I’ve been doing a fair bit of work on Königsberg and Kaliningrad recently. I was interested in what Kant had to say about Königsberg.
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This graphic made me pause:

What’s missing? It seems that digital democracy has finally killed off politics: there is no mention of politics or political parties.

The diagram is from Delib, a company which produced software behind the UK Treasury’s Spending Challenge. They also sell their digital consultation software to lots of local authorities and governments.

So this white paper could just be read as marketing. However, I think it encapsulates a prevailing attitude on how government should work.

I’m not against these sort of deliberative efforts in themselves. I think, when it comes to policy implementation, getting the people affected involved is a very good idea. But the model proposed here eoncompasses far more than mere implementation.

If the new digital politics looks something like this then I have some questions. Who defines the problems government ‘faces’? That’s important because there are lots of different, and slanted, ways of describing any problem. What is the scope of this ‘platform’? Is the platform itself beyond challenge? What place does persuasion have?

I’m browsing an old Rough Guide to London left on our bookshelves by someone I can’t remember who passed through London and our flat. There is something pleasurable about reading guidebooks when not travelling, and reading one about your home is like surreptitiously listening in on a conversation about yourself. There is also something neat about the way cities are packaged in these books, and I think that a city’s denizens are influenced by the picture they portray as well as visitors – not only do they describe our notable ‘sights’ but they also inform us on how to make our city attractive to visitors – and, since ‘we are all tourists’* now, attractive to ourselves.

So, when the Rough Guide repeats the ‘city of villages’ theme about London, it not only does so because it is a way to explain the infrastructure of the city (which is does, though not very well) and to provide a useful narrative in which to place a disparate set of sights (which I suppose it does), but it also feeds back into what London perceives about itself and does with itself (takes care of the Tube and markets different areas, like Camden, distinctly – which you might think is obvious but which was a strategy which alluded London’s planners for a long time). I’m not suggesting that Rough Guide, Lonely Planet and so on dictate city planning, but with their huge market of tourists they are certainly participants in a dialogue about how cities work and are developed.

Cities these days are developed and planned by ‘partnerships’ of developers, local authorities, residents and business groups, architects, and other interest groups. There are no longer, if there ever really were, city fathers who commission municipal works on a grand scale. Instead there is a Byzantine network of – brace yourself for this term – stakeholders who seek consensus about how an area should work. Since none of these stakeholders has an overriding veto on decisions (well local authorities and the Government actually do, but it is practised within the constraints of the partnership model), consensus tends to come together around concepts which have been seen to work before: a technocratic approach prevails. Consequently urban planning fashions can be seen across many cities across the globe. A newly regenerated urban centre these days is likely to require a modern art gallery (not necessarily filled with art, but more importantly a building which can be described as ‘iconic’), outdoor cafes (from Athens to Oslo) and a pedestrian-friendly layout. Nothing wrong with any of these things particularly, but a lot of European historic city centres are beginning to look very similar (even down to tolerated graffiti), and that’s before we mention international retail branding. I think that the guidebook depictions of these cities are the end-product of these partnership decisions in some ways.

Looking at the end of the Rough Guide to London which is form 1997 there is a rather interesting expression of hope for the city, laid out in terms of planning, development and building:

…the Royal Opera House is undergoing a major refurbishment, as is the British Museum, and there’s to be a new Tate Gallery on the South Bank, which is itself due to be radically redesigned. And to top it all, a god-forsaken slice of Greenwich has been chosen as the centre of the country’s Millennium Celebrations. The other good news is that if, as looks likely, the Tories fall from power, London seems at least set to regain a properly elected governing body. It has to be hoped that it is given the power to reverse the last two decades’ decline.

That dates it quite neatly and is a piece of text to contemplate in the light of the very different backdrop to the current General Election.

* A quote from Sidney Mintz

Kind of like a philosophical dating agency, this system from Mark Vernon finds your perfect match in ancient Greek philosophy. I’ve been matched with Zeno of Citium who, given the stoic suspicion of the emotions and vice, I think might be a bit of a drag of a date…

I’m sitting in the new Shepherds Bush Library. Modern libraries don’t really do books. Books are certainly knocking around the place, but you get the sense that they serve as waiting room literature rather than the core purpose of the place.

In fact I’ve brought my own books to the library and I am using it as a place to work. Looking around it seems most people in here are doing the same. Libraries now are really not about books as artefacts; they are more about access and use of information. Indeed, this was the case when books happened to be the principle source of information. But I am wondering if an important secondary source of information is being neglected by the disappearance of the book from libraries, namely the librarian.

The first library I ever used was Crosby Library. The librarian at the reference library for many years was a man called Roger and his ability to find the most obscure pieces of information was legendary. But it wasn’t just his primary skills as an archivist and researcher that were important to me, it was also his enthusiasm and his ability to teach me about sources, their provenance and context which was important in helping me learn how to read in the widest sense of that word.

It isn’t that good librarians no longer exist – the good people of Hammersmith and Fulham libraries are excellent and very helpful when approached – it is that with an emphasis on self-study and data instantly available on a screen, the need for and use of an intermediate librarian who can not only find information but help understand and interpret the data, and therefore gain knowledge, is lost. The democratisation of data has not necessarily improved general access to good information. The paradox is that it was the restricted technology of books, making data scarcer than it is today, which meant that we had to engage with each other and find expertise to help us in our search.

This sounds like I am hankering after a time when access to knowledge was a privilege of the few. I’m not. I would just like guidance – around reference material on the internet especially – to be readily and easily available. In fact public libraries in Britain do excel in the online age in giving guidance on family history research. This is a subject for which people still feel comfortable approaching experts. I’m not sure if this is to do with the nature of genealogy or the age of its amateur practitioners (older, acquainted with the skills of librarians and confident in using them). It would be great if kids doing homework on Wikipedia – which gives them ready access to data that was difficult to find in the books and journals in the reference library – had the skills of a good librarian available to help discern its validity and usefulness.