Neighbourhoods

Conversational democracy and neighbourhood online networks

Nesta have organised a substantial event in London next Monday called Reboot Britain, which is about how we can

'punch through the gloom and take advantage of the radically networked digital world we now live in to help revive our economy, rebuild our democratic structures and improve public services.'

Paul Evans has organised a stream of sessions on political innovation. I'm speaking at one of these, alongside Nick Booth, William Perrin and Edward Welsh, which is on the broad-enough topic of Locality: Councillors, Journalists, 'active citizens', community websites and local government communications.

I think I'll focus on the ‘active citizenship’ part of the topic, keep the tech at a respectful distance, and ask ‘What's needed to stimulate active citizenship at local level?’

It'll need a rough distinction between informal and social participation on the one hand, and formal civic and political participation on the other. We need the former in order to stimulate the latter. (Well I know some people do political participation without doing social participation: I've even met folk who voted for them, but we won't have time on monday for the nuances).

To my mind, it doesn't work to suppose that people can be prodded and coerced into civic or political participatory roles when their experience of social participation is impoverished. So it would help if we can develop a thriving communication ecology at neighbourhood level, and get some conversational democracy we can depend on.

In the nick of time, with local democracy gagged and tied to the tracks and the train of public spending cuts thundering down the line, along come gallant dynamic al-action neighbourhood online networks. Hurrah. Let's get out of this metaphor and ask a few questions:

Does the economic logic of these nets imply a more appropriate geographic scale for democratic involvement than currently exists? (Consider, for example, how much difficulty some authorities have in trying to establish meaningful area forums).

Does the inbuilt interactivity imply more conversation?

Does online conversation stimulate offline activity?

Should local authorities be enabling the development of these networks? (Dunh?)

'At work wen they asked my opinion'

We asked some young people to think about the earliest or most significant experience of democracy that they could recall. There were some poignant themes reflecting unstructured lives ('deciding whether to live with my mum or my dad') and then this one:

'at work wen they asked my opinion on the display'

Not much is it? One ordinary lad with low self-esteem helping out for next-to-nothing in a shop or somewhere, and someone took the trouble to ask his opinion. I'm glad we asked for his input and he felt able to respond.

I read today, the mutual relationship between two persons is the smallest building block of society. (Thomas Hylland Eriksen)

Reflections on 'mindless vandalism'

A couple of years ago I posted about the pinfold in Bishopthorpe, a restored medieval pound now a simple village meeting and resting place. It's also a neat example of public property that is community-owned.

But community-ownership is not always easy. Bishopthorpe.net, the local site set up by my friend former resident Martin Dudley, unhappily reports vandalism to the pinfold.

Three quick thoughts occurred to me as I read the post and comments.

First, it's seems unfortunate how quickly the unquestioned assumption is made that young people are to blame. Many of us have probably seen grown men (or women, less likely) do considerably more damage in no time at all in a variety of contexts, with or without the influence of alcohol. There may be justification for the assumption that there are no such adults in the vicinity of Bishopthorpe, I don't know.

Secondly, there are parts of the country where this level of damage in one day or night, and no stabbings, would be regarded as a stunning result for the policing and anti-social behaviour teams. But let us not fall into the trap of therefore dismissing its impact in this context. Disorder in the local environment can have rapidly accumulating negative effects, and people are right I think both to remain sensitive to levels of order around them, and to take pride in the way they have collectively restored their heritage.

Thirdly, it's reassuring to think that issues like this can and do get aired openly, and views considered and refined, in an online space.

Just a pity that young people don't seem to be occupying much of that online space, because it might be a good place to be hearing their views.

Rationale - Adventitious. Causality - Contingent

As part of a project looking at the digitisation of archives and collections held by members of the public, I've been wandering around an absorbing example called CAIN, which is about conflict and politics in Northern Ireland.

Many important collections are established by ordinary citizens of course, because the institutional view of history is so partial and sometimes in denial. The potential contributions of resources like these to present and future understanding is enormous.

On sites like these you can linger over memorial quilts, reflect on the faces of children killed in the troubles, or learn lots about murals.

