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The Gentle Giant Who Shares and Cares - Craigmillar's Comprehensive Plan for Action
By Steve Burgess

A New Statesman article entitled, "The Other Edinburgh", written by (Malcolm MacEwen in 1972 concluded in a section subtitled, "The Other Festival": "By its pioneering example the Craigmillar Festival may do more for Edinburgh's social balance sheet than all the tourist millions the International Festival has earned in the last 20 years."

By its initiative in the EEC Programme of Pilot Schemes and Studies to Combat Poverty Craigmillar through its Festival Society is working on an even bigger social balance sheet with the keen intuition that the two balance sheets are specifically and intricately related.

The Craigmillar-EEC Programme is intended to enable the local residents to reach a level of reciprocal action with outside authorities and agencies, as to change the quality of life to such an extent that in time people will more readily want to live there.

The working document published recently as The Gentle Giant who shares and cares or, Craiomillar's Comprehensive Plan for Action is a vision of such a future. It is what Howard Perlmutter calls a 'prag-vision' for, it is also a basis for continued negotiation, with resource holders both to 'positively discriminate'is an area neglected for so long in terms of the quality of its social and physical environment as compared with other parts of the city and society and especially to allow and join with the residents in doing as much of the improving work in all spheres of life as they possibly can and can learn to do effectively and creatively.

The document starts out mythologically with the picture of tne giant play sculpture, 'Gulliver', constructed by a team of local residents. This imagery at once invokes the wider and deeper and longer experience of the reader and of society. The imagery continues depicting the substance of the giant as people, young and old, middle-aged and ancient, engaged in a rich array of community endeavors.

The impact of the document stems from the use of print and picture in a skilled juxtaposition, format and arrangement to give it life. It moves back and forth from the sublime to the mundane, from the particular to the general, from the abstract the contrete, from everyman to people; in doing so it reveals at least four interdependent levels: the transcencent in which mythology carries, unifies and projects the vision; the artistic, which evidences the joy of imaginative living; the theoretical, which interprets the policy relevance of what is transpiring; the practical, which states what local people and their partners are doing and need to do to improve the local conditions.After the mythology comes the theoretical statement:

In such a sharing of developing and governing there is revealed a new way which has great relevance for all other similar areas as well as those from which many of the people of the housing estates come, the inner urban areas.

Its basic importance lies in the fact that it advocates and signifies a change in politics and economics to yield a more fulfilling society. It is highly relevant. It proposes, by engaging and activating local people ... to do more with the limited public funds and other resources.Then the practical - the introduction concludes with a list and snapshots-relative to thirty-five special initiatives taken by Craigmillar Festival Society and others during the first years of the CFS-EEC Programme in the realms of employment, housing , social welfare, education, children and youth, transport, planning, the arts, communications. These include community arts-environmental improvement teams; the establishment of a company, Craigmillar Festival Enterprises Limited, to create long term employment and also extra recourses for community projects; making available information on jobs through local job boards containing cards for each vacancy supplied by the Employment Services Agency; a neighbourhood worker to work intensively in budgeting with families at risk; a developed information office; special community transport for the elderly or disabled people who are housebound; a special education unit for excluded pupils and chronic truants supported by the Festival Society neighbourhood workers as links with the pupils' families and community activities; after school clubs, residential holidays and camps especially for children under stress; touring drama to interest pupils in the local library and in dental hygiene; the development of an Arts Resource Centre through the conversion of an unused church; a print workshop which produced the Comprehensive Plan for Action .

In the body of the document each section covers a particular realm as mentioned above relating something of the background and describing both the positive and the problematic dimensions in that aspect of life concluding with a series of recommendations.Characteristically, the first section is "The Arts". It is prefaced by the following:

The key to the origin, evolution and success of the Society is in touching the creativity within everyone and providing a vehicle for its expression. The Festival remains the touchstone of the Society and is still the generative force that keeps the organisation alive, open to new ideas and forward-looking. It is the impetus of the Festival which originally sparked off the community action and kept it going through the fifteen years of development.

The final recommendations include generally: a restatement of principlesof shared government enjoining co-operative or reciprocal action, positive discrimination,and relevance to other communities; breaking the cycle of deprivation through development of the principles and procressive implementation of the recommendations in general and more specific ones referring to children and youth; replanning of the area emphasising the distinct character of each of the eleven parts of traigmillar; a balanced social mix involving a chance in housing allocation policy to halt the flow of people with problems into the area and an improved support system for people already at risk locally; redevelopment and new development of housing, amenity and facilities. Approximately one hundred and twenty-three main recommendations follow.Substantial resources are expected and requested from the rest of Society up to at least European level but also from the people of Craigmillar. dut the plan which is a snapshot of a social process is really open ended, as it says, a"working document", a"Green Paper" for negotiation. Its principles and some of its specifics may seem relevant to the needs and aspirations of people in other communities who have their own ways of going about things. Thus the messages are not only to traditional resource holders, the vertical partners, but also to the vast resources of other communities, the lateral partners, their people.