Neighbourhoods

Of the social capital of a social capitalist

Today I had the privilege to be speaking (at a conference of the Society of Chief Librarians, no less; not an indian in sight) alongside John Field, whose excellent book on social capital is about to be published in its second edition. A privilege, but not an easy act to follow.

John spoke about social capital and I was talking about the Living Library project I've been involved in, and about community engagement. I think between us we offered a healthy serving of social policy and practice ideas from beyond the field. There seemed to be a great deal of support for the notion of a locally-grown, non-confrontational model of Living Library - a model which facilitates and legitimises conversations that would otherwise not happen, building relationships in an organic way.

When I reached for a biz card to offer to John, he laughed and said he didn't have one. The explanation being that he came originally from Northern Ireland where 'everyone knows everyone'. Maybe one doesn't need biz cards for bonding ties, and if you don't need bridging ties I guess you can do without. To my delight, our social networks overlap through our common friendship with Alison Gilchrist: I think it took us five minutes at most to discover this connection.

Researching social relations in urban environments

Yesterday to Manchester for a workshop on reseaching social relations in urban environments, I got to hear three nicely judged and matched presentations about how people relate to their neighbourhoods and how the notion of neighbourhood is constructed.

If you go to the link above you can follow through to some of the work discussed. While the meeting was mainly about methods, it's interesting to think about two points that came across from the research that was described -

From Mags Adams ('Sensory Urbanism: sensewalking as a methodological device') and Andrew Clarke ('Understanding community through mobile interviews and participatory mapping') I learn that people do not separate the physical environment from the social when they speak about their neighbourhoods. (Well, I could have told you that, but it's good to have the research to back it up).

Meanwhile from Roger Burrows (talking about 'Life in Coded Spaces?') I learned, if I have this right, that there are externally applied systems (geodemograohic systems) that are not simply objective, but in some way invasive and distort the social while describing it. (So a bit like humans really). Fascinating stuff, I left wanting more.

Milkmen: the official mention

Here's what my sister-in-law told me. She was watching BBC Breakfast this morning when the milkman called, so she went to the door to say she didn't want another pint, too much already, but I can't stop and chat cos my brother-in-law's on the telly talking about neighbourliness...

Naturally most milkmen are interested in the topic, and this one is no exception - keeps an eye on folk to make sure everything's ok - so in he comes to watch for the few minutes that I'm on, in a somewhat shapeless conversation with Wayne Hemingway following one of David Sillito's short film pieces. Then apparently just a quick question - 'does he mention milkmen in his book then?'

If you're curious about the answer, one good way to find out would be to go to this page and be enticed.

The neighbours who never speak / David Sillito 7 May 2008.

Trust and key-holding

David Sillito has some pieces on BBC Breakfast tv this week, beginning today in a couple of localities where I've done interviews myself, Pembroke Street in Devonport, and Bolton Woods in Shipley.

And if you want to find out more detail on some of the stories David's picked up - and the detail on the research he commissioned which suggested that 36% of respondents would not trust any of their neighbours with a spare set of house keys - perhaps you'd like to come along and hear him speak at this book launch.

The question about key-holding was posed hypothetically. In some research I carried out in Manchester a few years ago, reported here, we asked the direct questions: 'Do you hold a spare key for any of your neighbours? And do any of your neighbours hold your key?'

We found that in the 65-74 age band some 49% had keys held by neighbours, and 43% held keys for at least one neighbour, but the other age groups were significantly lower. The size of our sample left some of our stats a bit shakey, whereas the BBC survey had 1000 respondents and shows little variation across regions (England and Wales) or age groups.

Are we a nation of strangers? / David Sillito 6 May 2008

Suburban gaze

This image is by Christopher Campbell and comes from an exhibition of paintings about London's infamous A406 North Circular Road. To most people who have to negotiate it, the North Circular is an obstacle or a set of traps, not a road in which people live. Yet the homes were built to the high expectations of suburbia.