And just when you're comfortable receiving data in the usual formats - images with a bit of digestible explanatory text - you click onto something that makes you see things in a different light. From this page you can see a 'Spreadsheet of Deaths Associated with Violence in Northern Ireland, 1969-2001, (Version 1; dated 16 June 2009)'. In fact it goes up to 2005, listing 3649 fatalities.

I stare at a lifeless name, and the screen spells out:

Rationale:Adventitious
Causality: Contingent
Context: Explosion

Here's the list of punitive categories for the dataset:

Internal Security
Enforcement
Intimidation
Reprisal
Factionalism
Retaliatory
Victimisation

It was compiled by Michael McKeown, a retired teacher from North Belfast. The word 'painstaking' comes to mind.

Promoting neighbourliness: communi-tea time in Knowsley

We've no way of knowing if neighbourliness has declined, although I think it's what we'd expect when we consider changes in the conditions under which it appears to thrive. But the essence of neighbouring is informality: and how do you promote that and nurture it in a bureaucratised public sector?

It's a question that crops up here occasionally - echoing a chapter I wrote about 'formalising the informal' in policy here, in turn echoing a question posed most clearly by Philip Abrams writing about neighbourhood care some years ago:

'How does one organise to promote lack of organisation?'

Not impressed? Well maybe the use of the word 'central' in the following quote, from Barbara Misztal's book on informality, will persuade you:

'the fine-tuning of informality and formality is central to the creation of social trust.'

Good neighbour schemes of various kinds have been tried, tweaked and tested over the years. Generally, I suspect they've had more success than they've been credited with, especially among housing associations. Unlike Neighbourhood Watch, as far as I'm aware good neighbour schemes have no central resource, co-ordination or funding. Neighbourhood Watch works on the basis of distrust: perhaps that tells us something about the policy-orientation.

Now here's an approach that attempts the kind of light-touch nudging of behaviour that we can expect will characterise much social policy from now on: all smiles please for Knowsley Council's playful campaign to stimulate local social interaction, including a mock news broadcast about a tea shortage threatening community spirit across the borough.

The message, says Adam Patterson on the New Start blog, is

'get together with your neighbours, share a cup of tea, get to know each other and help create a friendlier community.'

 

Sustainable land use and transport in outer neighbourhoods

Since early 2004 I've been on the advisory group for the SOLUTIONS project - it's a broad study focusing on spatial policy, transport systems and built form, in outer urban areas of England that are likely to experience growth pressures in the future.

Researchers from six universities have worked on strategic modelling of transport and planning issues to the year 2031, and local neighbourhood studies exploring the sustainability implications of various transport options and settlement structures. I've just come from the final conference and am struggling to piece together the key messages.

We can start with the predictable I suppose: existing land use patterns in outer urban areas are unsustainable, both environmentally and socially. The team looked at three main models that policy might promote, alongside the 'existing trend':

• compact city - high density development related to public transport and located within existing towns and cities
• market led dispersal - medium to low density development oriented towards travel by car
• planned expansion - new settlements and suburbs built at medium densities and oriented towards both public transport and cars.

Here are some examples of the kinds of subtleties that emerge once the models have been crunched:

• In the compact city, higher density reduces land take relative to the trend by 40%, but dwelling choice and space declines, and surface sealing / flood risk increases. Compact development results in a small reduction in resource use and environmental damage but has negative social and economic impacts.

• Under market-led dispersal, there is an increase of about 2% in total CO₂ emissions, and 13% in construction materials, but increases in surface sealing / flood risk are least.

• Under planned expansion policies, new settlements would improve space standards relative to the trend, but results are highly dependent on attracting basic employment to the new settlements.

Got that? So it turns out that the difference between the spatial options is relatively small; road user charging would offer more significant benefits; and improvements to sustainability are likely to require technological improvements and behavioural changes.

From the local study work it seems that the critical factor in determining the level of active travel, for both car owners and non-owners, is distance. There is consistency across different kinds of neighbourhood in the distance people are prepared to walk.

'If localities are planned so that facilities are accessible by foot - within certain distance thresholds - then there will be more active travel, a more socially inclusive environment and greater opportunity for people to cut car use and carbon emissions.'

