Neighbourhoods

Blokland on casual encounters

I'm indebted once again to Jan Steyaert who has sent me this note about Talja Blokland's inaugural speech, which she gave in February for her professorship in Rotterdam.

Key elements are:

We're focusing too much on strong ties, on solid social cohesion. For feeling at ease in the city, it's the very short contacts that are critical. Casual meetings on the subway, waiting in line at the shop - that used to be an area where we at least had familiarity with the others because we saw the same people each day or met them at other places as well. That familiarity is gone, these casual meetings are now anonymous.

Moreover, there is a 'creation of home in the public domain' when people start calling on their mobile or when two people in that subway start having a conversation in a foreign language. That's a private claim on the public domain which is a threat to the other uses of that public domain.

Jan adds that there's not much in there in terms of policy advice, only promise that these issues will feature high on her research agenda.

I ought to pay tribute here to Talja's excellent Urban bonds, which has lots of useful insights into neighbourhoods and notions of local community.

Just have a word

You know how it is, you sit down at a meeting in a community centre or a school or somewhere, and the kids outside are doing a bit of attention-seeking / boundary-testing provocation, kicking balls against the windows, and it's hard to hear. There we were last night in the community shop on Havelock, so young Wasim says quietly, would you like me to go and speak to them? Up he gets, we all know he doesn't need anyone to go with him. They carry on for a minute or so just to show they don't have to take any notice of him.

How lucky, I think, as the noise stops and the kids move off, for a community group to have someone to just do that: too many simply don't, I suspect, and can't cover it when they need to. The mood in the meeting, for the next two and a half hours, is confident and assured.

Time to scrap a few parks

Driving near home this evening I had to brake slightly because some kids had let their ball run into the street. I noticed that they were playing cricket on a patch of grass about half the size of a parliamentary committee room, lacking alternative space in their neighbourhood.

Safely home to find this:

"Speaking at a public accounts committee hearing on urban green space, ODPM permanent secretary Peter Housden said cash-strapped local authorities should rethink their attitude to parks and gardens whose upkeep they could not afford."

(From New Start magazine).

Thinks, that's odd. Would this be the same government that so strongly and laudably emphasised green spaces as a key feature of liveability? (Of what? Of liveability. Oh right.)

And would this be the same Thatcherite government, not known for its generosity towards local government, that now is less sure, shall we say, of the economic value of the public realm?

We should not pass over the irony of these comments being recorded on the day we heard the news of the death of Jane Jacobs. She was fiercely, and rather more astutely, critical of bad parks, which she thought could exaggerate "the dullness, the danger, the emptiness" of unattractive neighbourhoods. But she understood their complexity in a way that most local authorities do I think, but which may be a little too subtle for our central public space policy-makers. Time to dig out Ken Worpole's Park life for a reassuring flick-through.

(Thanks Martin.)

Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs died yesterday.

I think this was someone who brought broad understanding to narrow fields. I suspect she thought that academic rigour and intellectual respectability were less important than a bit of questioning common sense. She demonstrated that ordinary people asking a few questions can have impact, indeed that sometimes they simply have to have an impact.

Still lots to be done.

Who mentioned shame?

So it seems we live in a country where professional investigators - ex-military specialists in covert surveillance - disguise and camouflage themselves to collect video evidence against young people of anti-social behaviour, and are paid by authorities to do so. This was described on tonight's Dispatches programme as "one of the only solutions left." This must be, as Douglas Adams might have said, a use of the word 'solution' with which I was previously unfamiliar.

"Antisocial behaviour," said one of these professional oiks, apparently in all seriousness, is "a form of cancer."

As if that would explain the approach. How have we managed to end up in a society in which this is regarded as any kind of solution? One in which it takes quite a long time for people to think about talking to kids, to think about providing youth centres and youth workers, community centres, supporting sports education and so on. One in which authorities don't feel they have a responsibility to help kids deal with inconsistent messages from the adult world. One in which it is politically convenient to believe in the myth that shaming can be used to bring about widespread improvements in civil behaviour.

Certainly the Dispatches programme-makers didn't seem interested in challenging the suggestions or offering much analysis. Towards the end it was remarked that young people "don't seem to have any fear of anything any more." It's an interesting comment which probably has the ring of truth for many people, and it cried out for someone to analyse why that may seem to be the case - and perhaps to give just a little attention to the use of the word 'fear.'

Again, at one point, reporter Deborah Davies said "Increasingly we don't intervene." I sat forward, hoping to be enlightened with the evidence to back this up. But no, none came, and you could feel the Dispatches reputation for serious broadcast journalism gushing away. This was shallow journalism riding on the government wave of hype, and an opportunity to explore its issues was passed up presumably in the interests of audience ratings. Who mentioned shame?

