Neighbourhoods

Community assets

The Civil Renewal Unit has just published a report by Stephen Thake on community assets.

A first glance would suggest that this could helpfully have come before, not after, the government's review of community management and ownership of assets which was published in March. It will be worth remembering that the summary, and much of the first half of the present report, more or less amount to a very handy essay on the nature of the community sector.

"This report has three main themes: the contribution of community-based organisations; their organisational and financial fragility; and the important function that the management and ownership of capital plays in a strategy of growth and sustainability. Summaries of the case studies are distributed throughout the report."

I posted a note about the British Social Housing Foundation's report last year on community land trusts, here.

Transience and information about neighbourhoods

The DCLG's long-awaited report on frequent movers, published last week, is here; summary here. It hasn't yet moved in to the Social Exclusion Unit's website which is being redecorated.

The report won't blow your head off but it's a sound plotting of the issues. When I see the kinds of statistics that they have pulled together - eg that nearly 10% of residents in New Deal for Communities areas have moved three times in the last five years - I wonder how long we can go on in a state of ignorance about the real impact of this phenomenon. High levels of transience make neighouring piecemeal and unpredictable: weak connections among neighbours give rise to all sorts of other social problems, to which this government is far more alert than any of its predecessors. The initiative is significant but merits a stronger message than this report offers.

When you talk to experienced people working in local government they know the vulnerable areas and the difficulties they have with transient populations. Both professionals and residents sense that there may be a tipping point for any neighbourhood, in terms of population stability, and of course this is influenced by and influences a range of other factors such as design, employment, access to health and education, availability of transport etc. So how do we get enough systematic knowledge to be able to identify the tipping point?

We need to be much better at detecting trends in the various factors, using measures of disorder, empty and unlet properties, levels of GP registration and so on. The Moving on report quite rightly identifies part of the solution in data collection and information systems: unfortunately that is a familiar refrain for government aspirations followed by expensive failure.

On the Havelock estate in Southall, residents claim that many of the garages are owned by people who do not live on the estate. I've often been told that they're routinely occupied by 'crackies.' I observe that many are bricked or boarded up, and many are used for dumping rubbish. There was recently a so-called 'consultation' meeting with residents about the garages on the estate: it transpired that the landlord doesn't know how many garages there are, and there is no register of who lets, sub-lets or uses them.

In the scheme of things, this is hardly surprising. All councils and social landlords have limited budgets and they will have many issues that take priority over things like registering use of garages. But I'm clear that when residents sense a weakening community presence and looming disorder, precisely this sort of factor - unknown outsiders making dubious use of a local resource - is part of their unsystematic reckoning.

If we don't have systematic information about change in our neighbourhoods, the least we can do is to listen to local people's expressions of concern about it. Ideally, we should not only be doing that but at the same time working with residents to collect data to monitor the health of the neighbourhood.

Ways of dealing with neighbourly disputes

In the Respect action plan the government insists that it will not support people whose behaviour destroys the quality of life of  those around them. We will bear down uncrompomisingly on anti-social behaviour, Tony Blair writes in the foreword.

You'll have noticed that relations among certain neighbours in the middle east have deteriorated and they have come to blows. One might have expected those with influence to take a mature and serious view of the breathtaking and inexcusable over-reaction that the more powerful party has taken. So what happens? The most powerful nation in the world is now, according to the BBC, 'rushing a delivery of satellite and laser-guided bombs to Israel.' No-one is surprised at the UK government's complicity. The banner pictured above at today's London rally flaps with far more moral substance.

One of the internal consistencies within the new Labour government seems to be that bullying based upon the most threadbare of moral assertions (exemplified by Kim Howells on BBC R4 this morning) is acceptable. I note that the current rhetoric from the Respect Squad speaks of a shift to 'compassionate coercion,' so perhaps that will be the next stage in international diplomacy. If the Israeli tactic of advising people to adandon their homes and neighbourhoods, and then flattening them (as if warning made it excusable) comes to be echoed in the UK government's anti-social behaviour policy, will any of us be surprised?