If you've read Edward Platt's fascinating study of the homes and inhabitants of the (not dissimilar) A40, Leadville, Campbell's images will be all the more compelling. Like Platt, Campbell takes the mundane, refuses to heat it up, and yet still creates something I'm reluctant to look away from. The exhbition is at StArt Space, Columbia Road, east London until 25 May.

Among the comments Edward Platt made from his interviews with residents, I'm occasionally reminded of this one:

It is not the noise on the road, but the noise of her neighbours that upsets her.

Neighbouring and older people

My text about older people and neighbouring will be published shortly by Community Development Foundation.

There will be a launch, or to put it more technically, an excuse to gather and guzzle, at Shared Intelligence in London on Tuesday 27 May 2008, which happens to be National (wait, make that European) Neighbours Day. (Thanks to Ben Lee from the National Neighbourhood Management Network for providing the venue).

Speakers include David Sillito from BBC News, Chris Gittins from Streets Alive, and Ryan Campbell from Age Concern England. If you'd like to come along, please register as places are limited. Further information is here.

You're not from round here are you?

The other day we had the first in our modest series of locally-based Living Library sessions.

One highlight was a conversation between a young male teenager and a woman who had been evacuated from London in wartime and had lived in the village for 40 years. She said that she still did not feel like a local.

It's a nice example of just the kind of nuanced, hidden aspect of local relationships that we think the Living Library process can bring to the surface.

Thoughts for tormented neighbours

What can we say of events in Amstetten, other than to note that 'in a community where most neighbours knew each other,' sure, such things are possible.

And where tormented neighbours must be questioning themselves - did we do enough, should I have thought of this, should you have asked about that? - yes, the line between privacy and collective concern or responsibility is often hard to discern. It is not wrong that a person who wants to keep himself to himself, can do so.

Neighbourliness is a partial solution to many things, but it is probably not the whole solution to anything.

No hats

I took this pic with my phone, on the wrong side of a pub door the other day.

Why do they specify no hats I wonder? Perhaps it's nothing more sinister than that they don't want to appear to be discriminating solely against people wearing hoodies.

A bang at the door

I met a bloke today who told me he'd once put a firework through the door of a house on the corner of my street.

'They got me down the road - my trouser got caught in the chain on my bike, I fell off and they caught me. But they looked after me cos I cut my leg. They took me back and patched me up, and it ended up I went out with their daughter for about three years.'

Yes, since you ask, I had the temerity to ask him why he put a lighted banger in the letter box.

'Cos it was a big metal box' - his arms outstretched - 'it would have gone Boom!!'

This gent, now aged around 55, was clearly still animated at the thought of the sensational percussion he almost orchestrated. It was nowt to do with the people who lived there, about whom he knew nothing.

It's a nice reminder, chiming well with my own childhood recollections, that some behaviour perceived as anti-social is just boyish exuberance. (Well that's my story and I'm sticking to it).

Avoiding Mrs Jellyby: on involvement and coercion

If you work in community participation and engagement, you can get quite sensitive to questions about exploitative or coercive practices. Me, if I get the chance to have my coercion-ometer tested or recalibrated, I'm gonna take it.

And that happened unexpectedly today when I had the privilege to chair the first trustees meeting for Friends Out There. We have some way to go as a new charity, but I found myself among friends with energy, ideas, vision and practical nous, so I'm hoping we'll be able to convert the goodwill and excitement of our launch into some meaningful change.

We met in someone's house and several of the trustees had children with them. Some of the youngsters took the initiative to set up their own Friends Out There 'club'. We're talking roughly 8-12 year-olds. So they got on with their own meeting, in the kitchen - prepared an agenda, took notes, designed posters, listed ideas, and agreed to rotate roles at future meetings.

While this was exciting and to be welcomed, I'm of the view that on a sunny spring sunday afternoon, kids should have the chance to be outside messing around, making a noise and possibly causing a limited amount of trouble. So it forced us to examine the hidden sources of coercion. What had any of us said or done that brought the children to think they should be, or wanted to be doing this?

