Neighbourhoods

Bake for your neighbour

I'm just sitting at my kitchen table trying to sketch out a briefing paper on neighbourliness and older people, when there's a tap at the door. It's my next-door neighbour with some scones she's just baked, still warm, to go with me tea. Oh thanks - you alright dear? A quick word about the panto and she's gone (a bit like Cinderella, I thought afterwards).

So I sit down again, thinking, how many of us bake and give, these days? Perhaps we need some kind of 'bake-for-your-neighbour' day to remind us of the simple power of sharing food. The multicultural potential could be rewarding.

Food shared creates something else, it can take the spice out of conflict (think of Act 2 of As you like it - 'sit down and feed, and welcome to our table') offering modest moments of connection and little low-pressure spaces of understanding. Perhaps the bridges of cohesion could be baked in our own ovens? (And somebody's going to remind me where I've seen something similar, please?)

Behind you!

And unto this humble blogger, there did befall a great honour. I was trying to grab a quiet hour by meself when the phone rang: could I come help backstage right now as they're one short, stage left?

It has been panto week here. You dismiss it at your peril, particularly since this year's number, Cinderella, was written and directed by my son. You could get a nasty curse from the wicked witch.

So I could hardly ignore his practical plea for the saturday matinee, by mobile some minutes after curtain-up. And indeed I got a buzz being in the wings (more in-the-way than of much use between scenes, I fear).

The production (I witnessed a full rehearsal, two and a bit performances from the hall and one backstage) seems to have been pretty much an unqualified triumph. But who am I to say?

Having experienced its evolution over several months, from the wings as it were, I'm going to have to unleash one more short stuttering monologue about community drama generally, and pantomime specifically. (I last hit this theme 12 months ago.)

Community drama insists on the accommodation of the gormless and the gifted, the shaky and the sure. It welcomes those who are there for the social, those who have talent anyway, those who come cos he or she dragged them along, and those who don't know why they show up. Over several months, parts are re-written to match competence and emerging confidence. It's intergenerational, it tosses together the older assured voices and the uncertain young ones. Dances are worked and re-worked, lines learned and forgotten and changed; scenes blur, separate, find consensus. Technicians come in and fiddle endlessly with lights and mikes, someone sources the costumes and props, someone quietly paints the scenery amid rehearsal mayhem, a man is up the ladder sorting the drapes, there's publicity to do and tickets and programmes. Musicians are found, magic is worked.

You can take your song home, and work on your lines in the privacy of your bathroom, but teamwork permeates everything. This is essentially a huge collective local endeavour. I sometimes think that we should scrap school education and just get people doing community projects like this: for young people at least, it's about as educational (in my definition) as it gets.

And pantomime leaves no space for competitiveness or nasty prejudices. It gives people a familiar framework for behaving quite outside themselves. They do so initially in a social context (twice a week, through the winter, since you ask) and then ultimately publicly (five performances here, each wilder than the previous). Pantomime facilitates modest creativity and a confident rapport with family and friends in the audience - oh yes it does! - and temporarily legitimates marvellously childish behaviour among adults. And we should not overlook the fact that it allows young people, in audience and on stage, to behave childishly too: for some, I suspect, that is a stressfully rare luxury.

And if you're trying to interpret the picture, ok I'll try to keep it simple. Ben plays the part of an ugly sister and happens to be involved in redecorating a room, as you do when you're getting ready to go to a ball. So additional costume is required, and a little slapstick ensues. I hope that's clear.

Belfast: Falls Road library

One of the curiosities of my recent visit to Belfast was to find myself in the public library on the Falls Road, being shown round upstairs rooms mostly closed to the public. Here's where they run English language courses for Polish immigrants, the flipchart poignant enough for me. The flag flying from the airplane on the mural declares 'Falls Family Centre.' (Yes I know - round here you half-expect something more aggressively political). From the adjacent window, I took this unexpected view of the Sinn Féin offices next door.

