Neighbourhoods

Neighbourhood governance on a plate

At the Together we Can launch the other day David Miliband was speaking about the 'extension of citizenship,' and those of us with an interest in neighbourhood governance trotted off to a workshop to see what could be done about it. We heard from the ODPM's Mark Hitchen, who was responsible for the Why neighbourhoods matter paper.

And here's Ed Cox of Community Pride, whose facilitation of the session required each group to write key points down on paper plates. I'm fairly sure none of the plates was spun. Plenty of talk about parish councils, delegated budgets, and the variability of the goodwill of local authorities. Meanwhile a few points have crossed my mind.

Part of what bothers me is that many people have a very unsatisfactory experience of democracy in their personal lives; and indeed unstaisfactory appreciation of what it means to participate in the decision-making processes that affect them. I worry a little about the assumptions of enhanced local democracy from the perspective of people for whom democracy has always been a part of day-to-day experience. Similarly, as I have said often enough, it doesn't help if we keep using the term 'community' as if it implies consensus. We may be storing up problems if we imply that people who live in the same locality will naturally agree on what needs to be done, or even that they wish willingly to contribute to the processes of reaching consensus. Thirdly, I'd want to make a point which emerged from the governance game we ran in Bath last week: there is a need to ensure that the representatives are genuinely representative. This is not so much about the electoral formalities of democracy, it's about behaving in representative ways.

In other words, as with the slightly weary e-democracy debate, it's really about enhancing the culture of democracy as much as its processes.

Government and citizen: a new social contract? *updated with link*

In his speech at today's launch of Together we Can David Miliband sought to explain how the social contract is 'out of step' and the social order is in transition. He even used the term 'the collective sphere,' identified as being in need of modernisation because we no longer have a culture of acquiescence sustained by deference and hierarchy. This was a call for re-emphasis on the values of mutuality and shared responsibility, "to build the sense of ownership, belonging and civic pride that is the oxygen of a successful society."

Today's achievement was to make all this sound like a rational way of developing policy without it coming across as an over-spun gloss on existing and new initiatives. Is it a genuine cultural change? Home Office minister Hazel Blears followed up with a speech that emphasised democratic empowerment, arguing that Together we Can "marks the beginning of a new relationship between government and citizens." The press release speaks of the Together we Can action plan as “the first step towards a significant shift in the balance of power between local communities and Central Government.”

Hazel Blears also noted in passing that we're not very good at assessing the cost-benefit of informal social control in terms of savings to services. (Sounds like time for some research funding there then...)

Events like this - more than three hundred people, a fistful of government ministers, expensive video and choreographed production – don’t help get at the detail but they do tell us a bit about commitment, continuity, and whether an initiative is soundly based. There are numerous awkward issues to be surfaced and dealt with, in particular some of the neighbourhood governance questions, and I'll post separately on these.

The Together we Can documents are here and here.

David Miliband's speech is available here.

The consequences of neglecting the public realm

Last month CabeSpace published a report on the link between civil behaviour and the qualiy of parks: Decent parks? Decent behaviour? This is one more collection of case studies, and while some of them are pretty good - check out the involvement of street drinkers in design and landscaping in one project, for instance - I do start to wonder how many more case studies this planet can either provide or absorb...

What's useful here though is that it clarifies strongly the link between antisocial behaviour and public space. This is about the consequences of neglecting the public realm:

"The parks were in decline and failing to meet customer expectations long before anti-social behaviour started to become the dominant characteristic."

Lockable space

Here's a curious story about car parking in Istanbul. In part of the city the local authority sought to address the congestion problem by installing steel barriers  on the kerbs, to stop cars parking half on the pavement, causing inconvenience and making the streets less safe and less inviting.

Apparently, as the municipal engineers moved out at one end of the street, the metalworkers moved in at the other end. They cut through the base of the barriers, welded-on flanges, and sold padlocks to the residents. Who now have a removable barrier and hence their own parking space.  It sounds like a triumph of practical enterprise over (a) lack of consultation and (b) lack of imagination. Unfortunately it privatises public space, so it's hardly an ideal solution. It will be interesting to find out what the authority's next move is.

I heard this story from English journalist Steve Bryant a few weeks ago, who lives in the neighbourhood in question, and while I was there I came across this example.

Neighbourhood governance: closing in on some issues

Yesterday in Bath, David Wilcox and I ran a workshop game on neighbourhood governance at a Quest networking event. David will surely post something about the technique and process in due course on his blog. Meantime here are some issues that emerged in the conversations that we stimulated.

The whole neighbourhood governance agenda makes an assumption that people will connect to their locality. We know that people will come together in the face of adversity, but why do we suppose that they will come together just because government wants them to? This assumption was immediately challenged by one of our groups.

