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Regeneration As A Human Enterprise
Though many think they play the regeneration game few understand that development and regeneration are not necessarily synonymous. A consortium may build offices which, when completed, fail to attract tenants. A good deal of speculative office development occurred in the mid-1980s to take advantage of escalating property prices in Britain. Regeneration, when it did occur, was incidental, a by-product. Development takes place irrespective of human factors: regeneration depends on them. Development follows impersonal market forces: regeneration requires empowerment - of the individual entrepreneur, so that he can act quickly, or of a local community which, by its collective will, can make faceless officialdom think again.
These were the thoughts I shared in Salt and Silver, my book about the regeneration of an historic site near Bradford.
Economic regeneration seeks coherence, wholeness, integration of both human and non-human factors. Without coherence there is fragmentation leading to separation, specialist language, artificial divides between, say, the arts and sciences.
Renaissance thinkers
You only have to glance at the architecture of historic Prague or any other European civilisation that survived WWII to see that in the time of Goethe and Mozart, Kepler and Caravaggio, there was no division between arts and sciences.
Michelangelo designed the dome of St Peter's in Rome and Leonardo pondered the circulation of the blood and powered flight. Consequently, philosophy and poetry, astronomy and religion, were not the segregated specialisms they have become.
European poets such as Miroslav Holub are liable to be well-versed in chemistry, biology or engineering. Poetry is simply another example of creativity.
'Creative thinking'
In the UK, however, poetry is regarded as 'creative writing', as though imagination and inventiveness are expected to be absent from other public forms of expression - council documents, business reports, scientific papers.
Creativity is not to be thought of merely as entertainment or escapism; the energy that it releases is liberating for the human spirit and it is the celebration of the human spirit that must be at the heart of regeneration. Otherwise it is merely development.
An example of the above may be found in Vaclav Havel's play Redevelopment or Slum Clearance
Emotional honesty
On a personal level, regeneration means facing up to difficulties honestly, with candour; taking well-judged risks instead of reckless gambles; doing not simply talking. We need emotional honesty in which the emphasis is on direct reporting of raw experiences.
The performance of poetry is one way to approach emotional no-go areas. This can be pleasingly cathartic (tears & laughter) and, in a small way, illustrates the philosophy of European Renaissance - that regeneration is liberating.
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