Neighbourhoods

Repressed spaces

In my note about residents not needing signs, I mentioned Paul Carter's book Repressed spaces, so I went back to some notes I had made when I read it. It's valuable if you're interested in understanding the meanings of public space and its uses.

Carter explains agoraphobia as a 'movement inhibition' and uses a wide range of cultural and historical insights to help move us all on to a more sensitive approach to planning and design - "A different design on place-making is required to transform places of gathering into meeting places."

Without taking us (in my unlearned view) too deeply into pschoanalysis, Carter nudges us into thinking about when a space is a place, how issues like orientation, proximity, gathering and lingering reveal "the characteristics of sociable space." The fear of the agora, Carter suggests, "is a critical way of inhabiting the environment, one standing at a dissident angle to the orthodoxy which identifies stability (mental, political and architectural) with stasis." OK that's probably an excessive charge against orthodoxy but it certainly helps me think about what matters where people move about in public space. The task is to apply such understanding of what Carter calls "the invisible topography of relations" to the local social context.

And thinking about movement reminds me to mention the CeMoRe conference on alternative mobility futures early in January. I can't recall when I've so much looked forward to a conference - I only worry that the programme is overflowing and my appetite won't match the feast. The event is organised by John Urry (with others), who gave an insightful keynote paper on 'mobility and community' at the CDF/OII conference in October - recounted by David Wilcox here.

A couple of other points about Repressed spaces. Tall buildings have poked through on this blog a few times so it's curious to note that in passing, Carter suggests that "Towers form in response to agoraphobia." The tallness, he says, "is a phobic reaction to the ground disappearing under our feet..." Well.

And on the next page (213) there's a note of some personal interest to me. "Agoraphobia, it seems, can be a characteristic of speaking and writing. Smoothing over discontinuities implies a dread of gaps opening up in the chain of logic, a fear perhaps of thinking and acting freely." As a novice blogger I'm pondering this quizzically, but this is not the place for further analysis.

'Residents don’t need signs'

Can we develop a method of ‘reading neighbourhoods’? How exactly do you read the spatial and social signs when, say, someone takes you into their neighbourhood and shows you round, or when you visit a project or a community centre somewhere? Without thinking about it, we pick up information from things like the style and state of the housing, the number of people walking about, the presence of corner shops and shutters, and so on. So what if people could augment such spatial information with observations of their own, for the visitor to cull according to their needs and interests? All you may need is a mobile, or maybe not even that.

These thoughts were sparked by a conversation with Giles Lane of Urban Tapestries, when I went to see him with David Wilcox. The Urban Tapestries project is looking at how people can associate place-based information of their own, with that place, using location-based wireless technologies. The Urban Tapestries blog carries some material about their recent public trial in north central London. We talked about how different content would be authored in different kinds of locality, which brought to mind a comment in Paul Carter's absorbing book, Repressed spaces:
“Residents don’t need signs, only foreigners do… In this sense, all signs are signs of not belonging, of coming from somewhere else. Thus, logically, a city in whose streets signs cluster like bees is designed for strangers. It is constitutionally for the other.”
And it's true, when you visit a marginalised neighbourhood, with no through-traffic cos there's no way through, and just a few incursions by, say, the utilities or delivery vans - there are few signs. The fewer signs, the fewer advertisements too of course, and so on. Hence the sharp distinctions between, say, a lively urban centre and a severed outer estate that may have begun to atrophy. But if you were picking up additional information about a place from material 'left' there for you, by others (both residents and visitors) - information that could be tailored to your interests or your gender or race or age or degree of mobility - that could alter significantly the ways in which we read neighbourhoods. It could alter the ways in which we behave, in terms of territoriality. Hopefully there will be opportunities with projects like Urban Tapestries to explore such implications from the point of view of people in low-income neighbourhoods.
Reference: Carter, Paul. 2002. Repressed spaces: the poetics of agoraphobia. London: Reaktion Books.

Neighbourhood encounters

I'm very interested in encounters, from the few words exchanged by complete strangers at a bus-stop or between dog-walkers in the park, to coincidental meetings-up of old friends. Neighbourhood encounters are of course many and varied, from the serendipitous to the routine, but I never seem to catch them when I have a camera to hand. Which is probably just as well. But I just serendipitously encountered the rather handy website of the Image Library of the Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center which includes this nice example by photographer Dan Burden. If you're attracted to the site, I draw your attention to the usage guidelines.

Home Zones video

Policy Press have just published Home Zones: the UK experience: a new video resource for community groups and professionals working on Home Zones projects in the UK
The Children's Play Council, one of the partners together with Transport 2000, has been overhauling the Home Zones website.