Aydin Mehmet Ali, in her chapter in our forthcoming book, writes that 'the Respect agenda is destined to be ignored or ridiculed for exposing the hollowness and desperation of the ruling elites, which have lost the plot and are out of spin.'

Hot links?

I hope, in the current heat wave we're experiencing in the UK, that you're keeping an eye on your elderly neighbours. In France I believe it's called a canicule.

It's sent me back to a section in Jane Jacobs's Dark age ahead where she describes sociological research into a heat wave in Chicago in summer 1995. Eric Klinenberg noticed that some areas of the city had considerably higher death rates than other areas. He found that in two comparable districts, one (South Lawndale) had four fatalities per 100,000 whereas adjacent North Lawndale had a death rate ten times higher.

'In North Lawndale... elderly people were not accustomed to walking in their district because there was almost nothing for them to walk to. It was a commercial and social desert, almost devoid of stores and other gathering places... They feared strangers who came to check on them.'

In South Lawndale, by contrast, elderly residents had air-conditioned local stores and knew their local storekeepers, they had plenty of places to go to and were accustomed to going there. They were also more likely to trust those who came to visit.

The critical time in many neighbourhoods is when a crisis is so slight that it doesn't register as a communal crisis: if there are weak connections between residents, the plight of many may go unnoticed.

See Dark age ahead, 2004, p81-87.

Young people, respect and uniforms

Early in the year I found myself wondering to what extent Tony Blair's respect agenda is partly an attempt to recover the lost influence of uniformed organisations at 'critical ages' for many young people. (Answer: hardly at all. As Will Davies noted recently, the respect agenda is more like 'the reduction of politics to pest control').

But then I recently attended a couple of conferences where the role of young neighbourhood wardens - apprenticed to grown-up neighbourhood wardens - was celebrated. Complete with uniform. I think neighbourhood wardens are a genuine success story because they fit snugly in the problematic vacuum between informal local social relations and formal services. There's a DVD about the Hull Community Warden Service which was produced last year by ODPM (available from), which articulates this extremely well.

Just because I'm hugely suspicious of the mentality of uniform is no reason to disparage such initiatives, and I've no intention of doing so. A good socialist friend of mine helps run boy scouts locally and she's very clear about the benefits offered. But I do think we have to be cautious about the association of uniform with the instilling of values, discipline, respect, authority etc. For some young people there will be enormous benefits in terms of confidence and social skills; possibly at the risk of exaggerating gaps and differences within age groups. I'd like to think there will be close links with lots of non-uniformed activities going on. And I just hope no-one thinks uniforms have a place in the youth volunteering that was scheduled to be an important part, I'm not sure how, of the respect agenda.

Missing

I was on the Havelock estate with my friend Wasim today and we came across this. Theft or abandonment, I just thought it was indescribably sad.

Formal and informal in public space

I've long been fascinated with the evidence of woonerven and Hans Monderman's experiments removing traffic lights, at the way in which less formal, less legally-enforceable arrangements result in more efficient, equal and safer use of space. Like a lot of people I dislike barriers and traffic lights both as a pedestrian and as a driver, because they seem like a mutually-inconvenient and extreme solution to different forms of movement because we cannot find a functional compromise.

One reason motorist and pedestrian often haven't found a compromise is because official systems need to be able to apportion blame if things go wrong and therefore need to rule out ambiguity. This was before designers came along and introduced the notion of 'design speed' (ie controlling traffic speed through design elements) as distinct from 'legal speed'.

Some of this I've touched on before - 1, 2, 3, and 4 - and it featured in discussion at the Manual for Streets workshop I attended the other day. At the table where I was sitting, our facilitator asked if we felt that in residential areas there should be guard railings, anywhere. There was an emphatic and unanimous 'no'. Now here's a note just posted on the Streets mailing list:

"As part of the Kensington High Street improvement all guardrailing was removed, [with one small exception]..."