Hugh Barton of the University of the West of England argues for greater autonomy for local planners, to reflect the finding that

'the variation between different places is not marginal, it's huge.'

He also suggests that density is not the main factor in affecting people's behaviour and experience of locality.

Keep an eye out for more outputs from this research over the coming months.

Place survey: the headlines

Headline results from the 2008 Place Survey, which reflects and contributes to local priorities under local area agreements in England, have been published today.

• 59 per cent of the population felt they belong to their immediate neighbourhood

• 76 per cent felt that people from different backgrounds got on well together in their local area

• 29 per cent felt they could influence decisions in their local area

• 30 per cent feel that in their local area parents take enough responsibility for the behaviour of their children

• 31 per cent felt that there were problems with people in their local area not treating one another with respect and consideration (37.5% in London).

Links to various formats here.

'Community picnic'

Yesterday I was at a 'Midsummer Picnic' in Cumberland Market, north London, promoted by the wonderful Wellcome Collection and produced by General Public Agency. It was described as

'an event for local people to discover personal collections on stalls designed by artist duo Juneau Projects and inspired by Henry Wellcome and his collection. There will be activities for adults and children throughout the afternoon, and visitors are invited to bring food to eat and share at this traditional summer picnic.'

There were various stalls including seed planting, temporary tattooing, veggie-pickling, face-painting, watercolour portraits, and Wellcome's own impressive stand which you can see in the pic. Principles of gift and exchange applied, nothing was bought or sold.

In practice the theme of local people's collections was a minor feature and most people I spoke to felt the event was more like a fete than a picnic. But it was emphatically successful as an intercultural occasion, a relaxed gathering of people from diverse backgrounds in a local space.

I've been asked to write a review and was working with film-maker Dani Jacobs to create a record. I spoke to a Filipino; an Italian; a black South African who has been in England since 1954; three remarkable white Londoners in their nineties, Winnie, Jessie and Ethel (the latter two pictured); an east end Jewish lady, passionate about diversity; two more Italians; two Polish children and one Bengali; a white Englishman; an English mother married to a Muslim; another Bengali and her daughter; a Greek woman; and various others. It took a reluctant effort to remember that the casual ordinariness of all the intercultural and intergenerational interactions is not universal. (Recent reflections on racism).

Among the other themes I'll be looking at are: how this relates to other organised outdoor events like street parties and family picnics, the traditions of festivals and fetes; and the irresistible anthropological theme of eating in public. I'll post when it's done.

Do you have to be civil to talk about civility?

Julia Unwin, CEO of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, posted on the Joe Public blog the other day, on the topic 'Our society has lost the instinct for kindness' - trailing JRF's 'Social evils' publications.

'As a society, we appear to have lost the instinct for kindness and the willingness to extend the hand of friendship. Our responses to children, to older people, to strangers, are all conditioned by a concern not to offend and a fear of getting involved.'

Nothing like a mild generalisation to get Joe Public going. Within the stream of very diverse comments which has been accumulating were a few which tried to acknowledge and navigate the complexity glossed in the article, including this (more nuanced than the quote above, I think):

i think it is very easy for those who are well educated, secure and have nothing to fear to talk about civility / politeness - they find incivil behaviour bewildering - they muse over our 'broken society' and ask why - i think it is very easy to be polite and play by the rules when you are winning the game. If you are constantly losing and need the rules of the game changed asking politely doesn't normally deliver!

I'm pleased to have seen this point made.

How many religious people does it take to change a light sensor?

There are so many takes on this story I don't know which to go for.

'Gordon and Dena Coleman said they cannot leave or enter their Bournemouth flat on the Sabbath because the hallway sensors automatically switch on lights.'

These dear folk live elsewhere, this is their holiday flat we're talking about, but of course it's important to them. As is their religious code.

The light sensors were installed to save money and energy 'but the couple felt they breached their religious rules'.

The BBC report says that:

Other residents in the block of 35 flats, who could end up having to pay legal costs, are upset.

Some other reflections here.

