Neighbourhoods

Spirit level: the movie

The gap between rich and poor is at its highest level for 30 years.

It's time to get behind the folk at the Equality Trust, because a campaign film is being made.  

More here. And I’ve been passed this notice (thanks Jan):

Has inequality impacted on your life? Want to be part of our campaign? We're looking for London-based individuals who feel their lives have been affected by the growing gap between rich & poor. We'd like to come along and film a short piece with you this weekend which we can use to help explain why this project is so important. Want to take part? email hello@thespiritleveldocumentary.com

On the fear of interfering

Sunday morning, here’s a tap at the door and one of my neighbours says

‘I hope you don’t think I’m being terribly nosy, but, is everything OK?’

The previous evening we’d had a couple of ambulances outside because the baby we’re caring for at the moment needed specialist attention urgently. I don’t have any problem with neighbours noticing that sort of thing. I’d hate to live in the sort of place where it went unnoticed, and I’m perfectly capable of politely giving no more information than is appropriate when talking about children looked after.

Comparable situations probably arise in our neighbourhoods all the time, and I can well imagine people tentatively discussing with members of their family, or maybe on the phone to a friend, should they pop round and check if everything’s ok, or not? Deciding no, then yes, then hesitantly setting out, perhaps half-hoping that their knock will not be answered… Something a bit like that happened to me a few years ago.

But I’ve known this woman for about 25 years and get on well with the whole family. We exchange at least a cheery wave in passing several times a week. A few weeks ago I borrowed a tool from her husband and had a long chat about this and that. So why would she think that I might think that she was being 'terribly nosy'? Because in our culture it seems like an interfering thing to ask, even in those circumstances. I knew she was genuinely concerned about the baby.

It shows how deeply embedded is this cultural privacy thing, this fear of interfering.

Architecture or affluence - which has had more impact on neighbour relations?

Monday’s episode of Thinking Allowed on R4 was packed with up-to-date thinking about the ancient issues of community and neighbouring.

It’s good to hear Paul Barker expressing scepticism about over-use of the C word. (So it’s not just me). And Laurie Taylor speaks to Emily Cockayne about some of the insights from her history of neighbours (which I wrote about here). Emily reminds us how central is the issue of privacy:

‘Once anybody gets a sense of privacy from their neighbours they want to hold onto it’.

And she does not miss the chance to question efforts to reproduce the kinds of neighbouring of the past:

‘We don’t need to do the things for neighbours that people in the past used to do’.

The discussion at the end of the programme points to but doesn’t quite get to grips with the comparison between architecturally-led change in neighbour relations over time, and relative affluence as a driver of such change. Paul Barker hints that he sees the economic force as the more dominant (and adds important reference to the distorting effect of childhood memories).

Just now I can’t think of any research that has tried to explore and answer this question; but I’d just want to make the point that (a) affluence and architecturally-led privacy go together, but (b) they can impact on neighbour relations in different ways.

History tends to present poverty as something collectively experienced. But increasingly when I visit neighbourhoods I feel that stark poverty is scattered almost invisibly around estates where some people are doing quite well. In a few houses you see signs that there are a couple of incomes, a couple of smart cars outside and the place is looked after. A few doors along, papered windows or broken gutters may betray a sudden deprivation or collapse. Our local practitioners know it’s there.

The neighbourly and community connections may not be in place to respond to this fractured geography of poverty.

As I write I’ve just been finalising arrangements for a public discussion on changing perceptions of neighbouring, that Emily and I are running at The Forum in Norwich on 21 June (more detail soon). And I’m also conscious that if time had allowed I would be at the University of Bath right now, sitting in on a fascinating conference about ‘The Experience of Neighbourliness in Europe, 1000-1600’.

See also: Emily Cockayne's OU article on The decline of neighbourliness.

Resilient neighbourhood economies

Worth a read: Diane Dyson offers this thorough report on Geoff Mulgan talking about 'resilient neighbourhood economies', in Toronto recently.

 

Woof woof wifi

How to incentivise considerate dog ownership...

