Neighbourhoods

Balsall Heath study visit

People for Action have organised a study visit to Balsall Heath. Here's the blurb -

26th February 2004
Active Communities
Balsall Heath has gained national recognition as an urban success story, yet it has been a long struggle for what was once an infamously run-down and crime-ridden part of inner-city Birmingham. The regeneration of the area has developed from the ground up, pioneered and directed by the community itself - and has proved to be an inspiration for many. David Blunkett said: "They recognised that each of us is dependent for our prosperity and fulfilment on the wider community of which we are a part."
This study visit will take in a tour of the area, and feature speakers from the Balsall Heath Forum and other local resident and voluntary groups. The day will focus on how communities can take control of their areas and have a major, positive influence on the local quality of life.
More on the PfA site.

The e-neighbors project

"We're often not at home, or if we're at home, we're inside our houses... We often have garden services. We don't mow our lawns. We don't have that familiarity with our neighbors. This is our over-the-fence."

I quite liked this quote referring to neighbourhood online message systems, from a Boston Globe article about Keith Hampton's e-neighborhoods project. The project has been looking at how email technologies can stimulate and support neighbourhood relations, in four local areas around Boston Massachusetts. Keith presented at a conference a couple of years ago which I organised in Oxford and a policy seminar in London. The news I'm waiting to have confirmed is that he'll be in England again some time this spring, for an event on neighbourhoods, and I'll announce that here as soon as I have the date. (No pressure Keith!)

Traffic calming

“Regularly motorists mount the pavement to get past one another. And with no front gardens to act as a buffer it means residents have traffic literally just a few feet from their living rooms. It’s not safe to walk down the pavement at the moment. I really hope that the residents will receive help to resolve this problem.”

This is from a recent Transport 2000 press release. Residents from what has been labelled the ‘worst rat-run in Britain’ have been on a pilgrimage to Hull, described as ‘the traffic calming capital’ of Britain.

“The residents of Wykeham Street in Scarborough, voted Britain’s worst rat-run in a competition run by Transport 2000 and Sustrans last summer, are travelling to Hull to see first hand how effective traffic calming can be at alleviating traffic problems. The trip, organised by Sustrans and Kingston-upon-Hull City Council road safety officers, will give the residents an opportunity to meet local people and talk to them about how traffic calming has improved their street and how they feel about it now it is in place. Hull has implemented over 100 20mph zones and the total number of road crashes in the zones has been reduced by 56 per cent. Crashes involving child pedestrians have been cut by 70 per cent.”

The well-connected community

This week sees the publication by the Policy Press of Alison Gilchrist's book, The well-connected community.
Alison's sensitive understanding of the nature of community development work at neighbourhood level, her experience and insights into networking, and her profound appreciation of the principles and values of equality and social justice, all make this a must-read. But don't just take my word for it: here's the publisher's blurb and order form. And below is what Alison says in her preface...

The well-connected community
Alison Gilchrist

PREFACE

The naturalist John Muir once wrote “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe” and this has certainly been my experience of thinking, researching and writing about networking. My initial interest in networking emerged from my experience as a neighbourhood community worker and political activist. I became aware of how useful it is to have a range of connections in terms of getting things done without many resources and without much obvious power or status. I also noticed that keeping this web of contacts and relationships required quite a lot of time and some ingenuity, and that the women I knew were particularly adept and committed to this way of working. I began to realise that networking was not only an efficient approach to developing collective action, but represented an aspect of work that was insufficiently rewarded. I was motivated by a desire to find out why and how networking enabled people to work together achieve their common goals. What makes a good networker? Why are networks so useful? These were the key questions that led me into an investigation of the skills and strategies that under pin both effective and ethical networking.