The librarian I was speaking to was reassuring about how the library seems to have been seen as a cross-community resource through the troubles. In spite of years of service, she would recount nothing more than a vague reference to an instance when someone had placed an Irish tricolour on the roof, visible from the protestant housing beyond, and it had to be taken down.

A little research suggests that staff endured more demanding times, however. An article by Darren Topping and Geraint Evans published in Library management in 2005 describes 'a litany of damage' and offers this quotation:

. . . the Falls Road branch has been damaged by explosives, petrol bombs, burning vehicles, stones, bricks and bottles. It has been occupied by protesting republican women and a platoon of troops. It has not, in short, been quite the haven of tranquil contemplation a library is supposed to be.

As for the incident of the flag on the roof, Topping and Evans report:

When Belfast Education and Library Board (BELB) were pushed on the issue, they claimed that a steeplejack would be required to remove the flag. Unsurprisingly, no one willing to do the job could be found. By this stage, one side was threatening to blow up the library if the flag was not removed, and the other side were claiming that anyone attempting to remove the flag would be shot off the roof.

I have not the time or resources to explore and explain the contrast between these reports and what I was told, but it seems to me a touching example of the healing human attribute of selective forgetting.

Libraries and other community venues can sometimes, somehow, live out in dull slow-motion monochrome the flashing real lives of their neighbourhoods. Now that (hopefully) it no longer has to play a part in its own local history, the library's role is surely to help people understand and come to terms with that past.

[Darren Topping and Geraint Evans, Public libraries in Belfast and the troubles, 1969-1994, Library management, 26 (6/7), 2005.]

Please serve yourself: rural post offices

The Commission for Rural Communities has quick-published four case studies of the improvised provision of post office services in rural areas.

The document is uncontaminated by such things as an analytical summary to draw out the issues and put them in policy context, or an account of how they were compiled, but, ah, the CRC occupies .gov space, maybe that's the explanation. Anyway this is straightforward unglossed case study material. I was struck by this account:

The post office in Tealby closed some years ago but post office services had been maintained in private houses and then in the small entrance lobby to the village hall. With only a year to run on its permission to operate from the hall the threat of losing post office services was looming... A store-room adjacent to the village hall was re-built as a dedicated facility, with village shop, post office services and doctor’s surgery once a week. A number of postmasters have run the post office since its opening in June 2004. The Centre has a part-time employed manager who organises a rota of 22 volunteers to run the shop.

In private houses? Twenty-two volunteers? Tealby is in Lincolnshire, it's not a big place. Some small towns and large urban housing estates struggle to get that many volunteers together for worthy causes or in time of crisis, let alone on a regular basis. We're talking about an acute and demonstrable social need here, people are motivated about it.

In the light of that, the account doesn't exactly amount to a complimentary depiction of service provision in an advanced economy. It's an interesting example of collective effort, which raises familiar questions about how we prioritise investment in essential local services. All credit to the county, district and parish councils which all contributed funding. Now where's the sustainability?

My last post, to coin a phrase, on this theme was here.

Belfast: mixed communities, racism, and optimism

I've been in Belfast a couple days, first time back after several years, and everyone I spoke to is talking about the pace of change. One or two are still pessimistic, on the grounds that differences are so embedded that they could erupt again at any time.

But the evidence of rising population and employment, and a huge amount of new housing going up, testifies to a buzzy confidence, symbolised here by the notorious Divis flats. Once famous for having a British army post on the top, it is now apparently being refurbished and gentrified because there is heavy demand for the flats given the convenience to the city centre. Well, this story may be slightly rumoured-up: I was reassured that local people always get first choice when new housing and apartments come up.

I was lucky enough to have a chat with Patricia O'Neill in the Community Relations Resource Centre, who told me the emerging problem now is racism. "It's easy to go from one ism to another," she said.

Others I spoke to confirmed that racism has 'reared its ugly head,' with asians and east Europeans being subjected to more frequently-reported abuse. Beggars have appeared apparently, a very unfamiliar site in the city.