Are dog owners going to be more inclined to scoop up after their pooches, if doing so generates free wifi in the park?

In Mexico City they’re giving it a try. The more substantial the deposit, the more minutes everyone gets. Do watch the video.

 

 

 

 

 

‘Now I’m loud at home’: working with young inspectors

I’ve been co-authoring a report on a ‘young inspectors’ project in East Sussex. It has been revelatory for several reasons, two of which I’ll mention here.

The project involved training and support by participation workers for eight young people with a mix of disabilities, to carry out inspections of public venues and services. They inspected an outdoor activities centre, the catering service at that centre, a youth centre and a public library. This was the second such programme in East Sussex.

The report describes the significant benefits both to the inspected agencies and to the young inspectors, especially in terms of self esteem, skills and employability. My conversations with some of the young people, and telephone interviews with some of their parents, showed that for most if not all, the impact for them has been transformational.

One young woman hinted that ‘bad things’ had happened to her, and said that she was always ‘very shy in school’ and used to put herself down a lot:

‘Now I’m loud at home, more confident, I don't need any help in any lessons… It's made me feel more special in a way, I speak more in class, I'm more confident in what I do.’

The father of a young man who experienced intense anxieties and phobias, reflected in very low self-esteem, told me that the project had ‘helped him to overcome his fears and helped him to go to places.’ Simple things like having a clipboard and a badge helped his sense of identity enormously.

Two things in particular resonate with the work I have been doing in the east of England with young people looked after (eg).

One is just to do with the inclusive diversity of the group. The age range was from 12 years to about 20 years. I suggest that a bunch of relatively privileged young people, covering that age range, is quite likely to be hard to handle; but not this lot. Just as with the diverse groups of young people looked after that I’ve observed, they are dependably mutually supportive and tolerant. They’re an inspiration and the rest of us can learn from the way they unfussily co-operate to overcome difficulties.

The second point is a consideration of the costs and benefits of a project like this. In our evaluation of work with museums and young people looked after, Martin Dudley and I found that significant personal benefits accrued to the participants, reliably and sustainably, for around £30 per young person per hour. A typical programme in that field might run for say 15 hours, and this is quality, skilled work we’re talking about: in terms of funding, you’d think it was a no-brainer.

The same goes for the young inspector programme. Some of these young people had serious challenges in their lives, which might leave them marginalised and not in a position to contribute to society. The benefits were consistently attained and the risks of failure were low. The estimated cost to the state of providing these benefits was just over £3,000 per young person for the whole programme – and that cost is likely to fall of course as practise and familiarity develop. Even if only half of them establish a participation career and/or become employable and contribute socially and economically, that represents exceptional value.

It’s another uncontentious low-risk opportunity for social investment. What chance policy makers spotting that?

 

Ellie told Nelly

I’m voting for him, he’s done a good job. Nelly told Ellie no way, not for that lot. So we cancel each other out. I’m really busy tomorrow anyway. Me too said Ellie, let’s not bother. Agreed?

Next morning Ellie recognised Nelly’s boots under the booth, almost squealed, lost concentration, and crossed the wrong box.

 

The impasse of privatisation

I’ve just caught up with this New York times article about the killing of Trayvon Martin, which moves away from two-dimensional racism to pinpoint the cultural threat of privatisation that is summed up in ‘The Gated Community Mentality’:

‘The rise of “secure,” gated communities, private cops, private roads, private parks, private schools, private playgrounds — private, private, private — exacerbates biased treatment against the young, the colored and the presumably poor.’

I suppose I may seem like a socialist yahoo just for mentioning it, but I'm beginning to wonder how long before the tension between privatising policies and public need can hold? In London we're still mopping up after last summer's disturbances. Where and when will it snap next?

 

How does contemporary neighbouring compare with the past?

Emily Cockayne’s history of neighbours, Cheek by jowl, which I’ve already referred to a couple of times, is packed with little anecdotes of neighbour relations in England since the late medieval period. I’m left in awe of her achievement in accumulating so much absorbing evidence. The pace is sometimes a bit breathless as story follows story; and the author is never in a hurry to offer a theory or generalised conclusion from what she’s shared. But the style is very readable, laced with occasional dashes of light humour.