Maybe I seem a little over-sensitive here, but given the association of our charity with a village in Nigeria, I took no comfort whatever in recollecting the image of the philanthropic Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House. Dickens at his most devastating. Mrs Jellyby is devoted to the welfare of the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger, neglecting the interests of those around her. Her daughter Caddy comes to resent her exploitation by her mother.

I'm glad to say we all felt that the youngsters had taken their own path and in fact, before the meeting, one had complained to her mother that she wasn't being involved.

Still there we were in the back room, us adults, busy with Grown-Up Stuff, sigh. We invited the children to come into our meeting when they were ready and share with us what they'd done. How right-on of us.

Well, I suppose we think we understand involvement and we think we appreciate our young people, but they near blew us away with the creative directness of their ideas and approach. We now have the hefty challenge of working out how to support the stuff they want to see happen. The suspicion is growing that they might just be coercing us.

Community groups' survey on open spaces

CABE have set up a survey for community groups to find out what they need to help them create better open spaces.

This was the scene taken a few years ago outside a community venue in Brent where I did some work.

And this is an aerial view of internal estate space, from a tower somewhere in London. It's crying out for kids playing ball, an occasional BBQ or street party and community drama in the summer.

Which helps make the point that often it's not necessarily the redesign of spaces that should be prioritised, nor even provision of funding for creative solutions, but facilitating the release of energy by bringing people together and helpng them shape their own ideas: ie community development. Plus a few hundred quid maybe for a tent, some tables and a BBQ.

'Walking while Buddhist'

Zhong-Xin, a Zen practitioner in Cleveland (presumably Ohio), posted these reflections about a resident's reaction to the sight of Buddhist monks walking in a contemplative line through a neighbourhood.

'It appears that, while we were contemplating the suffering of all beings, someone in the neighborhood was suffering from fear of the unknown.'

So they called the cops. (Via Neighbors project blog).

Learning from the local: engagement and cohesion

A quick note about yesterday's Learning from the Local conference organised by the Centre for Urban and Community Research at Goldsmiths.

The main purpose was to report on a recent local project, the Newtown Neighbourhood Project (report will be linked here when I'm told it is available). This material was well contextualised with other presentations, including an update from Marj Mayo on a current JRF project on community engagement, governance and ethnic diversity - 'fluid communities, solid structures'; and a session on researching and working with gypsy-traveller groups.

The Newtown Neighbourhood Project worked in a predominantly white area with a sizeable proportion of residents of gypsy/traveller origin. The partnership (a housing association, a community engagement consultant, and CUCR, with Housing Corporation funding) seems to have worked really well, so that participative research was possible and small specific actions followed from consultative exercises.

The event got me thinking about the ways in which the community engagement agenda may be merging with (or coming into collision with) the community cohesion agenda.

My take on it at the moment, FWIW, is that the two agendas come from different drivers but just because there are tensions between them - for example, there are practices of engagement which might seem to contribute to segregation; and at the same time, as Michael Keith pointed out in response to a question, there's a politics of cohesion which is fairly reactionary - I don't see why there should not be a natural combining process here.

I'd like to live in a society where people incontestably have the right to informed participation in decision-making processes that affect them, and where at the same time people from different backgrounds get on well together. Doesn't sound too much to ask.

The hub of the village

'Since the pub and post office shut, the surveillance camera is the hub of village life.'

Cartoon by Matt in today's Telegraph.

Living library: take out a prejudice

Ronni Abergel, one of the originators of the 'living library' idea, is in London next week launching a new guide at this event -

Local Level is currently organising a series of public library-based Living Library events, so we were struck by the slogan 'take out a prejudice'.

It will be interesting to try and find out whether this challenging approach (developed in the context of youth work, I believe) attracts people who might otherwise not be encouraged to explore experiences that are new to them, or whether they might be put off.

