Tribute to Robin
I was very saddened to hear of Robin’s death, and continue to feel his loss profoundly. His influence and friendship came less from our joint involvement with the Greater London Enterprise Board between 1982 and 1986 (though there had been some earlier connections in Brighton, where I had been a student teacher and he a lecturer at the university in the 1960s, both of us involved in the New Left there) than from the work Robin subsequently pioneered with SEEDS (the South East Economic Development Strategy). This was a consortium of local authorities in the south-east region keen to experiment with new ideas in economic development, of which Robin was by now regarded as a key exponent - to say the least.
Like Robin, I suspect, I’ve always regarded local government as more important than national government, particularly for those of us who believed in bottom-up approaches to economic and social development and change. It was always stimulating company to travel with Robin, Michael Ward, Sarah Bissett-Johnson, Geoff Mulgan, John Montgomery and others to Basildon, Brighton, Crawley, Harlow, Stevenage, Reading, and other towns in the region (I think Robin also managed to recruit Dieppe into South East England), talking to council members and officers, all of whom thought Robin a god come to earth. ‘I could listen to Robin all day,’ was commonly heard afterwards in the members’ tea-room.
The big idea at that time was post-Fordism, or flexible specialization, a new development in industrial management theory, and upon which Robin was internationally renowned. I will always remember a paper Robin wrote on post-Fordism in municipal park operations. As municipal finance tightened, he argued, local authorities had embraced the economics of mass production, in this case, of the public landscape: bigger machines, fewer workers. As a result, a rich tradition of ornamental gardens, decorative public parks, carefully managed estate lawns and parkland (especially in the New Towns) was giving way to a one-size-fits-all landscape shaped by the gang mower and a proliferation of low-maintenance shrubbery. Also disappearing were municipal nurseries, where skilled horticultural workers produced national and local varieties of plants and flowers. Instead, plants were bought in from commercial nurseries with a much more restricted range (and hence less bio-diversity).
Robin made even criticism kindly and respectful. For example, with his customary good humour, he delighted in telling the story of one town where the handsome gates of an historic park had had to be removed because they were too narrow to allow entry to the new mowing tractor. Thus, he said, the landscape was being re-designed to fit the machinery, not the machinery made to enhance the quality of a uniquely designed landscape.
His intellectual achievements were wide-ranging and many. Apart from developing the London Industrial Strategy, and his long-standing work on fair trade networks across the world, his work on the new economic of waste, published by Demos in 1999 as Creating Wealth from Waste, was for me a key work in public policy, and remains so. Robin’s approach was, as always, counter-intuitive. For him the household dustbin was a treasure-chest of invaluable new material resources, not an embarrassing collection of inert materials that had to be disposed of and forgotten for future generations to worry about. Although waste was ‘the shadow side of the economy’, Robin saw that it was also the basis for a new materials economy that could provide resources, jobs and new forms of active citizenship, as part of a process he called eco-modernisation. Using all the new technologies at our disposal, combined with a different kind of civic politics, there was no reason he argued why a zero-waste economy was not achievable in the future. This was bold stuff and the report was a bravura work of intellectual weight and significance, and of course it ended - as all of Robin’s reports ended - with a ten-point plan.
Robin’s thinking was embedded in systems theory, of self-correcting processes and networks, and, ideally of frictionless circularity based on mutual aid. What goes around comes around. I thought of him recently when reading Robert Macfarlane’s book, Underland, a personal exploration of what goes on in the world out of sight, underneath the land and sea. In the chapter The Understorey, Macfarlane discusses the recent work of forest ecologist Suzanne Simard –and I am sure Robin would have caught on to this research quickly – who have discovered that trees communicate with each other underground. The forest actually looks after itself collectively through a ‘co-operative system’ of collaborative intelligence, sharing awareness of disease and other threatening environmental conditions, the individual trees helping each other survive through a complex system of mutual aid.
Robin’s work was rooted in an understanding of natural ecology, of the importance of the local as the terrain on which all successful political processes first gain traction, and lastly on what he described as ‘the close inter-relation of the formal and informal economies’. For me, this remains everything that a radical politics should be, which is why the environmental movement is now the only game in town.