So come on Emily, we all want to know: how does contemporary neighbouring compare with the past? In spite of her general coyness as far as conclusions are concerned, this bit sounds pretty confident:

‘Active neighbouring has declined, but latent neighbouring has remained. Most neighbours still trust each other and will help out in an emergency. Who would want to return to traditional neighbouring, if that came with the hardship and lack of privacy that fostered it? Modern neighbouring has a different character because the context is different. We rely on neighbours less; we can be passive neighbours.’

Sounds about right to me, and it pretty much fits with other conclusions such as those of Mary Godfrey and her colleagues. My take on it would be something like this:

One form of neighbouring that has almost certainly declined is what we might call ‘negative neighbouring’ – a moral governing culture typically referred to now under the label ‘curtain-twitching,’ which had evolved to establish and reinforce norms, and those norms extended into gender, racial and other stereotypes.

Of course there are plenty of contemporary anecdotes about this form of neighbouring but I don’t think anyone is putting forward the argument that it is more prevalent and influential today than it was 60 years ago.

If we think of some forms of neighbourliness in more neutral terms – just knowing and recognising people whose help could be mobilised in time of need – it’s probably fair to say that the numbers of local people we know in this way have decreased. But that may not be at all critical if, as for most of us, the number of people we know whose help we can summon readily has not decreased. Even if some or many of our contacts are not going to be physically within reach in a home-based emergency, their power to engage appropriate neighbourly support may still be strong.

Finally, what about what I have called ‘supportive’ neighbouring, the sort of behaviour between co-residents in which people go just a fraction out of their way to be supportive and imply readiness to help in time of need, without transgressing the norms of privacy? I really have my doubts that this has declined to any great extent if at all.

Where Emily and I probably differ though is in the weight given to the welfare state as having ‘crowded out’ people’s readiness to offer support. It’s obvious that to some extent, formal services have taken over occasions such as childbirth when in the past neighbours were more or less forced to depend on each other. We’d expect that the nature of neighbouring would change as a consequence; but it wouldn’t necessarily have declined significantly.

My sense is that if neighbourliness really did decline over the past generation, then of all the contributory factors, the crowding out by the welfare state was not one of the most important. The availability of organised social care for those who needed it not only made life more liveable for millions, it probably had far less of an impact on positive neighbouring than did the availability and use of cars; television; new forms of housing; comparative wealth; population diversity; and a cohort of women in the labour market.

And so, as I wrote here:

‘The task is to understand how the notion of an enfolding community might be possible in an age of personal social networks with the looming challenge of living with difference, when there is less need to be neighbourly and few of us really have to be more than superficially friendly with our neighbours.’

I do believe that when residents connect through neighbourhood online networks, where those are collectively-oriented, the potential to resolve this challenge is significant.

Against that, as I’ve said before, investing in formal initiatives in order to generate local social connections may be of limited value, being back-to-front. Emily's pretty emphatic on this:

‘Good Neighbour societies are founded on a notion that organisation will bring about a return to traditional neighbourliness. It will not.’

So with all this in mind, I’m proposing a meeting about the past, present and future of neighbouring, in London in about a month’s time – just before the jubilee street party brouhaha swamps us all with romantic representations of community and soppy insistence on formal mechanisms as the key to revisiting a past golden age of neighbouring… More on that very soon.

Getting something back from baby boomers before they go

I was at a Building Futures debate last night at the RIBA, part of their investigation into ‘how cities adapt to the changing requirements of an ageing population’. Among the speakers were Alan Hatton-Yeo of the Beth Johnson Foundation, and Indy Johar of 00.  

I just want to note here a couple of points that Indy made which struck me as particularly important.

First, he argued against distinguishing any single age group in public debate where it pits one group against another: ‘intergenerational warfare is completely pointless’. This is part of an argument to get away from single segment politics, a tradition exploited by many politicians and single issue lobby groups. Rather, we should be working out how to do intergenerational planning and intergenerational economics.

