against asking people what their views are. In fact we regard our own door-to-door surveys as an essential part of our role in local politics. However, we carry out this consultation strictly as a means to end—in order to address the issues raised by residents.
Our concern with the model of consultation that will be used by the Community Garden/Gillians Park project is its tendency to become an end in itself, bearing little relationship to and, crucially, having minimal impact on the issues to be addressed.
In the past such exercises have lead to the collection of various viewpoints with little attempt to identify common themes or gauge the level of support for one idea over another. This has allowed those holding the purse strings to cherry pick the issues they want to address, paradoxically allowing the community no say at all in what the funding is to be spent on.
We may not have got much for the £20,000 originally available but are we going to get ten times the benefit from the new £200,000 project (funding has not yet been secured)?
Mistakes may have been made with the original design of Gillians Park that need to be rectified but there is no guarantee that whoever comes in next won’t make different mistakes or fail to address the most pressing issues. That being the case, why not give the community genuine control over the project and give those members who want to get stuck in the freedom to make those mistakes? Who knows, they may surprise all the experts with what they come up with.
As far as ground work is concerned, the IWCA’s offer still stands. Surely, though, the new budget of £200,000 should allow the hire of a digger to go with all the designers and community consultants. But perhaps that’s just too simple.
Leys Independent, issue 25, October 2004
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