Whose place is it anyway?
I’ve long puzzled over the phrase, ‘knowing your place’ – most frequently deployed to (uh oh, here’s another) ‘put someone in their place’.
Both express a need to assume some authority over those who should be ‘put back in their box’ whilst those in command carry on being commanding despite inconvenient ‘un-called for’ reports.
Having long retired from what was then a deeply hierarchical organisation modelled on the military (and one that struggled with innovation), I now much prefer the delight of locally talented pools of people who really do know their places and appreciate their habitats in fine detail. Between them, they also know a thing or three about almost any specialist topic you’d care to mention. This Community Capacity – the resident energy source that sustains the places we inhabit – can be seen as a great asset or an annoyance, but either way it cannot be ignored. Community Capacity plays a significant role in explaining why some places thrive whilst others decline.
There is no doubt that Council Officers are a dedicated bunch, loyally devoted to their chosen areas of expertise. Nursing a community can be as much a vocation as, well, nursing. There’s also no doubt that they labour under the constraints of dwindling resources and edicts handed down by higher command – moderated or amplified by the local governors, elected Councillors. But the central high command sees only averages with little contextual awareness of the real place-makers or the expertise and wisdom embedded in each community.
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