Indy then went on to argue the need for a process of intergenerational wealth transfer, because this has broken down, and inadequate levels of house building have contributed to the collapse. He identified a contrast between older people’s insistence on independence, and the fact that there will of necessity be an increase in intergenerational households whether they like it or not. This led to a welcome blast at the so-called baby boomers (shades of The Pinch):

‘It’s about the baby boomers not talking about what they need, but standing up and talking about how they can contribute.’

What are the odds of that happening in significant numbers? Where, culturally or politically, is the stimulus for it? I find myself increasingly despondent at being part of arguably the most selfish and destructive generation in history, in this country, and I fear it will take more than wise words from Indy, or David Willetts's book, to slow things down, let alone reverse the damage. Someone persuade me otherwise.

The messages of front doors

I’ve been out helping to deliver leaflets this weekend, as the local elections are coming up, and been really surprised at the proportion of homes near me that send stern messages to anyone approaching.

Many are open from the pavement and I could wheel the baby buggy up to the door, but others stack up the barriers and disincentives.

I reckon around 50 per cent of front doors near me carry a message about not wanting cold callers, pizza leaflets or free newspapers, or insisting on seeing verifiable identification if I were to be so impertinent as to knock or ring.

At one house the letter box was deliberately secured shut, for fear of bombs, presumably; so anything, including post (and bombs, conceivably) had to be left in a box at the doorstep.

Of course there are also those that courteously, but not quite invitingly, advise you that you are subject to 24 hour CCTV recording. Most memorably, one with a silent dog behind the letter-flap who snapped the leaflet from my grasp and narrowly left me my fingers.

And all the time one is conscious that while some people regard political campaign material as a form of dirty litter, others will complain if they have not received theirs.

It’s dispiriting to face the messages of many fortress mentalities, but maybe I should do this more often, to improve my reading of neighbourhoods.

Reality checks

A few days ago I went back to listen to a BBC Woman’s Hour programme from before Christmas which had an article about neighbourliness. It included a conversation with Helen Hibberd, Co-ordinator of Chorlton Good Neighbours (which I’ve mentioned recently) and Liz Richardson, from Manchester University, who I think I can get away with calling the doyenne of community action research.  

One of the points that Liz was making was that people seem to want to be more friendly with their neighbours but feel shy and say there are things that inhibit them from ‘making the first move’ – echoing Lilian Linders’ research finding about ‘the request scruple’: the problem is on the demand side, not the supply side.

As it happens I bumped into Liz at a meeting in London on Friday, and she told me that when she got home from the recording studio on the day the programme was made, she found there was a serious brawl going on in the street outside her house. For all the soullessness of contemporary neighbouring in some contexts, to which she had referred in her broadcast comments, here was a violent and bloody fight going on in the street.

But, Liz assured me, the neighbours rallied round, saw off the attackers and cared for the wounded victim.

Which reminded me of my own reality check, when talking about neighbourliness to camera a few years ago and finding that local kids were throwing stones at us.

It would be better not to have such incidents, but at least they help stop some of us getting soppy about ‘community’ and neighbourly relations.

 

Why engage?

I liked this note from a New Start magazine article on the Turning the Corner (TTC) project, a Big Lottery funded series of initiatives working with young people in parts of northern England.

“In Wakefield, Pav Sull, owner of Woodhouse Post Office, has reported a marked reduction in antisocial behaviour in and around his premises since getting involved in artwork projects with young people and volunteering at local youth drop-in sessions.

“Pav says: ‘One reason for getting involved was so that when young people came in the store they would see their work on display and generate a sense of pride. We hoped this would translate into better behaviour, which it did. I have seen a drastic reduction in the anti-social behaviour compared to before TTC was set up. I have also noticed a vast improvement in the attitudes of the young people that come into the shop.’”

‘He seemed just a normal bloke’: resilience, community protection, and neighbouring

Recently I mentioned two examples of public services (fire and rescue, trading standards) not usually associated with community engagement. This morning I was in a discussion about similar questions, the role of local people in readiness for, and response to disasters and emergencies.

