17th March 2021

In 1995, a lethal heat wave hit Chicago. Two similarly disadvantaged neighbourhoods, adjacent to each other, fared very differently.  Ten times the number of elderly residents in one neighbourhood died compared to the other. Subsequent research pinpointed the critical factor to be high levels of interpersonal contact that routinely occurred in the neighbourhood with less deaths. That contact occurred because of what the sociologist Klinenberg calls ‘social infrastructure’. Libraries, pocket parks, pavements – public spaces of all kinds. And not just the quantity but the quality of its design. We know this but occasionally it’s worth reminding ourselves of it.

The rules and regs that apply to crofting are notoriously complex and are administered by the Crofting Commission – a government agency.  Although widely acknowledged as being under-resourced, the Commission is nonetheless routinely accused by crofting communities as being complicit, by dint of inaction, in allowing crofting as a way of life to slowly die out. At a recent packed gathering of the Young Crofters wing of Scottish Crofting Federation, the call to the Crofting Commission was unequivocal ‘do your job and give us access to the crofts that remain – act now or crofting dies’. Serious stuff.

The 2015 Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act has reached the age and stage when the Scottish Parliament starts to look for evidence of its impact and whether the Act has done anything to strengthen the hand of communities. The committee in charge looked at two parts of this multi-part Act – participation requests and asset transfer. If it was issuing a progress report it would probably read – ‘tries hard but could do better’. The main conclusion the Committee drew was that the most disadvantaged communities are benefiting the least from the provisions of the Act. Well, well, what a surprise.

There comes a point when wealth beyond a certain level acquires a super-charged momentum of its own, taking the high net worth individual into a world of super-rich and beyond. As a society we tend to treat these individuals with an unusually high level of deference, awestruck by their ‘wisdom and insights’ into the problems of the world. Notwithstanding that the source of their wealth doesn’t always bear close scrutiny, their philanthropic activities which we seem to accept without question, are not always what they seem. New research from Bath and Newcastle Universities makes for interesting reading.