"In the more or less 3 years since completion accidents have dropped by around 40% compared to the 3 years before completion, which is significantly better than the comparable figures for both the whole Borough and London."

The tide is turning, slowly. And my point is not just that this is an evidence-based transformation of damaging safety-obsession in environmental design; it's also part of a cultural transformation towards the accommodation of informal ways of doing things, because human beings are quite good at informality and the managerialists, who aren't, have had it their way for too long.

Neighbouring in the media

David Sillito's BBC news articles shown on breakfast tv this week, featuring Streets Alive, Roadwitch and Netmums, have thankfully managed to avoid being negative and may have stimulated just a little debate. For the time being at least you can find them here:
Who needs neighbours?
Neighbours: the case of the Giant Bunny
Neighbours: when they're not good friends
- the last one includes a link to a live tv chat with Wayne Hemingway.

Meanwhile, just to follow up on the culs-de-sac saga... I gather BBC Radio 2 yesterday carried on from BBC Radio London and were still perpetuating the Times-generated myth that people who live in culs-de-sac weigh 6lbs more than people who don't, and that this information is coming from the government (a government which one Radio London caller described as 'left-wing'). So here we have two famous British institutions which in the past could be depended on for reliable journalism, regenerating rubbish. From the beeb we still expect better.

What does it tell us about this topic that, now the summer's come and 'real news' has dried up a bit, one of the padding topics the media reach for is 'community'? (Apart from the above-mentioned, I had a call from Radio 4 last week and suspect they may have covered something earlier this week which I missed). Personally, although I'm not very good at the kind of immediate bullet-point chat they need, I don't tend to shy away from these opportunities because they force me to try and articulate my wishy-washy woolly thoughts intelligibly, and that's healthy. These opportunities also suggest that some people think issues like sense of community and neighbourliness are important and of popular interest. That's good too, even if the issues get simplified, heavily filtered and unfortunately distorted.

Stirring up views about culs-de-sac

The Times today has an article and an editorial about culs-de-sac, based on the draft Manual for Streets. It suggests that the government (meaning the consultants who are still consulting on the government's behalf) 'is calling the cul-de-sac's bluff.'

I'm old enough to remember when the Times was a newspaper, so I was not surprised at what looks like shoddy journalism which, for example, in both pieces completely misrepresents Richard Jackson’s US research into sprawl, walkability, and bodyweight (mentioned in the Manual para 5.3.3).

Two things I'd quite like to see: (i) some comparative research into sociability and connections with people beyond the street, in culs-de-sac and through streets; (ii) efforts to redesign through streets on the scale of culs-de-sac so as to promote opportunities for play, walking and sociability. And a question: not everyone can live within buggy-pushing distance of a 'centre' (shops, clinic, post office, cafe etc) so what are the arguments against their preferred choice of environment? People like culs-de-sac because most of the rest of street design has handed the street as a public space over to the car. MfS is part of the movement to change that; but maybe while arguments about car use feature strongly in the debate, as they should, considerations of social exclusivity in pseudo-enclaves don't, because we lack the sociological research.

There does seem to be a “culs-de-sac bad, grids good” mentality around among professionals at the moment which is going to oversimplify the arguments grotesquely if we’re not careful. Judging by  a BBC Radio London programme this morning, at least there's a debate starting, albeit a rather crude one. Fewer culs-de-sacs, in more defined circumstances, yes. More attention paid to density in urban centres, yes. And more home zones bringing down the scale of through streets and blocks, definitely. But allowing a message to get out that MfS is there to stamp out culs-de-sac might prove to be a bit of a public relations blunder.

Finally, this is a cue for something which hopefully the SOLUTIONS project will bring to the surface - if we ask people where they want to live, many say a quiet bungalow in a cul-de-sac. So we can cover the country in low density sprawl cos that's what they want. If we ask them if they want green space and breathable air - yes we'll have that too please. But you can't. Ahah, a public policy issue that affects everyone - time to bring this debate into the public arena in a responsible intelligible way.