People have lots of different interests, and their allegiance and commitment may be stronger to interest groups than to their locality. This implies that you might not get enough strength of commitment if you assume that we’re solely or mainly bound together by locality. People will cluster around their interests if they find them in their neighbourhood, but is that enough to sustain democratic forums at the most local level? One of our workshop groups, playing the storyline of a fictitious neighbourhood forum, felt the solution was to establish sub-groups around interests; but then they ran up against the challenge of representation because insufficient numbers were turning up to meetings. Well they tried to solve that by saying 'we don't have meetings, we have events'...  Which is fine, but we're talking about a decision-making forum of some kind here...

And then there's the question of community 'leaders' or dominant activists. My hunch is that this will feature less in the neighbourhood governance agenda than is anticipated, but here's how one participant expressed it:

“However democratic you try and make it, you’ll get the big mouths, and others won’t put themselves forward.”

We're looking to develop the game as a way of surfacing issues in this agenda, so if you're interested please get in touch.

Park this way sir

Interesting essay on reconciling parking strategies with public spaces strategies, by Ethan Kent, here in the Making places newsletter from Project for Public Spaces.

"...people don't come to an area for the parking, they come for what’s distinct and special about that place."

Good Neighbours Against Street Furniture

Nice vignette from my friend Martin Dudley in the York outpost of Bishopthorpe (temporarily known as Ascot-upon-Ouse) - about a neighbour's action as a wheelchair-bound pavement user was faced with an obstruction.

Family and friendship networks in old age

BBC news this morning reports on an Australian study on the relative benefits for older people of strong family networks versus strong friendship networks. It seems to confirm what we already know about the health benefits of friendship networks, but questions family support by comparison.

"It was found that close contact with children and relatives had little impact on survival rates over the 10 years. However, those with the strongest network of friends and acquaintances were statistically more likely to be alive at the end of the study than those with the fewest. This was evident even if the person had been through major changes such as the death of a spouse or close family members, and the relocation of friends to other parts of the country."

The article quotes Lorna Layward, research manager for Help the Aged: "As a society, we do need to include older people more and encourage communities to build the kind of environments that allow social networks to blossom."

Having been discussing the strength of extensive family-based support networks in Turkey recently, I wonder what would be the findings of a similar study in countries where family contacts predominate?

There's an interesting Guardian Society article from a couple of years back, on the importance of friendships in old age, here.

Together we can

The Home Office has just launched the website for its Together we can initiative, with a big event in London on 28 June 2005. Together we can is a cross-departmental action plan which formalises a range of government policies and initiatives into a coherent whole. It says here that:

"Together We Can will help to build a new relationship between people and government; a relationship based on mutual trust and shared responsibility."

Speakers at the conference include David Miliband MP, Minister for Communities and Local Government, and Hazel Blears MP, Home Office Minister whose responsibilities include community safety and civil renewal.

You can register here.

Physical capital and public value - *updated with link*

This week CABE is launching a collection of three essays called Physical capital: how great places boost public value. As usual with CABE, they've the money or muscle to field a quality line-up, in this case of Big M's: Geoff Mulgan, Francois Matarasso, and Ali Madanipour. Madanipour concentrates on the distinctive regeneration of Castle Vale in Birmingham, exploring the physical aspects of that success. Mulgan plunges fearless into the dodgy backstreets of public value, emerging with the idea of 'value maps' - visual diagrams which set out in graphic form the relationships between different types of value - in his clutch. Matarasso tries to get the concept of physical capital to stay where it's put in the shifting context of cultural value, spatial ambiguity, quality, value, and, well, people.

Well worth a read - available here.

Open gardens on a neighbourhood scale

Near where I live there's an annual low-profile open gardens day. About 15 or 20 people from around the village, including a friend of mine, bravely put up with folk like me trampling their lawns and pointing at their plants. We get a list and a map and trudge round in different directions from street to street. Last year they raised over £1,000 for a local hospice, and yesterday in spite of the cool weather they must have had three or four hundred visitors. A few people get the kettle boiling and there's home-made cakes of course. There's one combination of three adjacent terraced houses, whose owners all participate: you go down the alley and into the back garden of one, then proceed through gates onto the second and third, so it's like a large shared space.

What I like about this is that it's a neighbourhood event at neighbourhood scale. You see people you've seen in the street or at the station. Gardens generate conversation. People go at conversational pace. It's advertised in local shops but doesn't pull in coachloads from further afield.

Well not yet. This year it was advertised in a local newspaper and I picked up a little mutter about the wisdom of doing that. It presents an interesting dilemma. This event is driven by local people, of course, and some of the participants might well not want it to grow into a regional attraction. But there's the fund-raising argument and the simple momentum of success. I'll try and find out how the discussions go.

Civil renewal conference

'Civil renewal: empowering communities' - Capita conference

19 July 2005, London

More here.

