His prescription is more housing supply to accompany environmental improvements. But we need to think a bit more carefully about this to get the medicine right for places like London.

As he points out, the economic benefits of making an area more desirable will largely go to existing home owners and landlords as the value of the land, and therefore the rent they can charge, increases. Lower income people will be forced to move, presumably (according to Jim’s argument) to less liveable areas. Council and housing association tenants who are secure in their homes gain a nicer environment, but they have no direct stake in the increased value of the land their homes sit on.

Building more homes as Jim suggests could help to keep prices down, meaning less of a windfall gain for land owners and possibly more stable rents. But in practice, due to London’s policy of “mixed and balanced communities”, deprived areas tend to see council housing demolished and replaced overwhelmingly with housing for sale in order to “balance out” the social “mix” of people in the area. There’s no way anyone with an average income and average wealth would be able to buy a new flat in most areas of London on the open market.

The flats will be bought by wealthier-than-average people, and probably many then let on the private market, with a good number of those subsidised by housing benefit. So while more supply might dampen the economic consequences of making an area more liveable, and while it might spread the wealth a little more widely, the economic benefits will still mostly go to wealthier people.

You would need to increase house building across London to 50% higher than Boris Johnson’s aspirational target just to stabilise prices. It would be interesting to know whether there is enough spare land and available development finance to raise supply levels high enough in order to gradually reduce prices so that the benefits of new homes would be principally accrued by ordinary Londoners.

But there are other ways in which we can reduce unequal access to nice local environments while maintaining or reducing levels of economic inequality. Housing supply is undoubtedly part of the picture, but policies need to be a bit more sophisticated to achieve this aim.

One simple policy would be to try to build lots more council housing in wealthier areas that already enjoy high environmental quality. That would require a government to reinstate an adequate housing capital budget; the new budget for London in 2011-15 is two-thirds lower than than the budget for 2008-11!

Another would be to ensure all the new housing is put into the control of a Community Land Trust, which owns the land and so can keep homes permanently affordable. Members of the Trust, usually a co-operative, use any rise in land values to benefit the local community and not private individuals. To date, there is only one example of this in London – Coin Street. Despite valiant efforts and credible plans from various other communities, the HCA, GLA and government have done little to make this concept happen.

A third more radical solution – radical as in dealing with the root of the problem (from radix, Latin for ‘root’) – would be to bring back taxation on land. Winston Churchill and Lloyd George both tried, and failed, to do this at the turn of the 20th century. They were blocked by wealthy landowners in the Lords, whose ancestors got rid of them as the power of the Crown diminished.

We have a tax system that raises income off hard work and consumer goods, and that leaves people to rake in huge gains from increases in land values and capital gains with comparatively little or no tax. If we brought back “schedule A” taxes, land values wouldn’t rise so much, the benefits could be clawed back for investment in affordable housing, all local residents could therefore benefit including council tenants, and people might be encouraged to invest their savings in productive stocks and shares rather than dead bricks and mortar.

These solutions have all been applied in the not-too-distant past. But as with the debate over the National Planning Policy Framework, they seem to get overlooked in simplistic debates over false choices like “housing supply vs. conservation”.

Jim’s post is much more sophisticated, looking at the relationship between environmental improvements and the housing market. But his prescription – more supply – needs to be equally sophisticated to ensure that we deliver environmental and social justice side by side.

London Mutual Credit Union, for example, is a not for profit organisation that provides ethical financial services to Southwark and Lambeth boroughs. These services include savings accounts, current accounts and loans to people who find themselves financially excluded from high street banks. They have no shareholders, and all their profits are returned to members.

Unlike Wonga & co they are genuinely providing useful services without looking to make a very sizeable profit off the backs of the idiots and the vulnerable.

Anyone struggling financially would also be best off seeking help from the Citizen’s Advice Bureau and checking out the many handy tips on web sites like Money Saving Expert (a personal favourite).

Thankfully we won’t have Wonga sponsoring our public transport network this New Year’s eve. Apparently Boris has gone for a booze company instead, who promise to promote responsible drinking. Cheers!

I embarked on my own obsessive photo-documentary project with a friend in an otherwise ordinary market town many years ago, snapping photos of ugly gardens in Bedford. For a year or so I couldn’t walk along a street without noting ugly gardens and trying to remember their location. Perhaps a precursor to my mapping hobby?

