Spare me the details

Town & Country Planning, June 2006

It is a serious sign of middle age, but 1981 seems like yesterday to me.  I mention this partly because the early 1980s are suddenly in vogue – there is the television series Line of Beauty to prove it – and partly because it was the year of a critical piece of research which provided a clue about how to fight crime.

             

It was then that an article called ‘Broken Windows’ appeared in the magazine Atlantic Monthly, by the sociologist George Kelling.

             

Now at Rutgers University, Kelling's article made public detailed research in the South Bronx area of New York.  If you broke one window there in a deserted block and mended it the following morning, the building would stay intact.  But if you didn’t, every window would be broken within 72 hours.

             

This discovery provided the theoretical basis for the policy that the New York police put into effect in the 1990s.  Not just Rudolph Giuliani’s zero tolerance policies, but also the very local accords between police and neighbourhood groups which really made the difference.

 

The lesson was that, actually, big policies don’t matter very much compared to small ones.  It is the little things that make a difference to crime: the tiny signs that signal to criminals that their behaviour will be tolerated there: a certain anonymity, rubbish in the street, broken windows.

             

When the dramatic drop in crime is discussed in this country, unfortunately, policy-makers only seem to know about zero tolerance.  They even put it into effect in a few selected places, forgetting that this simply moves the little signs of disorder elsewhere.  It is well known, of course, that zero tolerance is massively expensive and impossible to put into effect everywhere.

             

Why do UK politicians fail to understand the lessons of New York – those local agreements and partnerships, exhaustingly negotiated via the Citizens’ Committee of New York City, that rebuilt trust between police and locals?  I can only think it is because of the British official contempt for the local.

             

They do not grasp that little things are important.  It offends them: for British officials, the key task of policy is to excise the little things altogether.

             

The other current fad of the chattering classes this year is modernism.  There are two exhibitions in London running at the moment, and I realise I risk trespassing on regular readers’ patience – if there are any – for returning to the subject again.

             

But I recently came across a fascinating insight into this business of little things.  It was a quotation by the head of the Bauhaus women’s weaving workshop in the 1920s.

             

Women are delighted by childlike qualities, colour, ornament and surface design, he said – and it was a him.  “Their failure is to be absorbed by detail and never to grasp the bigger picture.”

             

I should explain that, despite the fact that the women’s weaving workshop was by far the most successful aspect of Bauhaus in the early days – the only department where women could be official members – it was excised from the modernist canon.

             

But the sentence does reveal how the early modernists prided themselves on their lordly grasp of broad abstraction, which went with their determination to remove detail altogether from their designs.

             

What does all this prove?  Not that the modernists invented this heresy: there is a pompous lawyer in Bleak House whose catchphrase is a limp “please, no details”.

             

I think it is that some of the more disreputable tenets of modernism are still hanging around in Whitehall, and it is preventing them from making things happen at local level.

             

The trouble is, the people who run Britain these days – modernists to the core in their contempt for history and details – still believe this.  They still think that the business of solving problems goes like this.

             

First, they take an especially intractable problem about neighbourhoods, communities and places, then they remove all of what they see as the dull and mundane specifics and the miserably feminine details.

             

Second, they formulate some abstract maxims that can apply to any situation or any community.

             

Third, they appoint some worthy from the public sector who can be trusted to put those maxims into effect without regard to local peculiarities.

             

Fourth, they assign some kind of narrow measure to every aspect of the subtraction, and convince themselves that you can somehow capture and pin down the progress.

             

What do they achieve?  Absolutely zilch, though the metrics appear otherwise.  And this miserable ineffectiveness stems from the same loftily contemptuous attitude towards detail.

             

Because actually, you can’t separate the general from the specific.  It is the little things that really matter – the looks exchanged between neighbours, the small repairs to minor pieces of vandalism – that will make the difference between success and failure in a neighbourhood.

             

So let’s hear it for the little things.  It may be parochial, it may have a whiff of blue collar about it, it may ignore all the rules about legislating for individual cases, but it works.