The Portobello Paradox

The Paradox of Portobello: community action soars, community council collapses by Justin Kenrick and Eva Schonveld.

Community action is infectious:

Membership of Action Porty has trebled to over 1,400 in a month. Vibrant community venues stretch along the High Street – from Bellfield, Tribe Porty, Tills, the Town Hall, to the Wash House, Porty Bookshop, the 5-a-side pitches, to name but a few. Meanwhile, the attempt to prevent private developers’ from turning The George and the Police Station into unaffordable housing continues, and the public baths, the Prom, the skiffs, and the beach itself are all swimming with folk.

Community Council collapses:

In this context it may seem strange that not even 7 people out of a population of 12,000 are willing to be on the community council, and so Portobello’s community council has – for now – been disbanded.

This seems especially strange since there has been a highly effective community council (within the tight constraints it felt were imposed on it) for many years. One that has been particularly good at online consultations to take the measure of Portobello’s response to a range of issues, mostly ones that developers and/ or Edinburgh Council seem intent on pushing ahead with. For the most part, the 4 councilors representing Portobello and Craigmillar over many terms, have attended and actively participated in community council meetings.

Despite this, Craig McIntyre, a long-standing member of the Community Council (who – like almost all – has declined to continue, leading to our community council disbanding) says that:

“Our projects have often been absorbed into broader council initiatives and steered in directions that don’t always reflect the values and vision of our local community. Our Community Council has consistently been recognised for its strong commitment and proactive approach. However, we face persistent barriers, and no meaningful powers have been devolved to the local level to allow communities to make decisions or implement changes on the issues that matter most to them. 

“One of the recurring themes in our discussions has been the need for greater diversity and broader community representation. It’s vital that we create space for young people to get involved, bring fresh ideas, and feel that their voices are valued and heard.

“Often being on the Community Council felt like an unpaid role with limited internal support, and we struggled to get sufficient engagement and responsiveness from Edinburgh Council. As someone who has grown up here and cares deeply about our community, it’s disheartening to see our area—so unique in its character and challenges—receiving relatively little investment.

“What we truly need is a clear and inspiring vision for the Promenade and the wider area. We need dedicated individuals to invest their time and energy in local matters, and a collective drive to help our community thrive. With the right support and direction, we have the potential to become a model for others. Sadly, opportunities often seem to slip away before real progress can be made.”

There were many last straws that led to community council members refusing to put themselves forward again.

One issue is Council officers’ unwillingness to seriously engage with positive proposals from the community, articulated by the community council. These included a proposal to develop the Westbank Street site, and another to turn the Pipe Lane toilet block area on the Prom into an income-generating cafe and changing space with modernised toilet facilities.

But it was also hardly surprising that others didn’t put themselves forward to spend a Monday evening a month dealing with issues where the community council is not given the respect or standing to influence Edinburgh Council on developments Edinburgh Council is pushing for and the community is complaining about, or on developments the community is pushing for and Edinburgh Council is derailing, often by proposing that much larger and more positive (but ultimately unaffordable) change needs to happen, so scuppering more immediate smaller scale positive projects.

Add to that an old-fashioned format with anyone not on the council placed in a mostly ‘audience’ role, a lack of intentional relationship building and attention to group culture, and an acceptance of received notions of what local democracy looks and feels like, and it is understandable that people no longer put themselves forward to participate.

This apparent paradox of rising apathy in relation to a form of democracy that appears to be failing us, and an increasing appetite for active engagement in caring for one another, was made crystal clear in the community’s response to Action Porty’s rallying call for help to transform Bellfield (launched in part in an article in Bella Caledonia positively titled: ‘Building a better future one community at a time’).

A rallying call to transform Bellfield

We asked for help to raise a minimum of £100,000 so we could unlock £450,000 in government funding, and £150,000 from a generous philanthropist. This was so that we could push ahead and transform the old parish church building at Bellfield, and so create a wonderful upper floor for life events, performances and large gatherings (with a lift to it), and flexible space downstairs (with meeting rooms, kitchen and accessible toilets).

