How Many Voices Does One City Need?

The other week a large package arrived at the Culture Vultures office. It had a Leeds and Partners logo emblazoned on the front. It looked weighty and important so I knew it must be for Emma – I only do the slight and insignificant stuff, a division of labour I’m more than happy with.

“What do you think of this?” Emma asked days later as she ripped open the stiff brown wrapping and thrust toward me a pristine copy of a book-sized object that reeked of printers ink and self-satisfaction. I took Emma’s enquiry as a tacit license to say what I thought about the book-like product, One Voice, by Leeds and Partners, which was finally available for inspection.

My first thought as I scanned the pages was, this is a hard read. I don’t mean that it was intellectually demanding, or that it in any way challenged my settled preconceptions. I mean it’s a terrible slog to get through. Every letter of every word in every sentence of every single sodding paragraph assaults your eyeballs in FULL CAPS. I’m sure I’m not alone in harbouring justifiable prejudices concerning people who have no shame or sense of decorum when it comes to the caps lock key. If ever I find myself in the same room as someone displaying FCD (Full-Cap Disorder) I try to make sure my back is covered and my exit route is unobstructed. Never look an FCD sufferer in the eye, only speak when directly spoken to and always keep your hands in plain sight would be my advice should you ever be cornered by a full-cappista.

Fortunately 90% of the pages of One Voice contain less text than the average tweet, so the reading may be a chore but there’s not much of it to speak about. In fact, if you compiled the whole textual contents of One Voice into a single Word document the result would not be much longer than a standard Culture Vulture blog post. One Voice may look like a book, feel like a book, and the pages seem to flip like a book, but calling it a book in any sense other than sheer physical dimensionality is seriously misleading.

However, these points are minor quibbles of style: what of the substance? What does One Voice have to say? I’m pretty sure that was the point of the original question.

One Voice is divided into four sections. There’s a short explanation why Leeds and Partners are disseminating this information now and what they’d like us to do with it. This is followed by eight short examples of good stuff currently happening in Leeds (Arena, airport, shopping centre etc.) and twelve examples of great stuff to come (internet infrastructure, transport infrastructure, another shopping centre etc.) The bulk of One Voice is the central sixty pages detailing what they call the “proposition” and what the proposition means for the Leeds economy, “our people”, and the place itself. Finally there’s a bit of history and how this history relates to building “a new kind of city” for Leeds.

The introduction explains that One Voice “will help you understand the ambition that will drive the development of Leeds for the next few years.” We all need to “speak in one voice”, a “consistent, ambitious voice”, if we want to create a “forward-thinking city culture”. We are all responsible for making a “difference to the success of our city” and One Voice aims to be a “rallying cry”, a “road map” and a “litmus test” for “everyone who believes in the city”.

My first response to this was, hold on a bit: what’s with all this “you’ing” and “we’ing business”? The most appropriate pronoun is “they”, surely? As in, what are they (Leeds and Partners) doing to advance the development of the city? That’s what we pays ‘em for. Why is what I think or say as a private citizen of any relevance in helping “build the city’s reputation”? My personal impact on the inward investment decisions of major companies is about as significant as a single raindrop in the Sahara, so why are they laying this heavy guilt trip on me, man (I was having a hippy moment, I don’t quite know why.) So far I wasn’t happy with the way this litmus-testing, rally-crying road map was going.

The next section is somewhat more reassuring. Lots of big, impressive projects that are truly great for the city: who could argue with better broadband, Olympic success, the Tour de France and pioneering scientific research? I can cheer along happily about all this stuff while recognising that most of it has little or no relevance to me personally. Knowing that the new DC4 Data Centre in Hunslet will have 2,440 server racks may make me an asset down the local on quiz night but it doesn’t affect my life in any consequential way.

The “proposition” is similarly easy to approve of, and with the same kind of warm and fuzzy, remote indulgence. Who wouldn’t want to live in a “powerfully magnetic city that draws people in to build great lives”, which is “committed to getting better and better, with courage and imagination”? Who could resist “a city where people make the difference”, a city “where you can take full advantage of a vibrant mix of diverse experiences, with a breadth and scale that gives everyone something new to discover”?