The project was intended as a loving tribute to the dull places in which most of us live, and a comment on the influence of the endless gardening TV programmes at the time rather than a criticism of the owners. I doff my hat to anyone who makes an effort to do more with their garden than store old washing machines and weeds.

Like Jenny we ended up arousing the interest of the local media, which in turn led to a full page spread in the Daily Mail. We turned down subsequent invitations to debate garden design with TV personality gardeners on BBC Breakfast and Richard and Judy because they obviously missed the point and wanted us to attack the celebs or the garden owners.

It’s nice that Jenny clearly likes the chicken shop fronts, and isn’t just sneering.

My personal favourites aren’t all chicken takeaways, but you can find them on Denmark Hill. It starts with a Pizza Hut, which has been bested by a Tasty Hut just two doors over, followed a little further south by a Tasty House. Who will raise them a Tasty Mansion?

First, I go everywhere by bicycle, which means speed limits and London congestion are of very little relevance to my journey times. But I noticed that journey planners like CloudMade’s offer wildly optimistic journey times for cars. Even ignoring congestion, I thought, they can’t be taking account of speed limits, which across London are lower than the national assumptions. For example, most main roads have a 30 mph speed limit and a growing number of roads, residential and main, have a safer 20 mph limit.

The second reason is that speed limits have been a big issue for cyclists recently, featuring in campaigns around issues like Blackfriars Bridge and Southwark’s Transport Strategy.

So here’s a snapshot of our data around Peckham and East Dulwich after a few sessions on my evening commute, using ITO’s excellent tool:

Orange roads are 30 mph, green are 20 mph or lower, grey are main roads without any data; all the minor roads without speed limit data just show through from the background. Getting more roads down to 20 mph will make them much calmer, more pleasant and safer for people on foot and bike.

Not a bad start, but we have a long way to go! I could probably get data out of TfL and Southwark Council. But I’m interested in seeing what I can actually find on the ground, both because the two sometimes don’t match up and because it made me aware of just how varied the signposting is.

With some roads it’s very obvious – it’s a short residential road with a signpost and a huge “20 mph” painted onto the road. On other roads you could easily miss it. Walworth Road has a 20 mph limit, but if you missed the single signpost going either north or south past endless distracting shops, signposts and shoppers, and buses that often block your view, you could be forgiven for assuming it’s 30 mph like most other roads.

Back to OpenStreetMap, it would be good to get better coverage of speed limits. I notice that some parts of the country like Norwich are very well mapped, while London – with the exception of my experiment, Islington and a little bit of Tower Hamlets – barely has any.

One for a winter mapping party, Harry? Or maybe another good reason to get cycling and pedestrian groups interested? I’ll talk to the Southwark campaigners…

Emer draws on the work of Jürgen Habermas, a sociologist and philosopher whose theory of the system and the lifeworld helps describe the difference between New Public Management and Open Governance. In short, the New Public Management model involves government (“the system”) choosing the tune and forcing the public (“the lifeworld”) to dance to that tune (“colonisation”). You can only hold government to account according to the data that public managers decide to collect and disseminate. Open Governance on the other hand allows for meaningful dialogue between government and civil society, leading to what Habermas called “communicative action” where people talk about complex issues and then act (and hold to account) based on a common understanding.

While the London Assembly has started to embrace open data and social media, I think it has been fairly superficial. Or rather, in Emer’s terms, it has remained within New Public Management model. Scrutiny of the Mayor is carried out by committees of Assembly Members with goals and performance established by public managers and politicians; social media is used for the most part to communicate that to the public.

The London Assembly, for those out of the loop, is an elected body of 25 politicians who hold the Mayor of London to account.

I want to pick up on a comment by Janet Hughes, Head of Scrutiny in the London Assembly, that “media, bloggers, members of the public… should all form part of an overall picture – its not about competing with each other but it’s about all these different parts coming together to ensure maximum accountability and transparency”.

I want to very quickly sketch how committees currently carry out their scrutiny work, then suggest a way in which they might embrace an open scrutiny model that allows for communicative action rather than colonisation. I don’t pretend to have arrived at a complete description of Scrutiny 2.0, but hopefully it will provoke some further comment.