On the subject of territory, Patricia told me there is increasing demand for homes in mixed communities; immigrants are coming in who have no interest in the sectarianism, and many people who moved away are now returning. From over 90% segregated social housing, there is now expected to be a growing interest in mixed communities.

This is not as clear-cut as one might hope of course, but there's cautious optimism. I gather that catholics will shop on the Shankill Road now and protestants will shop on the Falls, conversations take place over the occasions of trade, but it's still too dangerous to socialise in either case.

I picked up some fascinating literature including a report on the mixed area of Ballynafeigh from the Farset Community Think Tanks Project. It includes this striking anecdote:

There are a number of pubs on the road everybody goes into, and you don't see that in any other community. I would go to the Errigle every week and argue politics - with Catholics and Protestants - we feel we're in an environment where that is possible. The only time there has been trouble was a couple of months ago when one of my friends got a glass shoved in his face. It was not locals but outsiders that started the trouble, and it ended up the locals joined forces against them. There were people injured that night, but it was an amazing thing to see local Catholics and Protestants come together to kick outsiders, who were clearly there to cause trouble, out of the area.
(Living in a mixed community: the experience of Ballynafeigh. Island Publications, 2001)

Meanwhile, mixed housing on its own isn't going to solve everything and there seems little progress on educational desegregation: still only about 5% of children go to integrated schools, I was told.

The peacelines still enforce their jagged distortion, with some sections being 'reduced' shall we say; but in one place at least, being extended in height. Kids with little else to do just throw stones over. I was told that 15 peacelines have been built since the Good Friday agreement, which illustrates awareness of the fragility of peace. This section here runs across a park, with that defiant sense of temporarily-intended permanence that weighs people down.

More soon. I've not been able to check the information I was given and have recorded here (except with others as my conversations moved on) so if there are errors I'd grateful for corrections.

Improving the ecology of housing estates: seminar

Where the wild things grow: biodiversity, groovy plants and veggies on housing estates: a free seminar on improving the ecology of housing estates

NeighbourhoodsGreen seminar, London SW1
26 February 2007, 10.00 - 14.00

'This seminar will launch specific guidance to assist social landlords and their residents in bringing some life to their local spaces. Please join discussions with a panel of experts to talk about improving the ecology of housing estates.'

Details.

Making new technologies meaningful at local level

My old friend David Wilcox offers a pretty comprehensive account - with serious input from Gary Copitch - of recent applications of the local tech game that David and Drew Mackie have been developing. The process requires people working in groups to invent a local character or characters, choose from a set cards those projects they think will benefit them, then tell the story of how they would use the technology in their given context. Life being occasionally worthy of imitation (and David and Drew being the way they are) the facilitators throw in a few wild cards as you go along.

This instance looks tasty because it's clearly helping people get to grips with the kinds of issue usually described as 'reaching the hardest to reach'. Gary's input (which David quotes) really broaches the need to get local people who experience exclusion exploring the issue, not just professional people playing games about them.

Having watched, participated, and sometimes contributed to the development of some of their games over the years, what's special I think is how they make some complex things simple enough for you to get to grips with them, but at the same time clarify why some things that ought to be simple are just so damn complex.

Community engagement residential workshop

Trafford Hall and The Guild have organised a residential workshop on community engagement, developed with Community Development Foundation, to run 27-28 February 2007, Trafford Hall near Chester, UK.

This two day training course will cover:

• The practicalities and reality of community engagement
• Community development principles and how these can be used as good practice to support community engagement and work with your residents
• Measurements of community engagement and how to demonstrate community involvement.

Leaflet.

Neighbourhood indicators

If you're interested in the use of neighbourhood statistical indicators, there's a recent paper using a case study on the Neighbourhood Statistics site here.

Reverse graffiti

Reverse graffiti. This guy should get compensation for working unpaid in unhealthy conditions. Possibly one of the safest places in Sao Paulo though I suppose.