Over the month of April we knocked on doors, stood on pavements or on the Prom, and heard from all sorts of folk about how important the place has been in their distant past, or more recently, or in the present. We were anxious as the amount being raised by people buying community shares wasn’t rising fast enough, and then in the last week the amount doubled and by the 30th April this extraordinary community, plus kind folk from further afield, had raised a breathtaking £168,525 in the space of a month.

In the process of this ‘Bellfield’s Big Build’ campaign, our membership trebled from 442 at the start to over 1,400 by the end, with more than 75% living within our slightly arbitrary (but necessary) boundary. Many of the other 25% live just outside our boundary in the far wider area of people for whom Portobello, with its High Street, Prom and beach, is the place where much of our social and cultural life happens.

Action Porty – the community benefit society that campaigned to save Bellfield when the Church of Scotland wanted instead to sell it to the highest bidder – can now proceed with the first (£776,100) stage of transforming the old parish church building (what we call ‘the celebration hall’) to meet a community demand that way outstrips what we can currently offer.

Thanks to the generosity of the people of Portobello and further afield in participating in the share issue, we expect the rebuilding to begin in September. Clearly, we can achieve so much if we dare to trust and act together.

Could we regain community self-governance?

So with all this community energy, why does the community seem to have given up on working with Edinburgh Council through the top-down structures provided?

Perhaps the clue is in the ‘top-down’.

In this ‘top-down’ approach, elected politicians, civil servants and local authority officers – however well-intentioned – seem to feel the need to not risk allying with initiatives from the ground, since that may mean allying with initiatives that may fail or – possibly worse – succeed in demonstrating that a bottom-up approach can be far more responsive, flexible and effective. Instead, they align with ‘top-down’ imposed solutions which ally them with those above them (thereby not threatening their position) and that rarely solve the problem being addressed, and often simply displace and multiply the impacts of that problem.

“The top-down democracy model is so thoroughly embedded in local authorities’ culture where you get better pay the more staff and resources you command – so the entire enterprise is fighting for size and that status” (Cathy Maclean, Action Porty Trustee)

Power devolved to a lower level can always be withdrawn, ignored or curtailed by the higher authority. In light of that, people on the ground seem to gradually give up believing that it’s worth even trying to influence processes which seem to continue as planned, regardless of what local people have to say.

A councillor, an MSP or an MP of a political party can feel powerless to stand up to their leader or Prime Minister, even when their constituents are complaining that they seem to be condoning something those constituents utterly oppose, such as the genocide in Gaza. This is just one example of how those who seem to hold power are blamed by those below them for the actions of those above them, while feeling they have little leverage to impact those above.

Fundamentally, we seem to treat sovereignty (the place where decision-making power is agreed to reside) as resting in countries acting as states. How would things change if we instead saw sovereignty as resting in society acting through communities?

That would demand of communities that we recognise ourselves as the active drivers of change.

To the extent that communities then decided to pool our resources and share power with other communities, we could enter into voluntary agreements across cities or regions. To the extent that those cities or regions decided to pool their resources and share power with others, they could enter into voluntary agreements across countries or continents.

With sovereignty ultimately resting in communities and not states, those upper levels could only persist to the extent they serve society through communities.

In many deliberative processes, we see how, given responsibility, and enough time and resources to consider how to use their power, most people shift into a mode of concern and care for people and places. Embedded in empowered communities, this mode could transform many of our most intractable problems. Would we let our neighbours go hungry? Would we permit the poisoning of our water sources? Would we tolerate new superstores destroying our high streets?

Granted, a change of such magnitude may seem impossible.

Change is the only constant:

But the impossible can happen so quickly we forget we thought it impossible.

Looking at current social and political trends, the question may simply be: Do we push for positive transformative change or, do we believe that is impossible, and so allow forces seeking negative change to have their (at first seemingly impossible) way.

‘Positive change’ enables people to connect in mutually supportive ways that increase each others’ autonomy. Negative change is about passing power to those forces which impose division and blame, uniformity and fear, in order to to appropriate and exploit.