[This post has been sligthtly edited following feedback. Enjoy].

Day. Centre.

With ragged sinews Dearie grips the chair arm. Staring at the volunteer holding tea, she's peering at what it was that Don said about landing on the moon, when he got home from school, what was it. She glares awaiting focus, and has all day to do so. Off-centre now she shines down on the rest.

Designed spaces for young people

AdiZones are outdoor gyms or fitness spaces designed mainly for young people, which have been around for about ten months in London. Yes, they're sponsored, well spotted.  Via CYP Now I see there's to be a national rollout for a few more of these highly configured third places.

Well and good, but I do think there's a problem with the official impulse to over-design spaces for young people. It's natural that they will put some energy into redesigning it their way, and if that involves a little damage or graffiti we shouldn't be surprised: at that age, our instincts are charged to beat off anonymity, and it seems we live in a society determined to impose anonymity.

I think I know who will win, most times. There's a very successful space for young people in a town near me, which is basically a fenced-off disused building site, with some concrete ramps and tables for skateboarding. The authorities wisely left it to the kids to decorate it themselves and invent its uses. AdiZones feel to me like another example of Uncle Society telling young people how to spend their time, which is just not smart.

And I'm just curious about this: the adiZone freestyle space is designed 'to encourage Taekwondo, Judo, gymnastics and other activities like dance and aerobics.' I note that the equipment 'does not require electricity', but is there a power supply so that people can plug in their dance music? (And if they do, will we all have to hear it?)

A game about community resources

I devised and ran a game the other day for library staff and community sector representatives in Cornwall. It was part of a workshop over two days and the purpose was to explore the implications of and context for a civic/community resource in the centre of a town. What follows is a short description of what happened.

We began in plenary by inventing a town with certain features, and a few neighbourhoods with a range of unspecified social problems. We then turned our attention to trying to describe the features of an ideal neighbourhood for the residents of that town: somewhere safe, clean, friendly, informed and connected, with a viable local economy, quality housing, good levels of health and so on. We grouped these 'attributes of community' into four headings: social and community, local economy, learning and recreation, and communication.

Next we explored the institutions at work in the town - some, like the college, operating town-wide and some, which I dealt as cards to each of three groups, at neighbourhood level. All participants helped plot the roles of the institutions (a drug advice centre, a mother and toddler group, youth centre, police community support officers, and so on) in relation to the four groups of desired attributes, plus the partnership links between them. As someone suggested and the pic seems to confirm, in this fictional world, everything's joined up.

Then they got to work describing in more detail the rather unfortunate particulars of their grotty and deprived neighbourhoods - levels of crime, disorder, educational under-attainment, mortality, poor housing, the works. They scored each area for the four attributes on a matrix of 'fragile, stable, or robust': almost entirely fragile at this stage.

When this was done we went from table to table passing each neighbourhood and its problems to the next group, so that each inherited a new locality with its challenges to be addressed. I asked them to take on these challenges within a five year timeline, making reference to the role of the institutions whose laudable partnership work was by now graphically blu-tacked to the wall. What they were striving for was to work out how the existing range of local agencies, together with groups of residents, could somehow lift the neighbourhoods in a few years from their low scores on the matrix through 'stable' towards 'robust'. Ah, if only.

By this time we all had some idea of the gap between what could be achieved in the town and the aspirations for ideal local quality of life. So it was time for an announcement about a new source of funding for an agency to occupy a disused civic building in the centre of town. Participants were asked to work together to develop a bid to address the shortfall, including statement of purpose, critical success factors, proposals for management and governance, and an outline of specific projects and client groups.

This worked better than I'd dare hope. In order to prepare their part of the bid, participants had to get up and move between their groups to find out what the other groups were preparing; and they did.

Even better, those working on client groups and projects came up with something quite special. They invented a kind of community sector ideas incubator ('The Place'), where the initiatives of diverse community groups are nurtured and developed, occupying no permanent space in the venue but being nurtured there. Groups would come to and form around The Place, get help with connections, with sources of help and funding, and move on, on a community development model. Why such a role should not be seen as related to the role of a community library I don't know. I still think it has mileage, although even by the time I left the following afternoon, and we had worked hard on the meanings and potential of 'community library', those who had invented it still needed persuading of its worth.

