‘The concept of sustainable communities touches on far more areas than I thought it would’

Harold Wilson once said a week was a long time in politics. Well, a term is certainly a long time in a foundation degree in sustainable communities. We’ve covered so much already and I’m not even half way through the first year.

The focus so far has been on two things. Firstly, we’ve been getting to grips with the key concepts and exploring the different theories about what makes a sustainable community. If a place is to be somewhere people will want to live and work, what do you have to get right? What works?

Sir John Egan’s now famous wheel is pretty hard to beat for sheer comprehensiveness, I have to say. His eight spokes – including the economic, the social and the cultural, the built environment, transport, governance, services, the environment, and equity – seem to have it covered. We can all argue about how best to ensure each of these is addressed properly. But few can deny that all of them need to be given due consideration.

All of which brings home the sheer breadth of the subject. Nothing quite prepared me for that. The concept of sustainable communities touches on far more areas than I thought it would.

Secondly, we’ve been looking back a lot, getting a sense of the history of the whole sustainable communities agenda. It’s fascinating to learn all that’s gone before, from the genesis of such ideas in the 1950s and 1960s through to the Tories’ City Challenge concept in the 1990s and then the approach of New Labour since 1997. I’ve even taken up the tutors’ advice to read the first report of Lord Rogers’ urban task force.

A lot’s clearly been achieved in the last decade, and cities such as Manchester are shining beacons of how successful urban regeneration can be delivered. But there’s still a lot of work to be done – not least in the areas of environmental sustainability, housing quality and transport infrastructure. But with an industrial legacy so much greater than our European neighbours, perhaps dealing with the problems of a post-industrial world was always going to be harder for us.

So that’s the broad brush of the first few months studying towards my first degree. What of the detail?

I’ve already finished two assignments (passes achieved in both I am pleased to report) and been out on my first field trip (to a deprived estate in Newcastle).

The first assignment, as part of the Introduction to Sustainability module, was a self-assessment exercise aimed at reviewing one’s own skills in areas such as writing, numeracy and presentation skills. The idea was to make an honest assessment of the areas you might want to improve. I’d say I am reasonably confident in most areas, though I could definitely do with more experience in making presentations.

So, it was lucky that the second assignment offered a chance to do just that – albeit as a group. Presenting as a team does give you a sense of ‘safety in numbers’ so I’m not sure it helped address any of my confidence issues. But it was a useful exercise nonetheless.

The presentation was part of the Researching Sustainable Communities module, and our group task was to tell a community (cleverly disguised as our tutors) how we would carry out a piece of research into safeguarding Bangladeshi children in Newcastle. We were asked to consider what sort of information we would need to give community stakeholders.

Working as a group was fine, however the logistics of putting together the presentation outside of class time was difficult. We all wanted to have an input yet we all lived in different parts of the country. The only answer seemed to lie in bouncing emails backwards and forwards (complete with 5MB attachments and lots of track changes). We’ve asked the tutors could we find some way of utilising Blackboard – the university’s electronic, online teaching resource – for future group work. That is, could a group piece of work be put up on this part of the university website for colleagues to access, amend and comment on? Watch this space.

This is the second blog from David Campbell in a series about the Academy’s foundation degree.