Ttesting

by Joe Penny


Brixton market traders, part of a program sponsored by Lambeth Council. Source: Young Lambeth

Most people wouldn’t call public-service commissioning exciting, if they even know it exists. Commissioning is the process of coordinating financial support based on assessment of local needs, aspirations and assets. It includes processes of contracting, procurement and outsourcing. It sounds dry and remote from our daily lives, but this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Commissioning is at the heart of how decisions are made about the services we rely on throughout our lives: when we are ill, when we need legal advice, when we want to do something fun in our area. As outsourcing becomes the norm, commissioning has turned into a booming industry. Each year, some $130 billion is spent on outsourced public services — all through a commissioning process of some sort. In other words, if you care about public services and how taxpayer money is spent, you care about commissioning.

Commissioning has great potential as a vehicle for local democratic engagement in urban renewal. Yet it is too often managed by public-sector employees who are too far removed from the people they serve. It doesn’t have to be this way.

At the New Economics Foundation, we’ve been working with a young people’s service-commissioning team in London’s Lambeth district to change the way they allocate funds. The aim is to co-produce the commissioning process. This means working in partnership with people who use and provide local services to decide what the council should be trying to achieve with the dwindling money it has to spend.

An early example of co-producing commissioning involved $32,000 earmarked for a service aimed at young offenders. In the past, a group of professionals would have decided what service they thought would be most effective. They would have then written up a tender that specified what the service would look like, how many people would benefit and how results would be evaluated.

The problem with this process is that it doesn’t incorporate much input from the target population. As a result, it misses out on an invaluable source of expertise. It also runs a high risk of failure because, as countless examples show, when the so-called beneficiaries of a service are not involved in its design and implementation they are far less likely to find it useful.

We did things differently in Lambeth. The first stage involved recruiting a small group of young offenders and paying them in Brixton Pounds for their time and effort. They were responsible for defining outcomes and helping to draw up a service tender. They also interviewed short-listed bidders and decided to fund a talent show organized by local youth. This was not the commissioning manager’s first choice.

What does this tell us about the future of commissioning? At a time when more and more public money is channelled to private companies, and democratic accountability is at risk, co-producing commissioning opens up the potential for inclusive decision-making at the local level.

Of course, this is far from easy. When trust is low, it’s hard at first to get people involved. When people do take part, it’s difficult to manage conflicts and ensure that the process isn’t dominated by the most vocal participants. Despite inevitable challenges, the potential benefits are too great to be ignored.

At its best, co-producing commissioning engages target populations in fair allocation of public funds. It brings people together around a common goal, fostering a sense of collective ownership over local services. In short, it can help kickstart a more democratic approach to urban renewal.

Joe Penny is a researcher at the New Economics Foundation, but the views expressed here are his own. His interests include the production of urban space, security urbanism and the right to the city.

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by Alex Schafran

Virtually everywhere you go in the Parisian banlieue, you will find large signs drawing attention to "urban renovation" — major facelifts for large housing projects (cités), new public spaces in the centers of villages and towns, better integration with the myriad transit projects currently underway, entire blocks of housing.

Omnipresent construction, like most initiatives in France, is being done by a complex network of public, private and semi-public actors operating at every scale. Ideologues of either state or market would be incapable of understanding new development in France, for everything is a public-private partnership when you drill down deep enough. Regardless of who seems to be in charge of a project, there is liable to be a large billboard outside the construction zone with a celebratory rendering of what this space will look like — be it a revitalized public park, a downtown shopping zone or an eco-housing development built by a major developer. This, of course, is nothing unique — billboard-sized renderings have become part of the international language of city-building.



What is notable about these billboards is the people shown occupying the new space. It doesn't take a scholar of race to guess that the answer is not those who look anything like the population of the banlieue.


The actual center of Argenteuil (above) and the rendered version (below).



The shocking thing about the "whitewashing" of places like Argenteuil, Choisy-le-Roi, Villetaneuse, Drancy and Asnières is how thorough it is, and how little it matters if it is formally a public or private venture. For me, what started as a passing observation has evolved into a research project. Of the hundreds of people in what are now dozens of renderings I've encountered in housing projects across four districts (departments), there are only a few people of color. And not only are the white people everywhere, they are often particularly blond and bourgeois or seemingly part of the vast "bobo" class that has started to gentrify places like Montreuil and Pantin. At times it feels like a bad joke: in a major poster for the T8 tramline — which will connect Épinay-sur-Seine with Saint-Denis — the only black person, among over 50 people, was playing basketball.



Although I can't prove quantitatively that this is a false rendering — France doesn't collect data on race, based on a tenet that since race exists only in theory, in theory it doesn't exist — not only do these cities have significant communities of color, I'd bet my bike and camera that many are now majority minority. I'd also be willing to wager that in many communities where these renderings have been tacked up in public space, they have been false for a generation now. Moreover, these renderings belie the fact that people in the public spaces of metropolitan Paris are strikingly diverse, both in the banlieue and in the city itself.



There are a few exceptions to the many disingenuous billboards on display, including the group picture (above) from Argenteuil. But even this one, clearly intended to promote the harmonious vision of a multicultural and inclusive society, erases one of the most visible aspects of life in metropolitan France: Muslim women with head scarves. Spend five minutes on a busy street, in a park, on transit or outside a school at dismissal, and you will realize that women with their heads covered are part of the firmament in contemporary Île de France.


A couple on a bench in Parc Lefévre, Livry-Gargan. (The woman's hair is not red.)

Head scarves are a lightning rod for controversy in theoretically secular France. The urbane nation where James Baldwin felt so at home will surely be aghast at this whitewashing; but even much of the progressive wing of the French establishment would likely sit on their hands at the failure to show women in head scarves occupying public space, even if they are an undeniable presence.

Credits: All pictures by Alex Schafran.

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