Dispatches and anti-social behaviour

Channel 4 is broadcasting on Monday this week a Dispatches programme called Britain's Yobs.

Dispatches investigates why as a nation we've become increasingly intimidated by young people and why we won't intervene when we see someone being attacked or property vandalised.

Reporter Deborah Davies travels across Britain to visit the cities and towns which are most afraid of their younger inhabitants. She also meets the victims of violent attacks: those who dared to tell teenagers to stop behaving badly and those who discovered that when they were attacked people just walked on by rather than help them.

Chanting "ASBO 'til we die," a crowd of teenagers surround the camera but eventually calm down enough to talk to Deborah and admit they're fully aware how intimidating they seem to passers by.

They've interviewed Richard Sennett and Jacqueline Barnes, among others, for the programme so hopefully there will be some reflection, particularly on the fact that young people are highly likely to be the victims of anti-social behaviour themselves and have had little protection in the past from the property-obsessed society around them. I wonder if they caught up with Elizabeth Burney, who's absorbing book Making people behave is well-worth a read.

The programme goes out at 8pm. There's also an article by Deborah Davies in yesterday's Daily Mail, I'm told.

It's probably time to mention that I'm editing a book on Respect in the neighbourhood, which will be published by Russell House later this year and will include chapters by Jacqueline Barnes, Liz Richardson, Philip Connolly, Aydin Mehmet Ali and Jan Steyaert.

Organised street parties or informality? Both please

A conversation today with my good friend Jan Steyaert who mentions a policy paper (in Dutch) by Talja Blokland in which she is not supportive of street events like neighbourhood barbecues, on the grounds that they don't promote social capital. This is all part of the gradually unfolding debate about formal and informal participation at local level, and it's not going to go away.

We had research by Melanie Green and Timothy Brock(1) last year, contrasting informal local connections with formal participation in community organisations, and showing clearly different benefits, concluding that perhaps a mix of both is optimal for building social capital. Similarly, according to Catherine Ross and Sung Joon Jang in research published a few years previously,(2) informal connections between residents can buffer the effect of disorder and reduce the sense of fear and mistrust, but formal participation in community orgs shows little buffering effect.

I know these findings mean different things but I'm trying to get at a broader social trend here. And of course, it's not an either/or issue. It's not like you have to choose between promoting unscheduled neighbourly chats on the corner, or a street barbecue every august bank holiday. I'm trying to make the point that informality (thank you Barbara Misztal) is regaining ground with the discrediting of the measuring and controlling impulse, the weakening of some formal structures. I happen to think that has something to do with the network society, because bureaucratic controls have started to leak as hierarchies have come apart, and insights have sprung through the gaps.

I wrote back in January:

"My take on the government record, FWIW, is that hugely encouraging insights into various needs under the broad theme of social capital tend to have spawned cautious policy that is very much oriented to formal measures. Hence what I regard as a heavy over-emphasis on formal volunteering and on democratic participation, for instance, perhaps at the expense of putting effort into all sorts of possible ways of stimulating networks of informal connections among neighbours, that in themselves might provide such outcomes, along with many others."

Meanwhile, the momentum for street parties is alive and well in Bristol. I flick over to Streets Alive every now and then, and Chris Gittins has drawn my attention to their new Street Party site, complete with lots of practical tips (eg on road closure, insurance etc) and plenty of inspiring pics.

There's a huge amount of work gone into this, and they make a claim that Easton in Bristol (which I know was a patch once cycled by Alison Gilchrist as a community worker) is the Street Party Capital of the UK.

Wait, there's even a Street Party Charter. How's that for formalisation?

___________________________

1. Political psychology, 26(1) 2005.
2. Am jnl community psychology, 28(4) 2000.

Local park vignette

Just strolled down to the park and back. Busy. A few young lads perched on the kids' slide and climbing frame, one or two hoods going up as the rain started. The boys soccer team in training and the girls team about to start. Impressive the number of adults turning out for coaching and support. A single dog-walker, a lone jogger. A couple of blokes walking through on their way back from work. A group defiantly playing cricket in the corner, complete with stumps and proper gloves, the biz, fending off stray footballs that drift onto the pitch. Things pretty much as they should be then.

The power of fences: vignette

Close to where I live there's a disused lane, now a footpath, and on one side a large open field which contained an old dirt running track. A natural scene for dog-walkers. Before I became ill last autumn, it was my home training patch: I did well over thirty miles in a single session there one day just last summer. The land has been sold and development has been going on all winter.

