With the 2011 Tottenham's riots still fairly recent, Haringey's council commissioned in October 213  "The consultation of  Tottenham's future". Consisting on a five month's consultation exercise with the purpose of gathering responses from the local community in order to "inform and shape the Strategic Regeneration Framework for Tottenham", a document that will draw the future of the neighborhood for the next twenty years.

The meetings were intended to bring to the frontline the priorities of locals to Haringey's development. These consultations took great local participation with over 3,700 responses, according to the council. 

Following these consultations,  The Strategic Regeneration Framework for 2025 was created with the aim of tackling the main issues brought to attention by the local residents such as housing improvements, better access to public and social services and the improvement of public spaces in order to strengthen a more united local community.

Spaces such as the "Thinking Space" organised around different weekly topics open to discussion within different local communities in order to share their different views and problems, are perfect examples of this. This specific space is organised by Janet Campbell, a community development worker.

These events, called 'community events' are commissioned by Haringey's council to attribute a leading role to local communities and forge a future together in which  local needs are the priority for the district's development. However, in an attempt to investigate Latin American participation in such events, the coordinator's answer seems to be negative. "We have had no Latin American participant," affirms Janet, "but I believe that the Latin American community is an important part of the life of Tottenham and should be including in project monitoring data."

Such projects are aimed at creating open, relaxed and democratic spaces that have arisen as a direct response to the 2011 riots that put in relief the danger that engender  forgotten and marginalised neighborhoods in which cultural identities remain entrenched. 

 

Through the redevelopment of parks and green spaces for the enjoyment of leisure activities (such as the farmer's market), the remodeling of houses and infrastructures in order to improve the image and status of Tottenham together with the improvement of  transport connections (such as the remodeling of Tottenham Hale's train station) show how communities continue to have a great power.

They have their voice in a city integrated by a variety of different ethnic groups interconnected between them, bringing the peculiar character of this metropolis. A capital that is also affected by the economic crisis that has impacted particularly hard in Europe,  with its social and ideological consequences, in which the first victims are the weak, poor and vulnerable communities. 

Such is the case of the rise of nationalist parties in Europe, a new ideological front that has also ascended with particular force in the United Kingdom through the nationalist Ukip party (Party for the Independence of the United Kingdom), the British winner in the European elections. 

With a campaign that claims to be "unashamedly patriotic", Ukip advocates the closing of British borders and to highlight the British character by limiting social benefits, among others, to British people or communities that bring "benefits to the country".

 

Such is the field created: local communities, like the Latin American in Tottenham Hale, fighting for their presence and local recognition. That are part at the same time of yards (compounded by various communities) struggling to improve their contribution to the capital. All this, in an extremely multicultural metropolis with a strong migration and social tradition, which may have to adapt in the future, to an increasingly nationalistic, patriotic and enclosed country that might start to support more separation than integration. 

Time will tell whether, at least London, the irreverent British capital, will be able to maintain some administrative independence in its different councils to continue with the city's development based on its multicultural character. A city that actually gets its benefits through its different communities.