What we had achieved I think was a mutual reassurance that a library can be a place that collaborates intensively with local people in promoting community cohesion and empowering people to get involved in local life on their own terms.

Trooble at t'empowerment mill

Paul Evans, who set up the Local Democracy blog among various other things, invited me the other day to articulate how unwelcome it is for many people with problems in their lives to be the subject of demands to engage, to participate, and to have their say...

Nah, other stuff to do. Then I came across a note I wrote three years ago, quoting none other than David Miliband on empowerment:

"The challenge is to spread the sense of power and autonomy citizens feel over their lifestyles and values to other parts of their life, notably their interactions with public services, markets, and the community."

Good stuff to hear from a leading politician. But what I've been trying to get at is the point that too many people don't have much sense of power or autonomy over their lifestyles in the first place; so for many, maybe it's not necessarily the right place to start.

Will that do Paul?

Autobiography

I was born in 1955. In Gloucestershire I watched a field change and a hawk settle on nothing above it. Villages were raised by their children, invisibly harnessed. Sometime later I let go.

Found difficult and left untried? Perspectives on participation and engagement

For me, one of the recurring puzzles in participation and community engagement is how little attention is paid to the benefits experienced by those who participate. I wonder if the widespread uncritical use of the C word has something to do with this: if you go round assuming that 'community=consensus' I suppose you expect the benefits to the individual to be somehow self-evident. But they ain't.

We've found that people do have views on the 'wifms' (what's in it for me), you just have to ask them. Bev Carter and I asked young people in Milton Keynes what sort of benefits might ensue to those who were active on the local issues. Among the responses:

Power
Diserplin
Make friends
Be popular
Have fun
Showing off
Right decisions
Achievements
New things
Get more respect
Feeling happy
Helping people
Express talent...

Among the perceived barriers to participation for these young people:

Getting into trubble
Age diffrence
Bitchieness
Bullying
Parents get worried
Racism...

If we are to understand the difficulties in establishing a sustainable culture of participation and involvement, surely we need to have a serious appreciation of the identifiable benefits at the individual level?

Over a year ago I noted that community engagement was starting to get some negative press, suggesting a need to distinguish its principles from managerialist practices in the public sector. If nothing else, that might mean that when we speak about engagement, we don't always adopt the service-centric view.

I'm revisiting these thoughts because JRF have just published a 'round-up paper' reviewing the evidence on citizen involvement in local governance. It's a clear and useful summary of JRF's work in this area, but guess what, it considers involvement from the perspective of service provision and decision-making. If we always do that, then this kind of conclusion is what we're going to get:

'Community involvement costs public services significant time and money. Communities volunteer their scarce time and limited resources, taking away their energies from other activities in their community. If neither providers nor communities are clear about the objectives nor perceive any impact on decisions, on service quality or on citizen satisfaction, the policy is not sustainable in the face of tightening finances and difficult decisions about resource allocation.'

This suggests, to paraphrase G K Chesterton, not that it has been tried and found wanting, but that it will have been found difficult and left untried.

I can't help wondering if a different perspective might find community involvement economically, socially and morally indispensable.

Is racism increasing among young people?

A colleague and I have been puzzling over a level of racism among young people that we've come across recently. Complaints about racist behaviour were offered to us by workshop participants on several occasions, and we witnessed openly racist comments among the young people in a racially mixed school class and among a group excluded from school. These examples appeared to us to be crude and unreflective reiterations of unfiltered prejudices, in contexts where no challenge was expected.

Now I just came across a post by a youth worker on the CYP forum, claiming that racist attitudes have not only vastly intensified but they have also become calculated and covert.

Over the last couple of months I have been shocked by the hostile nature of the racist attitudes displayed by young people - supplemented with many references to support for the BNP... I have worked with disaffected kids for over 15 years and not one single young person has ever shown any self-motivated interest in any political party but now they know the names of their local BNP representatives.