Positive change mostly happens through many, many small moves gathering wider support to build towards whole system transformation. Above all, it is enabled by positive examples of what is possible, which is why such examples are so often quickly crushed.

It’s why, for example, the community I have been working with most closely in Africa for a decade and a half, only recently went public on its extraordinary ability to conserve and sustain the elephants, forests and moorland where it lives, knowing that going public before it was strong enough would have brought the wrath of state conservation agencies down on it, desperate to show there is no alternative to the failed fortress conservation approach of control from above.

Community action needs structural change:

To put it very simply: Scottish local authorities contain an average of 170,000 people, well above the European average of around 10,000 which is less than the 12,000 population of Portobello.

In an article titled ‘Scottish councils should be broken up’, Lesley Riddoch points out that:

“Scots are always astonished at the massive size of their councils compared to every other country in Europe, but don’t realise what we are missing. Put simply it is the chance to actively fix our own communities instead of watching them wither whilst being governed from afar.

“Of course, some communities have bought their land and other local assets. But escalating land prices makes that option increasingly tough and buyouts often leave volunteers exhausted and oversized councils intact. The Scottish Parliament can reverse centralisation and learn from neighbouring countries whose small councils have higher rates of participation without bureaucracy, paid councillors or highly paid officials.”

Community action can enable mutual care. In Portobello this includes, for example, buyouts and/or community management of key buildings, ceilidhs to fundraise for good causes, shared food growing spaces, and a community fridge which links stopping food waste with providing free food.

However, rewarding though it is in terms of community well-being, community action tends to ultimately be exhausting in the current system, and without structural change it cannot last.

“The Bellfield share issue is definitely a kind of (voluntary) local taxation. It’s raised here and spent here. We need local taxation (at the Portobello level) replacing a good chunk of national and regional taxation – deciding what we raise and for what – that should be a taxation principle.” (Jennifer Elliot, Action Porty Trustee)

While such this is critical to enabling communities to reclaim responsibility and autonomy, there would also need to be transfers between communities to even out inequalities in wealth.

The Bellfield community share issue has been a kind of voluntary local taxation, but these investments in our community are intended to be withdrawable after 5 or so years by those who may need them. So this approach to enabling community infrastructure asks people to help us get over a hurdle, and once over it we all benefit from the community space created, and individuals who may at that point need it, can also recoup their investment. About 75% bought between one and four shares (costing £25 each). Meanwhile 36 bought over £1,000 worth of shares, and well over 30 local businesses and organisations paid at least £250 each to buy shares. Others paid just £1 to become voting members. The support was from across the spectrum. It demonstrates an equal willingness to be supportive, and each person now has an equal voting right, unrelated to their number of shares. In a sense, it was ‘from each according to their ability to pay, and to each an equal say’.

Decisions based on local lived experience:

Fundamentally the kind of structural change we need is for communities to regain the power to make decisions that mean they can creatively and sustainably meet their needs.

–        In Portobello there has been recent violence on and near the Prom. Instead of just keeping on calling the police, a longer-term answer to this could be to create challenging activities that engage disaffected youth.

–        Airbnbs that take up whole flats or houses reduce the number of possible homes (while letting out a room for a season has been made near impossible), and part of the answer may be a community-owned hotel/ hostel so that tourism brings good money into the community rather than hollows it out.

–        The problems of rising car use might be better solved through tackling out of town shopping centres, and making High Street shops attractive, including by making walking and cycling desirable, and buses free.

The hidden side of the situation is that those with impossible-to-imagine wealth are living off society and not paying their part. These include the ‘private-jet-flying-corporate-benefit-scroungers’ who spend literal fortunes lobbying government, while construction corporations create rows of houses on green fields without community provision, enabled by lobbied councils who have been persuaded not to see the answer to the housing crisis in refurbishing housing stock, restoring community, and where necessary building on brownfield sites.

Key buildings in Portobello have, in effect, been in the public realm for centuries.