Our Living Library events will take place as follows:

Norton Canes Library, Staffordshire

Sat 26 April, 1000-1200; Wed 7 May, 1000-1200 & 1330-1500, Thurs 15 May, 1700-1900.

Bradford Central Library

Wed 14 May, 1500-1900, Thurs 15 May, am, Sat 17 May, am.

Bournemouth Library

Sat 3 May, 1000-1200, Wed 7 May, 1400-1700, Mon 12 May, 1000-1300.

Sevenoaks Library, Kent 

Tues 29 April, pm, Sat 10 May, am, Wed 14th May, am.

Cohesion and inequalities

'I do not think you can get community cohesion unless you tackle the basic inequalities at the same time... I do not think it is possible to have cohesion where you have got such a stark set of differences between people competing in the same area. Part of cohesion and part of the original definition of cohesion was to tackle inequalities at the same time... I do not see them as being two different things. Of course, if you do tackle some of the inequalities, then the chances are that people are going to end up in the same workplace and are going to interact with each other. They are going to end up at universities and in schools in order to interact. The process of measuring inequalities means that you are also maximising the opportunities for people to relate to each other as well on an equal footing.'

Ted Cantle, Institute of Community Cohesion, speaking to the communities and local government committee on community cohesion and migration, 25 February 2008, uncorrected transcript.

Death to the springy chicken!

To the RSA last night for a debate on 'home is where we start from' organised with the Family and Parenting Institute and chaired by Polly Toynbee.

And thank you Sarah Gaventa of CabeSpace, for a clear and passionate articulation of the arguments some of us have been trying to make about children and play in the neighbourhood: 'kids have to get out of playgrounds' she said, adding a well-aimed swipe at the obsession with safe play equipment - 'death to the springy chicken!'

Because there are some confusions over what is being argued here - see for instance some of the comments posted in response to this BBC piece - it's maybe worth making the point that children's imaginations are not the problem.

What I see as the problem is the government-led, adult-endorsed preoccupation with ordering and controlling childhood. Of course kids can have fun on a springy chicken/parrot/hippo/whale/dolphin; but designed, controlled environments to the exclusion of genuine adventure and the discovery of risk, are not desirable in the long term.

(In theory, you can hear the RSA debate here, but I couldn't get any life out of it).

Play in the street: a straw poll and a doodle

Society Guardian tomorrow is running some comments on the government's play strategy which has been published for consultation. (My two euros-worth on JoePublic. More here). Trying to get a handle on the issues, I did two things.

First, I ran a straw poll among contacts to see what they thought was the single biggest obstacle stopping children from playing in the streets. I got 22 responses, not all easily categorised but with eleven people saying cars or traffic and seven referring to parental concerns or perceptions. Some people made the reasonable point that in their areas, children and young people do occupy the streets.

While the responses were coming in, I tried roughly to flowchart the parental decision-making process to see if doing so would bring any clarity to the issues.

I don't pretend to be any good at logical or sequential thinking, and I've no experience at doing flowcharts in theory or in practice. I do have experience, albeit some years since, of taking decisions to do with my children's play.

My doodle proceeds through questions about the weather (issues around screen-based entertainment if the children stay in); do they have friends to play out with? In view? Safe spaces? If there are safe spaces, are they in the street or segregated?

At the bottom I scribbled 'Too much traffic?' and a subsidiary question, too seldom raised: 'Too many cars?'

I noted John Adams, in a letter in yesterday's Guardian, claiming that:

'Since Labour came to power the country's motor vehicle population has increased by almost 8 million. To provide just one parking space for each of these extra vehicles would require a car park equivalent to a new motorway stretching from London to Edinburgh - 90 lanes wide.'

Nope, can't get me head round that. I scribbled on:

'Invent fold-away car.'
'Stomp all over them.'
'Wait for policy to confront car lobby.'

Further suggestions welcome.

'How are you?'