The problem is out there, unseen and festering.  Whilst I roll up my sleeves and prepare for what is going to be a complicated challenge I cannot help but feel utter frustration for the damage caused by the hysterical “moral police” who have succeeded in driving this social cancer underground.

And disturbingly, when it came to reflecting on the recent elections:

Support for the BNP was very open throughout the day with young people joining in the revelry of “their” party.

This problem has been brewing, and I'm thinking about a paper published last year by Carolyn Gaskell on 'young people's experiences of (dis)respected citizenship and the New Labour Respect Agenda'. She pointed out how hard it is for young people to assume a role as an active citizen when the state does not reflect a sense of respect and worth to them:

'feeling disrespected by the state, living in insecure and often dangerous environments, without the voice, power or belief that change could be enacted, many young people subvert their citizenship, creating an alternative framework of respect for themselves.'

[Children's geographies, 6(3), 2008]

Community involvement in planning

Wholly sensible article on Planning Resource by David Tittle, noting that it's now five years since the requirement for statements of community involvement (SCIs) in planning was enshrined in statute:

The best engagement develops residents' capacity to understand and plan the future of their place.

If planners' and urban design officers' time is not invested early to talk with local people and argue for positive design, it will only have to be spent later on trying to dig residents and councillors out of entrenched positions.

Active citizens and public services

I've been in Cornwall, working with library and community development workers on community engagement for Truro library. One of numerous themes to come out of some intensive discussion concerned the relationship between active citizenship, volunteering, and community action.

Someone raised awareness of a tension in the way volunteers are helping to prop up struggling services - or felt to be so doing - while the service is seeking to engage increasingly with residents active in local groups. What's the connection between those two categories?

'Active citizen' seems to be an umbrella term, popularised from political expediency in the 1980s, encompassing civic participation, community activity and volunteering. Essentially it distinguishes those who get involved (and who thereby, by implication, advance the interests of the state) from passive citizens who absorb what the state offers but do not contribute to the collective accomplishment of quality of life.

Volunteering is a form of active ciizenship at the less political (and often less ideological) end of the spectrum. In public services - such as in a public library - volunteers will be subject to expectations about their role that have to be accommodated by their managing agency. Their degree of engagement with or commitment to the service ethos can be shallow, or not perceived as critical.

Typically, a community activist by contrast is politically autonomous. They may be giving time, energy and expertise voluntarily but not perceive themselves as a 'volunteer'. Probably more consciously than the volunteer, they may be compensating for a shortfall in public provision; campaigning to increase or improve services; or otherwise, positioning community provision as distinct from public provision.

The activist could be contributing energy to a campaign against the council, at the same time as helping a different department with some issue of mutual interest. They engage on terms that are acceptable to themselves and to the 'community' to which they claim allegiance. It's political, innit.

Now that libraries are finding that the responsibilisation agenda pushes them towards both involving volunteers and engaging with activists - always to mutual advantage one hopes - will our understanding of these roles start to come into sharper focus? Do we need these subtle differences, these nuances in the relations between citizen and state provision? I suspect we do, very much, and the subtleties will increase not diminish.

I Taw a Putty Tat

Not long ago I referred to the curious imbalance of neighbourhood-level complaints against dogs, compared with those against cats.

Well today, among the, ahem, 'Uncategorised' discussion at Harringay Online (sign-up required) there's a hint of some pent-up feeling about this:

'We have had birds nest in our garden and it was the cats that got 'em. The same cats that crap all over our garden - which is lovely. It is odd the amount of outrage that is stirred up by dog poo - but its pampered domestic cats that crap in my garden every day.'

'If you've got a cat, put it on a leash. Our bird populations are getting decimated. Keep your cat inside or don't have one at all. Otherwise you, not the cat, are responsible for our declining wildlife.'

At the Wildlife Care Center in Portland, Oregon, they treat about 3,000 injured animals a year. Staff think that 'up to 40 percent of the injuries' are caused by cats. It's spooky how blinkered cat-owners are to what their pets do. Could the story of ornithologist Jim Stevenson, 'the most notorious cat killer in America' be repeated in humble north London? Don't bet against it. The case against him was dismissed.