Via Ian Bertram.

Enter Communities England

Here's the announcement of Communities England, the new agency formed by DCLG by merging 'the functions of English Partnerships, the Housing Corporation, and a range of work carried out by the Department, including delivery in the areas of decent homes, housing market renewal, housing PFI, housing growth and urban regeneration.'

I'm ready to believe that the combined strategic interests of regeneration, housing, planning and development might be served through this merger. I'm curious about the choice of name though. (Oh come on Kev, what's wrong with the occasional carefree use of the C word...?)

And in a way there's nowt wrong with it: first, because I think it's justifiably aspirational - the agency should be about establishing the conditions for viable and sustainable communities (whatever we mean by that); and secondly, the main reason we put all this effort and resources into land, buildings and infrastructure (I hope) is to enhance the quality of life of people.

It helps a lot to have a government that appears to believe there's an important collective component to that. I'll be watching, and I really hope that in a few years' time we're not asking 'what's CE got to do with communities?'

Little boxes, just the same

Round here I guess it's like a lot of places, sometimes you think why bother to leave your garbage all over the street when we pay to have our dustmen, sorry operatives, do it for us. And they love to leave the emptied boxes in unlikely places.

But it's not their fault we now have four boxes per household - green waste, paper, plastic bottles and cans, and yer authentic garbage. If it helps recycle, it's obviously desirable. Except the lids blow off the paper box and the bottle box is lidless. Stuff gets blown around the place, accumulating in corners, blocking the drain covers and making life just a bit too easy for the rat population.

We had a note through the door some days ago from one neighbour asking if anyone had their green bin. Someone else went without their paper box for a bit, another found their bottle box gone. All excellent stimuli for neighbourly interaction.

Sounds like a job for a retired painter. On behalf of us all, my next door neighbour got all the boxes together and painted the numbers on. I had to have a quiet word about getting number six and number nine the right way up, but otherwise everyone now knows whose is whose. Not that we're afraid of putting stuff in each others' if there's space and the need arises, I'm glad to say.

You thought this blog was hard to read...

The Local Community Sector Task Force, set up in 2004, has reported. Here's a sample (from the exec summary, no less - ie the most heavily-perused section) of what they came up with after two and a half years:

8. Government Offices, which are responsible for negotiating LAAs on behalf of central Government: should, a) as part of the negotiation of the LAAs, always make sure that they assess and build an understanding of the role and challenges faced by the community sector and wider VCS in the design and delivery of local priorities and services, especially in areas benefiting from NRF, and the associated capacity needs and policy responses required at local level to ensure that the sector can play a full and effective role in the design and delivery of local priorities; and b) ensure that LAAs reflect the direction of travel to be followed locally around the role of the VCS in commissioning and delivering public services as well as a coordinated and cross partnership approach to supporting community capacity building.

Sigh. A shame because there's some interesting stuff in the report, but as so often when it gets near policy, the sector risks disappearing up its own backside. Back to thinking about how to invent the drawing board folks.

Citizen participation

A couple of years ago I served on a cross-departmental government task force on citizen governance, which was looking at levels of citizen participation and ways in which policy might stimulate more. It was a sign at that time of government's awareness that in the future they (government) will be doing less, and citizens will have to do more, if society's supportive machinery is to be maintained.

The task force concentrated mostly on roles in the relatively formal scrutiny and governance of highly accountable and regulated public agencies, like school governing committees, primary care trusts, youth justice panels and so on. No prizes for guessing what the socio-economic/ethnicity/gender profile in this field looks like. (A bit like the task force, you might think. I couldn't possibly comment).

I felt it was our responsibility to envisage a society in five or ten years time in which it is the norm, in which it is expected and taken for granted, that almost everyone contributes at least some time in their life to the governance of a public or ‘civil society’ organisation. So the issue is how as a society we effect the switch from it being unusual, to being assumed, even routine?