From the blurb about the video:
 shows how the Home Zone idea has evolved;
 draws on interviews with residents to show what it's like to develop and live in a Home Zone;
 offers valuable insights into the practical challenges facing UK Home Zone projects and how to overcome them;
 presents the views of urban design professionals on how Home Zones fit within urban regeneration;
 examines how local authorities can take the lead in developing Home Zone projects.

Includes a 40 minute version and a shorter, 12 minute version for public meetings.

Price is £29.99 or £12.99 for individuals or community groups. I guess I'm hesitant about sending off for it because I find video such an unsatisfactory format - not very browsable, the content not easy to repackage. If anyone's got their hands on this already, just click on Comments below and let us know...

Tall buildings and social mix - more on Skyhouse

More thoughts about Skyhouse, there's outline of an iSociety conference paper, Software for Skyscrapers with a call from Will Davies for info on any obscure case studies or research. Well here's a thorough think-piece which may not have been mentioned, J G Ballard's 1975 novel, (yes, possibly older than Will) High rise. Here are some tasters from the first few pages...

"With its forty floors and thousand apartments, its supermarket and swimming-pools, bank and junior school - all in effect abandoned in the sky - the high-rise offered more than enough opportunities for violence and confrontation."
"The massive scale of the glass and concrete architecture, and its striking position on a bend of the river [yes, it's set in London] sharply separated the development project from the run-down areas around it, decaying nineteenth-century terraced houses and empty factories already zoned for reclamation."
"The two thousand tenants formed a virtually homogeneous collection of well-to-do professional people - lawyers, doctors, tax consultants, senior academics and advertising executives... By the usual financial and educational yardsticks they were probably closer to each other than the members of any conceivable social mix... The high-rise was a huge machine designed to serve... the individual in isolation."
Plenty more where that came from. What it makes me wonder now is to what extent such a vision emanates from what we see as a largely american culture of individualism. The challenge that David Marks and Julia Barfield have taken on reflects, they told us, their own experiences of growing up in mixed tenure apartment blocks in Europe, characterised by ready acceptance of diverse others. It's almost as if the concept of Skyhouse is a question being asked of England, which way are we facing culturally - to Europe or to the USA? To make this vertical neighbourhood function both in itself and in relation to the surrounding community, will surely require the nurturing of a culture that places high value on social interaction and which recognises the public realm. Sounds like there's a role for community development then.
Meanwhile, David Wilcox has suggested developing a game to surface some of the issues. Watch his Useful Games blog for any news on that.

Gates and cities

Hi Kevin,

Thanks for remembering the example from Duisburg. The formation process of a territory, and the way it is represented to its members and those who are not, always remain potentially controversial. Two other examples are how gated neighbourhoods are being created in the middle of South African cities, and how gating has become the main form of urban development in China in the last two decades (not to mention the gated neighbourhoods in the US). These are transforming the notions we have of what a city is or should be like.

Ali

Gates and neighbourhoods

Steve Soames mentioned the Pembroke Street estate. Here's the gate in question -

What struck me when I visited Pembroke Street back in the summer (with the decorative gates open at both ends in what I assume is the default position!) was the sense of being in 'community space' and how that differs from civic space or public space elsewhere. The difference is not always so marked of course. But it's true that when you step into some neighbourhoods (not just 'housing estates') you get a clear sense that you are in someone else's territory.

And of course there are ways of making that feel threatening, or making it seem neutral or welcoming. There's nothing wrong with 'marking territory' I think, it just depends how it's done. In Northern Ireland I found the painting of kerbstones a bit disturbing. That may be because I was acutely aware of the meaning and the history of course, but it's also the case that it amounts to quite a loud and emphatic statement about community strength.
Ali Madanipour (author of Public and private spaces of the city) has an interesting example which he cites, from Duisberg, where the local authority wanted to celebrate the international character of the area. They set up a competition for public art and awarded it to a display of native American statues. With a largely Turkish population, this had a bewildering impact on local people.

'Storytelling neighborhood' - text of the moment

I just finished reading this -
Ball-Rokeach, Sandra J, Yong-Chan Kim, and Sorin Matei. 2001. Storytelling neighborhood: paths to belonging in diverse urban environments. Communication research 28 (4):392-428.

Research from the Metamorphosis project in Los Angeles that looks at the communication context of residential neighbourhoods to test a model of the ‘infrastructure of belonging.’ ‘Storytelling neighborhood’ is used as a verb referring to the communication process that creates community. The research takes account of such aspects as length of residence, tenure and home ownership, race, and so forth, and maps connections with local and national media, and with community organisations.