This is mainly about communication to and from the ‘resilience’ agencies which have to deal with the effects of explosions, rail accidents, flooding and so on. They are rightly looking to strengthen their contacts so that they can introduce timely voluntary and statutory support – like dealing with trauma for instance – which can be needed for months and years after a devastating event.

And this is progress. But it struck me that in some kinds of human-initiated emergency, such as marauding use of firearms typified by the currently newsworthy Anders Behring Breivik, or the Hungerford massacre or Virginia Tech - or even the urban disturbances of summer 2011 - the experience of local people may be complicated by a sense of guilt mixed with cruel deception. Whenever cases like this arise, neighbours are usually quoted as saying something like ‘he seemed just a normal bloke, kept himself to himself…’

Can we understand how it felt in retrospect to have been a neighbour of Josef Fritzl, and to have respected his privacy?’ I imagine people saying simply, We knew nothing, what should we have done? – and never really recovering. An anti-social or deranged individual determined to use privacy as a smokescreen will do so, unless as a society we were to dismantle the structures and culture of privacy. (Apparently because of privacy laws, staff at Virginia Tech were not aware that their student Seung-Hui Cho had been disagnosed with selective mutism, and a severe anxiety disorder).

Is this where we find the limit of community engagement? How close could the best of good neighbourliness have got to an Anders Breivik or a Josef Fritzl? No closer than they’d let you, through a street rep scheme perhaps, and no closer. You cannot see what he brings home from the stores in boxes or the magazines going through the letterbox, or what he views online.

So what is the community engagement offer to the agencies which have to respond and clean up? Yes, they can inform residents and raise awareness about how to be prepared and how to react. (In Olympic year here in the south east of England, the phrase ‘marauding terrorist firearms attack’ is now established in official terminology).

And they can certainly establish potentially-critical connections through voluntary agencies and neighbourhood groups. But for some kinds of spectacular events such as those envisaged and partly fulfilled by Breivik, if responsible social codes and connections are not in place at an early age, and intensive recovery and support for those who experience abuse (think Fred West. Or maybe, no, don’t) are not secured, we will know nothing until the alarm goes.

And that, surely, is the key: not just early intervention but a cultural focus on healthy, diverse social networks at an early age. One simple example: if most parents when choosing schools with or for their children, favoured schools that emphasise their socialising role more (much more) than the schools’ place on academic league tables, I suspect the broad impact on social capital and mental health would be significant. I’m beginning to see how community development is linked to community protection.

 

The real costs of car use

Here’s a delightful 4 minute video from Mexico explaining how induced demand and misdirected subsidies make the use of cars so much more of a problem than is duly recognised. (Note the presence of the British Embassy in the credits at the end. Should we look to the Mexican Embassy in London to help produce a version for the UK market?)

Local people defending the public realm? Deny them access to toilets!

Here’s a torrid story told by Adam Langleben of how one council – the infamous Barnet council in north London – chose to behave corporately in the face of a few residents seeking to defend their local library against a devious closure tactic. The officials’ sense of exclusive ownership over the property, including toilets, water and electricity supplies, shows a remarkably weak grasp of the notion of a public building.

Further, the council’s poor handling of the entire process is shown up, surprise surprise, by the use of social media. As Adam writes:

‘you cannot simply push around residents, lie to residents and expect them to simpl[y] take this.’

Part of the problem seems to be that Barnet council have signed up to some religious mumbo-jumbo which claims that the private sector runs things more efficiently than the public sector, de facto. Even if this were true – and there’s enough evidence (e.g.) to have discredited it long ago, if everyday experience were not sufficient – there’s a small question of the meaning and value of a public realm.

What matters now is for some of us to start thinking about how we restore services as public services - not products that people who can afford them, buy, or that are subject to the big society model of a miserable suspended animation, kept breathing artificially and fitfully through inadequate and unpredictable resources and expertise.

Who’s next door?