I vainly tried to make what I believed to be a crucial point. I don’t see how this can be done without taking full account of involvement in community groups at the most informal level. It has to be possible, for example, for a single parent who is persuaded to attend a committee meeting of the mother-and-toddler group, and who becomes involved, to be able to progress onto other forms of contribution if they want to. Certain personal and community development and capacity building benefits are implied.

In other words we should be on the lookout for the opportunity to broaden the spectrum, to promote progression pathways, and thereby to nurture the culture of a participative civil society. We need to do this by recognising that many people still go through family, school and work life with very little experience of being consulted about anything or listened to properly. If we want anything like a fully participative citizenry, we have to help people create and take such opportunities as organising events and contributing to decisions in local groups.

Sorry about the long preamble. All this was dredged up because the DCLG has today published some research on Motivations and barriers to citizen governance, based on focus groups with people who participate and some who might be described as lapsed.

I've read the summary and there's some interesting stuff, such as this:

Fear of repercussions of becoming known in the community was also a barrier, as was a lack of confidence in their ability to contribute in a governance role. Governance roles were seen as potentially cutting people off from their communities rather than making them champions for their communities.

But three points stood out for me from the findings:

• There is a misconception that citizen governance roles are not open to ‘ordinary people’.
• Many were concerned that the roles tended to be very time consuming and required a large amount of training.
• Those in citizen governance roles often considered the roles were demanding.

Quite so. But none of the recommendations seems to consider the kind of approach that I was proposing back in 05. The nearest was probably this:

'Governance roles need to be sold to the general public as accessible and feasible options coupled with building their skills and confidence to take on such a role.'

(Er, if we're talking about activity that is supposed to be in local people's own interests but which takes up their time and energies, and you just have to find the right way to 'sell' it, then there could be something wrong with the 'product'. Like, it's not a product).

Having had my cheap pot at the language though, yes, surely, citizen governance does need to be seen as something fit for all of us, and for which we are all fit. So we need to focus on a less formal, less be-suited, less middle-class professional level.

Why is that so difficult to grasp? I think it's because too many decision-makers and highly-paid researchers know what a school governor and formal committee look like and they're comfortable with that; but they don't know how a mother-and-toddler group or an estate action group functions, and they struggle to understand how hard that can be for people who are not necessarily used to decision-making contexts.

Integration: developing community relations

CDF have set up a major national conference on integration, London 8 March 2007.

Does integration mean you can be different and equal? Should we expect migrant communities to assimilate and adopt a “British” way of life? How can community development help communities find common ground while respecting diversity?

The event will bring 'a wide range of perspectives and experiences together to discuss what integration means for communities while promoting community development's contribution to building community relations and tackling tensions.'

Speakers include Ted Cantle, Michelynn Lafleche, Darra Singh, Harriet Crabtree, Alison Gilchrist, Krishnan Guru-Murthy, Nick Johnson, Ed Cox, Rushanara Ali, and Osman Skeikh. But meself I'd be more interested in the workshop themes. Check them out here. Conference leaflet is here.

Waste

MIT Press have published one of those graphic artist's type books - unexpected curious images and short-attention-span think-pieces - on the subject of trash. And it has just the right effect (on me anyway) of provoking bio-degradable thoughts on the micro and the macro issues.

So far I've enjoyed Gay Hawkins's essay-attempt to rescue the topic from its modern moral dimensions; Nina-Marie Lister's condemnation of the tendency to 'greenwash' rather than re-invent our waste spaces; and Edward Burtynsky's images of recycling facilities in China and Ontario. There's always a risk here of romanticising some fundamentally unacceptable individual or collective human behaviour, or of appearing (as perhaps this blog post might) to be making cultural capital out of the conditions in which some people have to live or work.

And then you come to the section on the murdered young women of Juarez, represented through the words and photographs of their mothers, and you get the feeling that the book has really just been preparing you for the notion of humans treating other humans as trash.