Public scrutiny in the old model

When the Environment Committee carried out two investigations into street trees, first in 2007 and then again in 2011, the subject and the terms of reference for the scrutiny were drawn up by Assembly Members and support staff. In each case the public were invited to submit written evidence according to those terms and further framing questions; the public were already colonised by the system. Invited experts gave evidence at public meetings, with scant opportunity for further public input. The reports were then drafted by support staff entirely within the Assembly, behind closed doors, and when the Assembly Members signed off on the reports the public were offered a finished product.

Some very good scrutiny products, I should add. But to the extent that they could be involved further, the public were left to comment on the committee’s work and press Assembly Members if they wished the committee to follow any aspect up.

At times, there is even an understandable but worrying tendency to think that the public’s input isn’t particularly helpful. Committees often scrutinise complex technical subjects such as the housing market, and so highly trained support staff look to highly trained experts for input. No effort is made to engage in a wider discussion with the public; it is more time consuming and, compared to expert discussion, does little to advance scrutiny according to the terms and frames set within the system by support staff and politicians.

Now, the second report on street trees was particularly interesting because it identified lack of data as a major barrier to the committee’s being able to hold the relevant public bodies to account. In the New Public Management model, the system wasn’t enabling proper performance management.

It also carried a case study on the local community in Elephant & Castle crowdsourcing their own data to bolster their case for saving the “Heygate forest”, something I’ve blogged about here.

Darren Johnson, Green member of the Assembly visiting the Heygate Estate to meet local activists

The activists didn’t map the trees and estimate their financial value as part of an antagonistic anti-council and anti-developer campaign; they are trying to engage in a meaningful dialogue with both before the council and developer draw up plans behind closed doors that decide the fate of the trees. Planning consultations at that stage are a perfect example of the system colonising the lifeworld.

If only the council and developers would really embrace the activists’ open approach it would be a wonderful example of Habermas’ communicative action.

Open scrutiny

Now then, what would the Assembly committee’s next scrutiny on street trees look like if this process really was “adaptive and iterative”, if the committee sought to “come together [with the public] to ensure maximum accountability and transparency”?

The second report published this year was iterative in that it updated the findings of the first, and adaptive in that it looked at new issues such as open data. But that iteration and adaptation was done within the system, by Assembly Members and support staff.

Perhaps in the next four years we will see more examples of activists using data to record and communicate their stories just like the Heygate activists – about trees being cut down, ruined by overzealous council pollarding or damaged by weapon dog training. If the support staff were to pick up on this not just as an indication of issues it should examine but as data and perspectives to be analysed then the iteration and adaptation between reports would start to be more open without needing a costly and difficult public consultation exercise.

Maybe social media like Twitter will also be so widely used by Assembly Members, support staff and activists that the work in between public meetings will be communicated and therefore in part conducted online, in public. Assembly Members might discuss terms of reference with activists; support staff and activists might discuss initial findings and potential recommendations. Bloggers from avid Mayor watchers to tree huggers would contribute their own more developed thoughts as the scrutiny process unfolds, offering useful new data, questions and perspectives for the committee to consider. Iteration and adaptation would be rapid, throughout the process of a single report than rather than in the years between reports.

In this model, the committee doesn’t assert itself outside the lifeworld, part of the system that scrutinises another part of the system. Instead, the committee conducts its scrutiny in partnership with the lifeworld, with the public.

The London Assembly remains relevant at least because of its well trained and managed staff, and necessary in view of its democratic function.

What do you think?

I’m no futurologist so my sketch of open scrutiny is probably deeply unadventurous. It is conceived from within the New Public Management model of a committee of politicians scrutinising a topic and producing a report. But I think it takes us beyond that model in an important sense, seeing scrutiny as a kind of communicative action where the committee, bloggers and activists come together to, in Janet’s words, “ensure maximum accountability and transparency”.

What do you think?

A photo of the Heygate Estate in Elephant & Castle, London

One of the best features of the Heygate Estate is the urban forest that has grown there in the past thirty or forty years. But the few remaining residents and local campaigners fear the “regeneration” will see many or even most of them cut down.

Through a friend who is involved with the campaign, I came along to help them map the trees that are there now. Knowing what you have seems like a good first step to saving it.