I’ve been passed a press release from FindaProperty.com announcing research which finds that 26 per cent of people in the UK don't know the name of their next door neighbour. The Scotsman has taken up the news here.

Just to offer a little perspective, a survey for Aviva Norwich Union in 2006 offered a whopping 55 per cent for this question (and no data to back it up there either). If you believe one, you may as well believe the other, and should therefore find the latest news heartily encouraging.

As I understand it, FindaProperty.com is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Associated Newspapers, a well-known source of fictionalised news with staff who are permanently alarmed. The UK version of the news that The Scotsman picked up claims that

‘According to the stats 3.5 million people in the UK have never seen the person who lives next door.’

Well that comes out at about 5-6 per cent, so I find it difficult to get alarmed about that either. I’d like to see the wording for the question though.

 

Building a sense of agency: community engagement in the age of consent

Last week Julian Dobson reported that the government “has been having a series of conversations about how to, in its words, 'mobilise neighbourhoods'”. I don’t know who these conversations are with but it sounds like they might have a bit of catching up to do. Julian reminds us that government seems to want a form of community action that gets people growing and picking apples for motherhood pie but doesn’t upset the cart.

I sense that a new phase of community engagement is emerging and I want to try and clarify what that might mean. First, four little insights from the past week or so.

• I heard how a Chinese restaurant had been inspected by the fire services, whose officers found several dangerous transgressions (not just out-of-date extinguishers) for which they could have been closed down. Rather than do that, the fire officers contacted the chair of the town’s Chinese Association, who intervened to help establish some quick fixes followed by managed upgrading, so that the business was able to keep going.
• I’ve been in conversations to facilitate a process of community engagement in an area of west London that is anticipating extensive regeneration. Our approach will be to help ensure that residents recognise that it is legitimate to have ideas and aspirations for their area; and that local agencies should provide a responsive environment in which such ideas can be tested and opportunities provided.
• I heard some trading standards officers talking about moving from a triggered prosecution approach, when a business transgresses (for example in under-age selling), to an advice and training model, encouraging traders to learn, appreciate and abide by the law. They call it ‘community protection’.
• I ran a workshop with young people who experience exclusion, who were part of a young inspectors’ scheme, whereby they gain confidence, acceptance and employability skills in return for helping local services (like libraries, surgeries, activity centres) through systematic evaluation. The young people’s role was welcomed by the receiving agencies and they could only tell me of one throw-away remark that might on a bad day have been construed as patronising.

Examples like this confirm to me that we are moving into an age in which governance is far more about permissions and consent – in both directions - than about top-down decree. This may be consistent with what has been called ‘permission-based policy-making.’ You can’t do that without genuine engagement. Most politicians haven’t spotted this, because politicians don’t tend to notice change that they haven’t brought about themselves. All four of the above examples were instigated by some of those hugely innovative, under-rated, committed people in modest-ranking roles in local public services.

This change in the relation between local people and service providers is profoundly related to the nature of the network society, which is characterised by the erosion of hierarchies and the emergence of powerful horizontal communication systems. That’s been going on for at least 20 years and is nothing whatever to do with political direction from the centre. The transformation draws on, and depends heavily on, people’s connectedness at local level.

So if government wants to understand the context of ‘mobilising neighbourhoods’ (I think that phrase probably means community action around local issues), it first needs to appreciate how neighbourly recognition and interaction underpin readiness to mobilise in time of need. That’s always been the case. The bit that I think is emerging now is about building a sense of agency at neighbourhood level, which you don’t do with flimsy rhetoric about ‘innovation’ and silly competitions and decimating the public sector.

What this is leading to is a space where people who have previously experienced only disempowerment, come to feel that they have consent to act.

 

 

 

Blossom

 

 

Yarnbooks

I'm a bit late catching up with this, but I think it's a delightful example of yarnbombing (via). As with other forms of guerilla art, it seems to work best when it draws attention to an inadequate built environment, with subtlety, humour and harmlessness. It looks like this one does the job.

 

See also: 51 victims of knitted (and crocheted) graffiti