There are 26 such phrases in One Voice. As an experiment I transcribed each civic characteristic into a Word document – removing all instances of the proper noun, “Leeds” – and sent it to twenty of my twitter acquaintances across the world. Ten people were led to believe that I was writing something about their city, and were asked how accurate was the copy on a scale of 1 to 10? I asked the other ten to guess the city. The first ten responded with an over 70% score confirming the accuracy of the copy for their city: only one person in the second group guessed Leeds, a psychotherapist of my close acquaintance who is no stranger to my devious ruses.

26 phrases which have over 70% applicability to a host of other cities around the world does not make a convincing “narrative” in my humble opinion. (Strictly speaking, One Voice is entirely devoid of anything remotely approaching a narrative, but that’s a separate issue.)

Finally, there’s the history and future section. Oh dear, this is where things start to go seriously awry. It may have something to do with the attempt at significantly longer stretches of writing. The previous pages contain single disconnected declarations that shimmer in the mind like motes in the sunshine: pleasant, hazy, and ultimately ungraspable. This is not so much of a problem in the early sections as the point appears to be to arouse a non-specific state of thrusting ambitiousness. The lack of any concrete reference is part of the strategy. But when the requirement is to tell a coherent story connected to verifiable historical facts, One Voice just isn’t up to it. Instead of sustained narrative we get feeble attempts to suggest causal links where none could possibly be relevant:

Communication became increasingly significant as Leeds became a powerful global trading city. The Trend has continued to this day. It’s hardly surprising that the city that installed the first automatic telephone exchange in the UK early in the 20th century is also one of the only two independent UK internet cities in the 21st century.

So, Leeds became one of two independent internet cities in the UK owing to it’s communication history – unlike the other independent internet city which had no such communication history?

It’s “hardly surprising” that such a bogus claim crumbles if you apply only a second’s thought to it.

Often the writing in this section is not just slack and flabby, it is positively gormless, as in this gem:

While Leeds saw great prosperity with the growth of the textile industry, it was also characteristically smart in developing complementary industries. Out of textiles, Leeds built a highly attuned understanding of banking and finance …

An understanding built out of textiles? That’s some very woolly thinking indeed.

The last couple of pages tell us how “we can all help.” Now that One Voice has “articulated the city’s collective ambition and mindset”, now we have “the understanding”, we are all instructed to go away and “talk about the city in the same terms and language.”

I have a several problems with this. I can’t see that anything has been articulated beyond a few pleasantly gaseous platitudes. I don’t see how I have acquired any more of “the understanding” than I had before I read One Voice. And, more importantly, I could never learn to speak about Leeds like a marketing Dalek, “in terms of the proposition, so it is consistently positioned in the same way.” In fact, if you ever hear me talking about Leeds’ “fantastic proof points” and “the pipeline of transformational projects” that we need to build on you will know that my spirit has been snuffed out and my soul sucked dry. Please, hit me over the head with a shovel and hammer a splintered stake through my shrivelled heart; it’s what I would have wanted.

What does One Voice matter anyway? Is it possible that Leeds will become a One Voice town? No, I don’t think One Voice will have the slightest effect on what anyone who lives in the city thinks or says or does. One thing I think One Voice gets right is “We think for ourselves, and value people who do the same.” Indeed, we do. And the only response a person who thinks for themselves can give to One Voice is, “Pull the other one!”

A great city thrives on many voices, not One. It should foster critical, engaged, free-thinking citizens and not just cheer on its economically savvy stakeholders. I can’t see the attraction of a city that regiments ideas and considers free expression and honest disagreement a hindrance. I wouldn’t want to live in an echo chamber, no matter how shiny, happy and productive that would make me. I’m not sure I’m at all ambitious for a new kind of city, a One Voice city: a city with all the city taken out.