“The most pressing need from a policymaking point of view is for discussion with the producers of local media…” p420. There is a concern that local media tend not to be ‘storytelling the neighborhood’ but are directing attention away from the local area – in the case of neighbourhoods with strong immigrant populations, this attention is directed to the country of origin.

The researchers suggest that home ownership increases the likelihood of connections to mainstream media and community organisations. (p420)

Describes one study area, Greater Crenshaw, which on the surface “presents a challenge when it comes to belonging,” with a weak economic base and being labelled as a “danger zone.”
“What seems to account for residents’ abilities to meet this challenge is the presence of home owners (47.4%), long-term residents (52.8% of more than 10 years or entire life), many community-building community organizations, local media that storytell the neighborhood, and people who talk to each other ‘over the backyard fence’ specifically about their neighborhood.” 421-422

Makes me keen to take a look at more from the Metamorphosis project...

'Text of the moment'

I'd like to see this blog used for the exchange of information about resources. This category, 'Text of the moment' is meant to be a kind of 'book of the week' section - except of course it won't necessarily refer only to books and there's unlikely to be a fresh post every week. Also, I see no reason why only new texts should be covered.

More on tall buildings

In Bristol today for a hurried lunch meeting with Gary Bridge of the Centre for Neighbourhood Research - thanks Gary - our conversation felt like a 'Just a Minute' programme with topics like neighbouring, gated communities, public realm, gentrification etc in quick succession. Got me thinking more about tall buildings as a form of gated community - security and surveillance are always issues in tower blocks and the old issue of enclosure looms large, if I can put it like that. So what, I want to know, are the key lessons we can learn from gated communities that could apply to a project such as Skyhouse? And what can we take from experience of tower blocks that perhaps might be applied to gated communities?

The social mix in tall buildings

I hadn't previously knowingly crossed the path of the Associate Parliamentary Group for Design and Innovation, and regret I had to leave their conference on the Sustainable Communities Plan early. But not before I'd taken another chance to meet and hear again the excellent David Marks, talking about Marks Barfield's Skyhouse idea - thanks to Will Davies at iSociety for the contact. Skyhouse is an ambitious project to address the problem of lack of urban density in London by building high and with mixed tenure.

There are big questions about how likely it is that mixed tenure will survive beyond a few years. Handling the social mix in a vertical cul-de-sac, from the design stage, is intricate to say the least. In a meeting last week hosted by iSociety, we touched on some of the questions about the shortage of semi-private and semi-public space in tall buildings. If you live in a low-rise area, chances are you have garden fences and parking spaces and porches and pavements, and windows overlooking the access to dwellings... all making for spaces of occasional connection or avoidance, all influencing social interactions in profound and subtle ways. Much of life in tower blocks is either in public space or in private space, and there's not much in-between.
CDF has carried out previous work on tower blocks and we're looking to extend that, so watch this space. Will Davies's interest is in the place of social software in such a venture - Will's excellent report on social software is here.
I don't think Marks Barfield are fooling themselves about how difficult the project is, all credit to them for going at it with full awareness of the social implications. I look forward to much learning and perhaps the chance to help with some of the thinking.
David Wilcox has posted a note about Skyhouse today, reflecting on the social history of tall buildings in this country.

Safe communities conference

Safe Communities - national conference organised by Community Development Foundation

23rd April 2004, Bradford, West Yorkshire

Themes include:
In the home – reporting domestic violence
On the doorstep – anti-social behaviour; substance misuse
A wider world – asylum seekers; world politics/local impact
In the neighbourhood – local services, buildings and design
In the countryside – rurality, poverty & social exclusion

Contact June Smith

Education and the neighbourhood - conference

Centre for Neighbourhood Research conference on education and the neighbourhood, 9 January, Bristol, contact Emma Holland.

Plumbers and trust

Quite a week for a novice to be setting up a blog. Three domestic factors have thrown up questions about neighbour relations: major health hassles, a miserably intermittent broadband service, and a plumbing crisis. So when it's 1030 at night and the shower's busted, water gushing all over the place, and you don't have a tame plumber in your phone book, what do you do? Is that too late to call the neighbour who you do trust?

It's true, even though I've lived in the same house most of the past 16 years, I don't know a plumber I can trust, but I do have wonderful neighbours who I trust very much. I knew they wouldn't mind - either recommending a plumber or helping fix it. But, but, I used yellow pages and next morning someone I'd never seen before appeared at the door.
My neighbours are always happy to do things for me and there's relatively little I do for them. I guess I was acutely conscious of the imbalance in reciprocity. And I'd like to feel that they'd come to me, if they had some kind of crisis which I could help with.
Plumbers have a special place in the mythology of social capital, at least in the UK. I wonder if they feature in any social capital surveys?