I finally made myself go down there and take a look. I went up to the forbidding fence, I peered at the earth-mounds, the huge concrete pipes, the broad tyre tracks. No sign of course of where my own tracks had patterned out half-mile reps or a steady ten. I turned and heard the way my weeping shocked against the quiet.

Mostly self-pity of course, about my confiscated health. But hard, for a moment, to distinguish from something more universal. I told myself that the plush houses and flats that will sprout here might just mean that existing housing will become available to others, somewhere along the chain. I didn't feel convinced.

People all over the place are watching their local green spaces disappear under the need for homes, complete with the snatched comfort of personal and collective memories. It's the thought of the BMWs and Mercedes that will be parked here, perhaps, and the unseemly millions being made by a handful of developers.

I watched a butterfly flicking along the inside of the fence for 50 metres or so, feeling for a gap, like the last wafer of some spirit of freedom trapped inside. Moments later a woodpecker clattered into the metal fencing, recovered and made off.

It's the most profound experience of the power of fences that I've ever had, and I feel rather naive about it. Change buries us.

Respect standard for housing

The government has published a consultation document inviting views on a new 'Respect Standard' for housing management, aimed primarily at social landlords. It 'will range across the prevention, support and enforcement agendas placing a strong emphasis on engaging and empowering residents.' Press release.

Its curtains for broken window theory

It had to come. Via Planetizen, news of the inevitable research which disproves broken window theory. The jokes about crack have already been made. A study by Bernard Harcourt and Jens Ludwig, reported in University of Chicago Law Review, apparently demonstrates that the declines in crime observed in New York City in the 1990s are exactly what experts would have predicted from the rise and fall of the crack epidemic, with or without broken-windows policing initiatives.

“The results are clear, though disappointing,” noted Harcourt. “Neighborhood disorder does not seem to have an effect on criminal behavior.”

Three quick thoughts (before I read the article, sometime next week). First, won't it be just great if we now have opposition politicians all over the place saying, ok stop wasting resources on repairing things in run-down areas? Secondly, I don't suppose it's possible someone has given the theory a tad too much emphasis, in policy, have they? Like, implying that it subtitutes for or even constitutes a comprehensive approach to community safety, policing and criminal justice?

Thirdly, could it depend on how we articulate the theory? If you formulate it as cracking down on minor crime in order to deter more serious crimes, then this conclusion is not exactly gobsmacking is it? I've always thought that broken window theory, if understood as keeping 'disorder' to a minimum so as to promote pro-social behaviour, is pretty much common sense and something that any self-respecting community development worker would tell you for free. OK maybe not for free but not requiring the full torture chamber.

It's called broken windows theory, not window-breaking. If the research contradicts this convincingly, I'll have some serious thinking to do.

Social jazz and community development

Useful article published over on infed by Mark K Smith about James Gustave Speth and the idea of social jazz. More momentum to the movement for informal and improvisational approaches.

"People harness situations and opportunities to find solutions and in the process create 'a complex market-led world of ad hoc experimentation.' It involves partnerships, alliances and fluidity to meet civil demands. It is also transparent. This means that the public can 'identify and punish companies and governments that break the social norms.' In Jazz, 'the public sees no need to applaud expert opinion for its own sake.'"

Participation and social class?

I recently came across this:

"Much of the recent discussion about group formation has been tinged unconsciously with the experience of the middle-class citizen in organizing small voluntary interest groups, so that we have come to think of social participation as something grudgingly offered and easily withdrawn."

OK, it's competition time! In what year was this published?

I won't be awarding points, cos points mean prizes and no sponsor has yet come forward. However, I'm feeling unusually participative, considering my class, so I'll give the answer, for those who are interested, in a comment below.

Remote happiness

I noticed a woman a few seats away, intent in subdued conversation on her mobile. When I put my work away, to get off the train, I noticed she was weeping.

“Are you OK?” I asked. Yes, she said, I think so, from a damp smile.

“Happiness?” I said. Yes, she said, yes.

Community development and networking

My dear friend Alison Gilchrist was never afraid of a challenge, and that included writing about the slippery notion of networking. Now her handy booklet on Community development and networking has been revised in a new edition and republished by CDF in association with the Community Development Exchange (CDX). Find someone to give it to.

Celebrating prosocial neighbourhood action

On the 10 Downing Street website tonight:

A couple from Yorkshire met Tony Blair before being honoured for their bravery in taking action against nuisance neighbours.