The findings described in the book are based on research undertaken to discover how networking is used by community workers and others to develop collective action among communities and to underpin multi-agency working. I was particularly interested in the tactics and traits that good networkers demonstrated, and wanted to make more visible the skilled and strategic nature of good networking, by which I meant networking that was both effective and ethical. The research programme consisted of two parts. The first was a case study of my own involvement in co-ordinating the first Bristol Festival Against Racism in 1994. The second phase of the research involved working with a panel of community practitioners over twelve months. They were asked to identify key networks in their professional practice and describe what they were used for, as well as any limitations. The community workers then spent a few weeks making notes of ‘critical incidents’ that had occurred in their professional or private lives that they felt had contributed in some way to community development. The evidence collected from these two stages was used to construct the questions for one-to-one interviews and the whole process culminated in a focus group discussion in which panelists considered the research findings and debated implications for community development policies and practice.

This book is not, however, just based on the research. Over the past decade or so I have enjoyed numerous discussions and workshops with people involved in community development. These have contributed immensely to my learning and have encouraged me to turn a rather academic thesis into what I hope is a practical and stimulating book.

Mobile or just missing?

I mentioned the presentation by Karen Broadhurst and Corinne May-Chahal at the Alternative Mobilities conference... Here's the abstract of their paper.
The researchers talk about the impact of high pupil mobility rates. If you're interested in the role of schools in neighbourhoods, and like me you missed last week's Centre for Neighbourhood Research conference on education and the neighbourhood, there are some useful papers available here.

Environmental justice

The Environment Agency has just published some research drawing attention to the links between social deprivation and environmental problems. I didn't spot the phrase 'environmental justice' but for sure this is what it's about - and not long ago that well-known banger-of-environmental-drums (and advisor to Community Development Foundation) Chris Church, was tapping this particular rhythm in my ear. The report, 'Environmental quality and social deprivation,' looks at three aspects of environmental quality - air quality, industrial pollution and flood risk, and apparently finds a degree of correlation in each case. I was reminded that the Environment Agency's 2002 Our urban future report had a chapter called 'Building stronger neighbourhoods' which made an effort to bring issues of environmental quality into the neighbourhood renewal agenda.
One point that struck me about the press release was that the implied health issues are barely alluded to, let alone grasped. Now why might that be?

Transience and neighbourhood relations

The CeMoRe conference on Alternative Mobility Futures in Lancaster lived up to expectations and leaves me with insights and questions about how neighbourhood relations are affected by different kinds of mobility. More on some of those in due course, but for now, a quick note stimulated by one presentation in particular which exposed a challenging area for community development to do with geographic mobility. The paper, by Karen Broadhurst and Corinne May-Chahal, looked at the experiences and views of children who have been ‘missing’ from the school system, often because of family fragmentation and mobility connected with aspects of social exclusion.

The researchers referred to stories of families and children whose degree of mobility gave rise to difficulties in relation to the systems operated by schools and social services. I was reminded of a visit I made to an estate a few years ago, where I was told that the annual turnover in some classes in the primary school was as high as 80%. Obviously it’s hard to see how anyone can teach in such a context and it’s also hard to see how community development can take place.

The question that arises, reflected in Broadhurst and May-Chahal’s paper, is to do with the extent to which children’s and families’ high mobility is problematised as just an issue of educational governance. But of course there is a striking community development issue, since high levels of transience have profound effects on neighbourhood relations. My colleague Gabriel Chanan has pointed out how people who experience exclusion often see their problems in a simply personal way, and may remain unaware of the structural nature of disadvantage and possible collective responses to it. Nevertheless, for reasons largely to do with local housing policies, experience of exclusion tends to be clustered. The authors’ study area suggested socially-depleted places where neighbourhood relations would be hard to establish and maintain.

The reason high levels of transience are problematic is not just to do with the fulfilment of administrative requirements in schools or the need to track vulnerable children. It’s also problematic because of the vacuum in neighbourhood relations and the diminution of positive social capital at local level. Disempowerment and a sense of resignation also emerged as characteristic of the families involved. I’m on the lookout for case studies of community development work in this context of fragmented and transient populations.

Safe communities conference

More on CDF's previously announced Safe Communities conference in Bradford on 23 April. You can download the leaflet here.

'Tone' of the neighbourhood

If you've got through all your holiday reading, try this (very) short story by Andrea Lowne, about neighbourly behaviour, published in 2002. It's called 'Neighbourhood Watch' and yes, it does have a character called Tone, plus a neat appearance by those classic neighbourhood props, the net curtains.