Reasons to be made cheerful

There's a debate going on about the extent to which governments can or should try to influence our behaviour. Of course they probably always have tried to ('Your country needs you' posters; don't drink and drive; get a smoke alarm; eat more healthy food; stop smoking, etc etc). But my feeling is that we ain't seen nothing yet.

A while ago I was wondering aloud what happened to social capital in policy: it seems it's turned into wellbeing. The Sunday Times had this article the other day, about a report to the Whitehall Wellbeing Working Group, which suggests that the attempt to quantify a personal “sense of wellbeing” is part of a move by all the main political parties to go beyond purely financial measures of wellbeing in setting goals for policy.

Well anyway, it claims that people who take the time to chat over the fence to their neighbours tend to be happier. I suspect it might even help if the conversation is a good collaborative moan, as long as it's not a fierce argument, eg about the government's Happiness policy. I can think of some people who, if told that the government wants them to be happier, would react with a flat refusal.

Panto in the dark

I was just walking home from a meeting this evening and noticed the street lights and house lights weren't on at the edge of the village: a very local power cut. I happened to know the community drama folk were rehearsing the pantomime in the hall, so I popped in to see how they were coping.

There they were, oom-pa-pa oom-pa-pa romping away at a song with all the electric heaters on for light, and a collection of candles blazing. The heaters created challenging conditions, as it's exceptionally mild weather at the moment (I'm at home with the back door open to get some evening air); and the candles might have had the health and safety officer reaching for the rulebook (I suspect he or she had had to be bundled into the panto-horse costume and left in a cupboard for the duration). Well it's just two weeks til curtain up, can't afford to let such concerns disrupt preparations. The panto is serious business round here.

Measuring the quality of public space

CABE have developed Spaceshaper, a practical toolkit for use by local community groups or professionals to measure the quality of a public space before investing time and money in improving it.

The toolkit works by capturing the perceptions of both professionals involved in running a space and its users. The results are discussed during facilitated workshops which aim to debate issues of design quality and build a better understanding about how the space works for the different stakeholders. The toolkit aims to be positive and aspirational, encouraging people to demand more from their local spaces.

CABE Space will be running a series of introductory taster sessions looking at how to maximise benefit using the toolkit.

London, 23 January and 31 January 2007
Bristol, 1 February 2007
Birmingham, 2 February 2007
Sheffield, 7 February 2007.

A version for children and young people is also being developed.

Neighbourliness seminar, London, 27 February

Shared Intelligence are organising a seminar on neighbourliness, at NCVO in London, 27 February. If it weren't for the fact that I'm speaking, I'd say it looks like a good event. You get to hear Liz Richardson, you get a copy of that book, and as it's you, a glass or two of wine. I recommend showing up late. Here's the blurb.

Refugee inclusion

The Welsh Assembly Government has published a Refugee Inclusion Strategy, for which the consultation ends 3 February 2007. There is also a literature review.

(Via John Vincent's invaluable Welcome to Your Library newsletter).

Cohesion and communication

There's a short summary here of initiatives to promote communication in the interests of community cohesion in the Dutch town of Zaanstad, following unrest after the death of Theo van Gogh.

The tension was wisely problematised as: 'How do the residents of Zaanstad communicate with each other?'

A multi-racial project group set up ten projects, several of them apparently driven by young people, and the summary claims among the results that:

• Solidarity at district and urban levels has been reinforced; and   
• Residents are themselves responsible for the atmosphere and good relations in the city and the districts.

The report is as yet only available in Dutch, as far as I can see. (From European Urban Knowledge Network).

Gangland on Thames

Here's an article by Paul Barker in yesterday's Guardian about Henley - very posh place in southern England with high land values and a few little local difficulties. Recently a business man had been kicked to death by a gang outside a police station in the early hours of a Saturday morning.

It reads very much as if Barker went along in his journalist's coat to explore the impact of this incident on neighbourly relations, and found the local campaign to save the hospital from closure was actually of more interest. One can only sympathise.