Joe and Alison Bednall suffered three years of abuse from a neighbouring family that included threats of violence, dumping rubbish and spitting. The couple refused to be intimidated and helped secure anti-social behaviour orders against the family responsible.

Their actions were later recognised at the Respect "Taking a Stand" Awards in London, where other winners were also honoured.

Mr Blair gave the couple a guided tour of Number 10 Downing Street and praised them for their hard work in helping him bring "respect" back to Britain's communities.

"He just said congratulations and well done and carry on doing what you're doing," Mr Bednall said.

After visiting Mr Blair, the couple were named as one of four gold Respect Award winners to receive £6,000 for their community group. They established the group during the struggle with their own nuisance neighbours so residents could work together to improve the area.

Mr Bednall added: "Since the group started going people are more friendly. They want to get things done now. They want to make the area a nicer place to live in."

I think some people will be reading that and asking themselves why they are not quite at ease with it. Surely the action these people took is laudable, and should be celebrated? This is an example of ordinary people resisting intimidation and overcoming the fear of retaliation, to assert their right to respect in the neighbourhood.

But we're not at ease, not because of the action, but because we can't help suspecting the motives behind its celebration. That's politics I'm afraid, but we shouldn't let it diminish the significance of what we are hearing here. Under any previous government, we'd have been quite surprised at such a press release, at national publicity given to such a theme: today, it's almost routine and we're suspicious.

So I'm just pausing a moment and reflecting that I'm pleased for Joe and Alison.

A crisis of community presence

I organised a visit of some Treasury officials to a local estate this afternoon. Usually when policy-makers get to local level they wind up somewhere special, where the four star local authority's won awards or the community project is blazing with invention or had some breakthrough, and the only problem is how can it be replicated.

Not this time, deliberately. We were on the Havelock estate in west London and piecing together the lessons was like trying to sew rags into costumes. Like, what can you do about some appalling lack of accountability or responsibility on the part of services? What are local people supposed to do about dampness in their housing, filth on their stairways, prostitution, rats, over-crowding and - perceived to be the biggest menace - drugs?

What came across in our discussions with residents in the family centre, on a walkabout and in the community shop, was the remarkable sense of resilience of residents in a context with very little hope or support. Local people are trying to compensate for the shortfall in services, and not even these efforts are enough to stimulate a matching input from the authorities.

And what struck me was that local people seem to sense the danger of the tipping point of disorder, although they might not articulate it in terms of 'broken window theory' or collective efficacy or whatever.

Listening to several residents talking about the prevalence of drugs, it was apparent that they understood that there is a menace here which is strengthened by other forces of disorder - when the police fail to show up when called, when people fear to go out because their appallingly-designed alleyways are unlit, when turnover is high and you don't stand a chance of recognising many of your neighbours, when condensation and damp grime and mice in the flat are a fact of life and the decent homes standard is just a fancy idea.

People sense that there is a crisis of community presence. Failure to be visible as residents, as occupiers of this territory, favours those who thrive on disorder, and it could be disastrous. The drugs problem is perceived as a wave ready to swamp their lives. So why are they left so abandoned, so unsupported by the services, when the most basic provision would make a huge difference?

I'm afraid we couldn't see any easy solutions and the purpose wasn't to invite the officials to come up with any, necessarily. The idea was to explore informally together a context which exposed the complexity of neighbourhood life with no frills, no laudable award-winning projects, no spectacular crisis or heart-swelling response. The community commitment is there, but untended it will bleed away.

Community cohesion and diversity

Local authorities have "not really seen it as their job to worry about people moving in and out of an area and why they’re moving in and to worry about social networks and social relationships, let alone relationships between different groups – whether they’re faith groups or ethnic groups. So this is a new and more difficult task."

From an IDeA interview with Ted Cantle on cohesion and diversity. Text andpodcast here. Cantle chairs the new Institute of Community Cohesion at Leicester.

Social capital conference, Glasgow

The Scottish network Assist Social Capital have organised a seminar 'Social capital: what works?' in the Trades Hall, Glasgow, 9 June 2006. Speaker is Tom Sander from The Saguaro Seminar. More here.

Miliband on empowerment

Given what I wrote the other day about empowerment, these words from David Miliband at a recent Fabian Society event are of interest:

"it is clear to me that the central political debate in the years ahead will be about power, who holds it, how it is spread, how it [is] accountable. We have to show that we have the ideas to reform the state as an ally of aspiration...

"To persuade people about the efficacy of government we have to make them part of the action; 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." [Emphasis added].

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.

The event was the launch of the Fabian Commission report on life chances, Narrowing the gap.