Journal

Is my local your local?

As someone who’s spent more time than is healthy fretting about local politics and local identity, I’m fascinated by the daunting challenge that councils, particularly in our biggest cities, have in connecting with the mental models their residents have of where they live.

Karen Loasby wrote a lovely piece recently on Haringey’s well-intentioned if flawed attempts to publicise services and facilities within her ward.

Happily, not all councils take Haringey’s rather literal approach. Last year, as part of project to help a local authority in London to redefine itself online, I interviewed its impressive chief executive and he summed the issue up neatly and with typical bluntness:

‘It’s not our job to municipalise the public’

His point was this: local boundaries matter only to the authority, not its residents – councils have to deal with residents on their terms. This chief executive, and for that matter, everyone else I spoke to there, recognised that their residents had a complex array of connections, tight and loose, with the borough. Only a fraction of their active time was spent there, the rest in central London, in neighbouring boroughs and beyond.

The council’s job, he – and they – believed, was to help people get the most out of where they lived (whatever that meant to them personally), without tying them to artificial boundaries.

Our sense of place is fluid and complex. These mental models adjust and flex depending on the services we as residents do or don’t use, our relationship with a neighbourhood, our work and family circumstances. That sense of place alters significantly, depending on whether you are speaking to someone as a parent of a child at school, a library user, or just someone who shops in a particular neighbourhood. We are all these things at different times and all at once.

It’s perhaps a handy reminder when we’re defining strategies, creating personas, defining information architectures that our target audiences don’t define themselves in nice, neat, stable ways but in messy, seemingly contradictory, and ever-changing ways. Our job is understanding their reality and keeping up with them.