So I helped them enter the trees into OpenStreetMap using the OpenEcoMaps install of the Potlatch 2 editor, set-up a simple map that shows them as clickable objects on a map, and provided them with a spreadsheet of all the data at the end of the process.

Some other clever bods in the campaign then used a system called CAVAT (Capital Asset Value for Amenity Trees) that puts a financial value on the trees. They estimate the value to be well in excess of £7.6m! Here is the CAVAT valuation laid on top of OpenStreetMap:

I’m glad to say this has become a case study in a recent London Assembly report into the state of street trees in London, which makes recommendations about the need for open street tree data and uses this Heygate mapping to show both the demand for this data and how useful it can be.

Since mapping the trees ourselves, I’ve received a file with all the trees in Southwark from the council with permission to use and share it, which is brilliant. I did a test import in East Dulwich/Peckham Rye, but stopped short because of rendering issues. It would be great to be able to import the lot and see if citizens can keep the data more up to date than the council, or perhaps even collaborate with the council and Trees for Cities?

The most important thing for Greens to consider is that we will most likely only get one, two or three London Assembly members out of 25. There’s no room for colourful characters with narrow interests, bad tempers or a tendency for self indulgence. They need to be good communicators, both practical and radical, collegiate and disciplined.

We need to pick people who can get complicated and often innovative messages across to the mainstream media, to other politicians, to the public. It’s no use being Mr or Mrs Brains if you baffle people when you talk to them, or bore journalists with predictable soundbites. Politicians have staff to help with policy research and messaging, but nobody between them and their audience.

We rely on our Members to put across a good, rounded image of our party. Whatever your particular politics, will your choices show that the Green Party is both practical and radical, that we are able to achieve significant changes to Mayoral policy at the same time as advocating a radically different vision of London? Radical idealists might spend four wasted years making good speeches; practical realists might forget the reason they’re Green while working for minor concessions.

Our two/three members have, in the past, won a great many gains for London by working with other political parties and at times with the Mayor. The comparatively collegiate culture of the Assembly is one of the joys of working there. People who enjoy tribal politics, who thrive on factions and who find it difficult to work with others – especially if they’re those hated Lib Dems or “sell out” New Labourites, won’t get very far in the Assembly.

To focus on these basic political skills takes the final quality: discipline. Watching Caroline Lucas over the past few years, it’s been remarkable to see how hard she works to find realistic radical ideas, get them across to the public and the media in a compelling way, and work with NGOs, politicians across the political spectrum and anyone else willing to help her achieve our goals. To compare her to someone like George Galloway, who is an excellent speaker and fires a lot of people up, is to compare an effective small party politician to a character that can only be tolerated in a large party.

Of course this portrait of an effective small party politician reflects my politics; you may think we’re in this game for an entirely different reason. If you think there’s no progress without revolution or the Mayoralty, these reasons may not sway you.

It’s well worth actually watching the webcasts of a few Assembly meetings, perusing some committee reports and reading some press releases to get an idea of the work they do.

If you like the look of that work and can see its value, you might ask yourself: would this candidate be able to work cross-party on affordable housing funding and river deculverting, gain media coverage on these issues, and win some real gains for London?

Maps are one medium where I’ve been trying to bring these worlds together.

Stepping into the ring

In the left corner we have people like Rob Hopkins, who has just written a great summary of Transition Town groups mapping wild food, local groups and visions of the future. This wonderful work makes use of relatively open tools like Google Maps, but (so far as I can see) they make absolutely no use of open data, and keep all of their data in their own separate mapping systems.

In the right corner we have open data crowds like OpenStreetMap, and after some prodding from me the Greater London Authority and the Department for Energy and Climate Change. Together we have stacks of open data on renewable energy generators, allotments, recycling bins and more. But so far we haven’t made it easy for activists who aren’t super-geeks to do interesting things with this data, nor to use platforms like OpenStreetMap to store data they gather.

This is a great shame because both camps believe in the value and power of co-operation and collaboration.

Here in Southwark (south east London) I have found several local groups, the council and the Greater London Authority all trying to map local food growing, or at least interested in getting the results. Why not all work together on one open dataset that everyone can then use?

With OpenStreetMap it is possible for everybody and their dog to gather data of interest to them, and put it all in one place. That way you don’t duplicate effort, and you benefit from other people’s work.