Shot and stoned

I was with David Sillito of BBC news yesterday, filming in an unfamiliar neighbourhood. Kids were straggling round the way they do, playing in the home-zoned street which was good to see, they asked questions and seemed ok about it. We did some walking shots and David asked me a question about anti-social behaviour. Before I could come out with any of the usual drivel, there was a clatter on the street sign close to our heads and we realised they were throwing stones at us. Of course I switched from saying something like '...and we don't listen enough to the needs of young people...' to 'what they need is a good thrashing...'

This is perfectly true, except the last bit.

Someone to talk to: the weakening of strong ties

I was in a discussion the other day when someone calculated the amount of time his partner and one particular group of confidantes had spent chatting over the years (he came up with a figure of 762 hours, in case you're interested). To some of us, this ability to talk freely about things, and to weave in and out of personally important and trivial topics almost seamlessly, is either enviable or puzzling or both. Who do you talk to about important stuff? Who are your confidants? Probably not your neighbours, more likely kin and friends outside your neighbourhood.

Now here's a sound paper by the US researchers who brought us a key paper on homophily ('birds of a feather') a few years ago - this time they've looked at core discussion networks in the USA comparing 1985 with 2004. They find surprising and disconcerting decline. The typical American discussion network has slightly less than one fewer confidant in it than it did in 1985; and an adult non-institutionalised American is much more likely to be completely isolated from people with whom he or she could discuss important matters than in 1985. The researchers suggest that

'the social environment of core confidants surrounding the typical American has become smaller, more densely interconnected, and more centred on the close ties of spouse/partner. The types of bridging ties that connect us to community and neighborhood have withered as confidant networks have closed in on a smaller core group.'

I'm not sure to what extent this contradicts what we would expect. Don't we assume that most of us now have discretionary personal social networks on which to draw in case of need for informal counselling and support? We would expect there to be increasing educational homogeneity in these networks and the research appears to confirm that. Indeed the key explanatory factor seems to be educational attainment, not race or gender or age. There are all sorts of insights and questions thrown up by the research, and hopefully the debate will result in a little policy attention being paid to informal local social relations.

Incidentally, before people rush to blame the internet for increasing social isolation, I'd urge caution in considering what constitutes 'internet use.' Keith Hampton when he was at MIT showed elegantly how web use is quite different from email use. The former is comparable to high tv use and is comparably bad for your social network. Email use is similar to telephone use and is comparably good for your social network. Probably for various reasons people who are not highly localised within their neighbourhoods will use the technologies of remote communication to strengthen existing contacts, not to diversify their networks through serendipitous face-to-face encounters.

McPherson, M et al. Social isolation in America: changes in core discussion networks over two decades. American sociological review, 71, June 2006: 353-375.

Anti-social behaviour vignette

As if to take me to task for the views I expressed the other day about the Respect Squad, I just had a lengthy phone conversation with a woman in a tower block. She is experiencing some pretty unpleasant and intimidating behaviour from her neighbours above and not getting much joy from the anti-social behaviour unit to whom she has repeatedly complained. Does this justify the notion of a flying squad?

My friend told me she dreads late afternoon on a friday because that's when the noise really starts. The neighbours know that she can't get any response from the ASB Unit over the weekend, so they turn up the volume and start the banging. Apparently an ASB officer came recently during the day when things were fairly quiet, but turned in horror saying 'what is that dreadful noise?' They haven't really started yet, says my friend, but together they went up, the officer calling through the door with all the fearful authority of a sunday-school teacher, 'don't do that it's not nice.'

Will the threat of the mission squad doing picturesque SAS-type tricks ten floors up have an impact on the performance of the local authority? That part of the logic may have justification - my friend will now go back to them quoting the Home Office press release - and I'm glad that this conversation has given me the opportunity to reflect further on the policy. Always willing to revise my opinion and learn, I hope. But does the failure of local agencies to apply the powers they have, really justify the policy and its publicity?