– Whatever one may think of the church, the church building at Bellfield had been crucial for a vast array of community activities since 1805, and the halls since the 1960s. We almost lost Bellfield when the church decided it wanted a greater profit from its sale, with no regard for community well-being or the fact that the community had paid to build it.

– Whatever one may think of the council, the Town Hall was paid for by Edinburgh Council in the 1890s to be used not as our Town Hall but in compensation for our losing our status as a town as Portobello was absorbed into Edinburgh. We almost lost the Town Hall when the Council saw it as a loss maker, but the community stepped forward to save and run it.

– Whatever one may think of the police, their building was built in the 1870s as our town hall, and has been used as our library, police and fire station. We are working hard to ensure this iconic building in the heart of Portobello is not lost to unaffordable private accommodation.

What is the ‘Paradox of Portobello’?

So what underlies the ‘Paradox of Portobello’, where community action soars, and the community council collapses? Perhaps the subtitle (of the ‘Building a better future one community at a time’ article) points to part of what is at play here. The subtitle is ‘Attempted theft of a church, a Town Hall and a police station’.

We have been resisting such high profile-thefts, but perhaps we also need to resist the much more insidious day-to-day theft of power from the community. Perhaps we need to recognise and accelerate a process through which we seem to be becoming a town in our own right again, starting from our own collective action rather than from making requests of ‘those above us’.

Such an approach will need the new (or re-emerging) democratic ways of making decisions that are based on direct democracy, not on the top-down representative approach that is so clearly failing, in part by being captured and in part by its processes discouraging participation. Growing up in a top-down society, we are (perhaps deliberately) not well educated into how to share power equally and deal with our conflicts. Quite the opposite. Nevertheless, processes for relearning participation are already being used to great effect and are not so hard to learn.

Can this be done in a proactive way, learning from examples elsewhere and supporting others to do likewise? Might this involve acknowledging and learning from the underlying feelings of 2014’s ‘Yes to Independence’ movement and the ‘Better Together’ response?

–   The good reasons people didn’t want independence for Scotland were mostly about wanting a good relationship with our neighbours, fearing we would be cutting ourselves off from others, and fearing we would simply be replicating at Holyrood what is already happening at Westminster.

–   The good reasons people wanted independence for Scotland were mostly about wanting to make decisions closer to the ground, wanting to no longer be dragged into unjust wars against others, and to tackle the extraordinarily unequal and unfair ownership of land and resources in Scotland.

To draw on the best in both approaches might involve no longer putting our faith in countries mobilised as states. Can we instead bring sovereignty back from the state to society, acting through communities of mutual support? Such an approach would support neighbouring communities, and those further afield, to find what is unique about their situation, their geography, their community, and so recognise and build on their resources, with support from others, and with a pooling of efforts and capabilities where that helps.

It may seem impossible to believe that we can create a world of mutual care in the face of forces that seek to divide and rule us, but change is the constant. Change takes time, a clear vision, hard work and luck.

If we don’t decide to try to make the changes that are needed, we can only fail. If we decide to try to make those changes – adapting as we go – we may fail, or we may succeed.

So many times, people have succeeded when most thought it impossible. In the end perhaps it is a cage of fear that holds us back, a cage that imagination and mutual care can help open.

Whether we then fly, or fall, may depend on whether we can spread our wings. It may depend on whether we’ve exercised our muscles of democracy through learning how to listen, how to disagree, how to change our minds through hearing others and how to develop, and put into practice, creative new ideas that can bridge our differences and meet everyone’s needs. Can sharing experience enable dogmatic divisions to be undermined, and the grounds for community enriched, so we can arrive at decisions, actions and celebrations together?

Is there a new movement emerging in Scotland?

One that is more than a political movement, not making an argument in the political sphere but reclaiming the ground on which politics take place, reconnecting it with peoples lived realities, and enabling politics to stop being the passive choosing of “the lesser of two evils”.

Can it instead be a place of active engagement, where we root sovereignty in the places we live, and use our collective intelligence, creativity and awareness of our mutuality (“I am because we are” as one African saying goes) to solve our shared problems and move towards a thriving, interconnected, bottom-up society?