It should also be possible to share the tools so local groups don’t need a resident geek to reinvent the wheel. Google Maps enabled people to make maps of local fruit and nut trees with ease; sadly OpenStreetMap has required too many geeky power skills to do this.

Touching knuckles

Which is why I have been working on the grandly-titled Sustainable London Map (ta-dah!) with much-appreciated help from another Sam Smith, Shaun McDonald and Andy Allan. This offers two tools for local groups:

First, easy access to the data we hold. My tool generates KML files with nice pointy clicky icons for all sorts of data related to low carbon power, waste, transport, food and culture. It pulls fresh data out of OpenStreetMap every hour. You can use these KML files on your own map or desktop programme, and you can embed the map itself if you don’t already have one.

Second, a customised editor (using Potlatch 2) that focuses only on the features that the map shows and that makes the presentation of all the OpenStreetMap data a little less overwhelming.

If every community group, charity and government body in London used OpenStreetMap then we would all be contributing to one definitive map instead of all doing our own thing ignorant of each other.

I have extended a hand to friends and contacts in my local Southwark who want to map food growing and renewable energy generators. Through various emails and pub meetups I hope they will begin to use the maps on their web sites (as Peckham Power have done) and to use the customised editor to enter new data.

I have also started discussions with staff at the GLA (who lead on Londonwide food strategy and projects like Capital Growth) and Southwark Council. To my slight surprise, they have been very enthusiastic about the potential of this work. If our tentative first steps in Southwark bear fruit, there is interest in rolling this approach out across London.

Pulling my punches

Given that this is a hobby, competing with a life and my Green Party responsibilities, I’m taking it all quite slowly. I know there are good reasons whymany groups will want to stick with the tools they already have, perhaps because they don’t have the time to make the switch, or because we don’t yet offer something they need.

But if you’re involved with any mapping exercises for local community groups and would like to find out how you could make better use of open data, or if you’re an open map data geek interested in helping bridge the divide with local groups, get in touch by leaving a comment below.

But should we really be so keen? I’m not so comfortable for two reasons.

First, how up-to-date is our data? I’ve recently re-surveyed my local area in minute detail and found several takeaways, shops and banks that have closed down or changed hands. I’ve also discovered that we have very poor coverage of cycle parking in Southwark following two years of massive expansion by the council.

How likely is it that these are being regularly checked and updated? I suspect “not very likely at all”, and have therefore decided to delete all my points of interest in my local area that I’m not confident anyone will update. I mostly deleted minor shops, especially those like hairdressers that change a lot and that aren’t very important to know about. I’ve left all the amenities like banks, post offices, cycle parking and pubs.

My second concern is that the completeness and up-to-dateness will vary according to the number of active and nutty OpenStreetMappers in the area. And that tends to translate to affluent areas.

In their useful paper on the “completeness” of OpenStreetMap, Muki Haklay and Claire Ellul issue this rather stark warning:

“The large number of contributors for applications such as OSM or Google Map Maker might convey the false impression that [they] represent a real democratisation of geographical information collection, whereas the reality is that these many voices are coming from the more affluent and naturally empowered sections of society. This cacophony is likely to be silencing the voices of the marginalised and excluded even further.”

As I have auto-traced buildings in deprived parts of Southwark from Ordnance Survey StreetView tiles and sporadic re-surveying, I have noticed the very patchy and thin coverage of points of interest in those areas. Probably half the churches and schools are marked with nodes (no ways describing sites and building, though I’ve tried to draw them in) whilst the rest are missing entirely; occasionally there is a smattering of takeaways and convenience stores.

A comparison of allotments with an open dataset from the Greater London Authority reveals a similar pattern (previewed above). Most of those we have missed are in deprived areas. I’ll be revealing more work on completing our allotment coverage soon, courtesy of some help from friends and contacts in various local/regional government departments.

Muki and Claire suggest public agencies should step in to improve coverage in deprived areas, but that requires a high level of committment to OSM from those agencies. Currently we are in the very early stages on this front in the UK.

Given all of this, I would be interested to hear what other OpenStreetMap contributors and followers think. Should we bother with minor points of interest like hairdressers and takeaways until public agencies step in? Is it better to leave them out to avoid a database full of out-of-date information that only increases inequalities of coverage?