Anti-social tenants and nuisance neighbours, conference

'Tackling anti-social tenants and nuisance neighbours' - Capita conference

14 July 2005, London

More here.

New community garden

Last week a break in my journey meant I had a few morning hours in Istanbul, and I got lucky. I headed for the nearest neighbourhood and within an hour's wandering came across this community garden (it was actually within ten minutes of my hotel, but I could easily have missed it completely). The garden had just been opened officially the previous evening and the pics show a little evidence of the party.

This place has got community involvement, design, and ownership written all over it. I watched a young lad come by and goggle through the fence as if to just check that the football area hadn't disappeared overnight: there'll be some growing up done between these fences, for sure. There was a graffiti wall and an inspiring row of pictures that hinted at the intergenerational wisdom of the whole initiative.  I had a quick chat with one of the women involved, and although we quickly exhausted our mutual vocabulary I think I recognised that quiet sense of fulfilment from collective purpose that must be universal. A real treat.

Civil renewal and active citizenship

A familar blogger's dilemma is whether to post straight away about a piece of news, or to digest it and offer reflections. This blog is information-oriented and frankly I'm not going to have time to read this in the next few days anyway, so here's the simple notification -

NCVO have just published Civil renewal and active citizenship: a guide to the debate, written by Véronique Jochum, Belinda Pratten and Karl Wilding. There's a pdf here.

From a quick skim, it looks very thoroughly researched and thought-through. There's a government launch and conference coming up, with a few things (at least in my mind) still to be clarified, so hopefully this will help. Since the authors include this attempt (click on the image to enlarge) to get to grips with the formal/informal participation question, it looks very encouraging. Just acknowledging that informal relations in neighbourhoods could be, er, somehow important for civil renewal, seems not to have been spotted anywhere near policy level yet, so this just could be a quiet breakthrough.

The future of neighbourliness

"Neighborly Relations - To raise Relationship points with a neighbor that your Sim doesn't like, prepare a group meal to eat with the neighbor, watch TV, dance at the stereo, play chess, use the hot tub ... Click on the neighbor and have them "Join" you. The relationship with the neighbor will go up without any of the negative reactions that occur in regular social interactions."

I don't have the temperament to go any further, sorry. Here's where it came from.

NeSS is alive and well, and growing

Wow. The Neighbourhood Statistics site has just been relaunched, with some fancy new features:

• Neighbourhood Profiles have more topics, at lower levels of geography and are available with a greater regeneration focus. For a comprehensive overview of an area, just type in a full postcode or placename. The profile gives data on a wide range of subjects, covering people and society, health, housing and education. It also includes Index of Multiple Deprivation 2004 rankings.

• You can build your own areas, such as neighbourhoods, from a best fit of Output Areas. You can then save these online, to re-use and share with other users.

• Select different variables, from a wide range of topics such as health and housing and compare the results in a single table. Differences and similarities are easy to spot and you can also chart time-series data (where available) for the first time. You can also thematically map all datasets and analyse data further using new mapping tools.

• View datasets at a lower level, with Output Areas and Super Output Areas. Information is also available on a range of other geographies such as wards, health areas and parliamentary constituencies and parishes making small-area comparisons easy.

Alright it's got some holes in yet, but it keeps getting better. The newsletter's here.

Thanks to John Bell of Ecotec for keeping me up to speed on this.

Neighbourhood encounter vignette

I'm in a buzz about this. I was as usual late for a train this morning, yomping down the hill to the station, when I spotted a diminutive half-bent hobbling figure ahead going in the same direction. "Could that be Mrs Walton?" I asked alongside. It was indeed. I hadn't seen her for I reckon 10 years, and frankly assumed she'd died or had to move into a home. I'd got to know her from chatting in the queue at the bread shop and the fruit shop, in the days when we had such. And of course we'd stop and exchange a few words whenever we saw one another in those days. There was a sense of huge mutual delight in this rediscovery of what is after all a low-level acquaintanceship. I'd once given her my phone number because I knew she lives on her own and might need it, but apart from that there's no possible claim between us.

I felt genuinely torn between the impulse to chat longer with her, and the duty of getting to an important meeting on time. I've now lived in the same place for nearly 19 years, a suburban village on the very outskirts of London, and it's seldom I walk through the village without seeing and greeting at least a nodding acquaintance. I really must make myself leave earlier to allow for these encounters.

The delight that Mrs Walton and I shared in our quick catch-up is both superficial and profound. It reflects our general need for uncomplicated occasional recognition from others with few demands; it adds to the gradual accumulation of the sense of belonging; and it somehow reaffirms our simple identity as individuals inhabiting a place.

Local democratic structures

While in Turkey several people talked to me about the system of village heads (almost always men, except in some urban areas) which I didn't know about. Between them these people cover all parts of the country, playing an official, unpaid administrative intermediary role which includes things like registering voters and endorsing identity cards. They are elected and often have an office or office space. A bit like a parish clerk in some ways but without the council behind them. They tend to be well-known and motivated to carry the interests of their community. There were differing views, among those I talked to, about how susceptible this system was to abuse and corruption; but it clearly has a very strong basis in tradition and continues to function for a society in transition.

What would we do without cars? #1

Some thoroughfares like these in Istanbul, of steps between hillside streets, are public spaces uncontaminated by cars. They are spaces of congregation, populated by cats during the day and a vibrant mix of people at night. Like much of the city though, not very attractive for people in wheelchairs.

Turkey and the network society

I've been in Turkey the last few days, courtesy of what is pronounced as the 'Britsh Councl,' trying to contribute to a national Information Society strategy there, and gained a few interesting insights which I'll post. What was striking as far as the Information Society thinking was concerned, was the central contrast of the UK experience of transformation, from a society of very mixed social networks; compared with the predominance in Turkey of strong family-based support-oriented networks of strong ties. I happen to think this could be a major issue for them. If Turkey is putting its hand up and saying, yes we want to be a modern nation, a connected nation participating in the new world economy and part of Europe, then it's likely that the traditional family-based structure of social relationships will be greatly weakened, and that could be quite painful. I don't think that's necessarily a reason not to go ahead, but I think you gotta know what you're doing.

Your key or mine ?

It's not my usual read, but a newspaper article drew my attention to this month's issue of Reader's Digest. Both the Belgian as well as the Dutch issue feature an article on neighbourhood relations.

The article points out the importance of local neighbourhood relations as a foundation for (feelings of) security and mutual support (water plants during holiday, go to the pharmacy if neighbour needs medicine, ...).

Interestingly, they did a small survey in both countries. I haven't seen the Dutch version yet, but the Belgian survey indicates we don't know our neighbours very well. Only 38% knows what kind of job their neighbours do, less then half of us know the names of all their neighbours. However, only a very small minority of respondents would want stronger neighbourhood relations than they currently have.

And that's where there's a strong inbalance between the nostalgia of local social networks that is still used as a norm for healthy social cohesion, and the reality of citizens who are mobile and liberated from the neighbourhood (see Wellman's literature on this). I honestly wouldn't want to limit my social networks to those living within e.g. a one-km. radius. But an multi-level approach (having both a local social network AND a dispersed network) is beyond what many can cope with. Too  much policy is based on the nostalgia and too few on the complexity of modern life.

Also nice to know is that 4% of people have problems with the kids in the neighbourhood, while 14% is annoyed by the dogs of their neighbours.

The newspaper cliping also promised data on key holding among neighbours, but I haven't seen those. Probably in the Dutch version.

Hedge laws

The puns have been flying so I'll restrain meself. I've been away a couple of days but I ought really to log the new legislation on what The Guardian called 'antisocially high hedges.' To clarify: new UK legislation allows local authorities to consider complaints about a neighbour's hedge(s) under the Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003. It seems that authorities can charge up to £550 to investigate a claim. In The Times a comment refers to 'Trivial disputes between neighbours' and laments the government's impulse to 'regulate the minutiae of private conduct.' Here's the ODPM press release, and it contains this significant clause: 'The complainant must show they have tried to resolve the matter with the hedge owner.'

I've made occasional comments on this blog about the extent to which it is possible for government to get inside people's property (answer: you ain't seen nothin yet) and this is the obvious angle for objections to the new legislation. None of the commentary I've read, however, has focussed on the more general issue implied in the whole business - that of neighbours trying to resolve matters between them. And while it's apparent that people are calling for this kind of regulation in the slipstream of the antisocial behaviour bandwagon - not everyone thinks it's trivial, by any means - we should keep in mind that (a) if we need such laws it implies low levels of neighbourliness and widespread reluctance to articulate a grievance and to negotiate to someone else's viewpoint; and (b) worryingly, addressing that shortfall seems not to be under consideration.

The ODPM's rampantly overgrown page on hedges is here.

More here on the website of Steve Pound MP who put forward the private members' bill on the topic a couple years ago.

Mediation UK's page on neighbour disputes is here.

Civil behaviour vignette

A half-busy town centre, a young lad chatting with his mates turned round too quickly, must have made contact, the old lady fell to the ground just in front of me, her stick dropping it seemed in slow-motion to one side. She so nearly, but didn't, cracked her head on the paving. The young man was apologising, offering to call ambulance, grabbing a mobile from a friend to do so. She too had friends with her, I offered water, we sat her up, relief all round. So there we were, three generations it's fair to say, sorting the situation and then moving on, unlikely ever to meet again. Civil behaviour in action.