The town council worries about gangs, clubbers, Friday night drugs, Saturday night window breaking, and now a killing. But the local paper is still mostly full of classic minor incidents. It hardly seems like a community where neighbourliness is in collapse.

Not yet anyway. Everybody now wants to know where Henley sits in the ASBO league table. Meself I'm more perplexed by the difficulty I have reading the contemporary Guardian staccato writing style, to which this article conforms. Probably it's just me, but it feels like watching a poorly spliced home movie.

(Thanks Ben).

The respectable and the rough in low-income neighbourhoods

I came across an article by Paul Watt in the December issue of the International journal of urban and regional research, which is well-worth tracking down if you're interested in research that genuinely tries to make sense of what housing estate residents are saying about their environments and everyday lives.

Watt interviewd 29 residents in the London Borough of Camden and sifted out interesting insights into how people make social distinctions under constraining economic conditions, and explores how those distinctions relate to images of place. His account illustrates sensitively how people tend to place others around them on a scale of respectability and roughness.

The low-status others and problem tenants constituted an amorphous group who were condemned both for their sheer presence as well as for their behaviour. The latter included a widespread array of activities ranging from violence, drinking and drug taking, to noise, vandalism, graffiti and playing football, as well as failing to maintain the appearance of the dwellings.

The research also seems to suggest that racism is often subordinate to the respectable/rough distinction: racist discourse is not denied, but contextualised in this framework. What's enormously valuable in this article is the way in which the author scrapes away some of the structural grime that has clogged up the ethos and processes of neighbouring.

He shows how maintaining 'respectability' has become more and more difficult in unstable economic conditions and in neighbourhoods where 'knowing exactly who is respectable, or rough, is increasingly problematic.'

The paradoxical result is that expressing a social distinction between themselves and the low-status others around them, via emphasizing their own respectability, has become increasingly ‘necessary’ within the contemporary working-class habitus at the same time that the material basis for such a distinction has markedly narrowed.

I started to wonder if this has implications for the greater formalisation of cultural capital. It certainly points to the need for more effort to appreciate diverse forms thereof, which is perhaps what the community cohesion agenda amounts to. The residents who see themselves as struggling to maintain respectability in such a context, as Watt points out, lack any dominant form of cultural capital such as educational qualifications by which to legitimate their self-avowed status.

But there are more urgent indicators here for practitioners, to do with housing allocation and estate management in particular. The fact that the research was carried out before 2000 serves in my mind to emphasise that neighbourhood management in this country was disgracefully overdue and has been not so much a glorious policy success as blazingly obvious.

The erosion of public welfare services was routinely regarded as both signifying and causing deteriorating neighbourhood social relations. In addition to the widely criticized paucity of council housing provision, an emphasis was placed upon the communal areas of the estates, including their deteriorating physical appearance, the erosion of support services such as caretakers, as well as the limited facilities for children and young people.

At about the same time (I discover from some notes I found on my hard disk over christmas) a community development worker from another London borough was telling me:

Instability of communities is a problem... We’re not in control of much that happens in our borough because of the power of the private sector. We have 17,000 people on the housing list. On some estates, one third of people are on anti-depressants. One third of children are taking their lessons in their second language… Within the council, everyone is following different government departments’ requirements and from time to time there is conflict.

Watt, P. (2006). “Respectability, roughness and 'race': neighbourhood place images and the making of working-class social distinctions in London.” International journal of urban and regional research, 30(4), December: 776-796.

Where old zimmer-frames go when they die

I caught this image at back of an old people's home not far from where I live. In my mind I kept picturing a tangled mix of disembodied hands, fierce or frail, determined or desperate, that had clutched on to them at different times.

Three days later I stood in the Musee des Beaux Arts in Brussels, soaking up Bosch's extraordinary Temptation of St Anthony (c1500). At the right hand edge of the right hand wing of the painting, there is this little detail.

Smell thy neighbour

Something is indeed rotten in the state of Israel. Reports say King Abdullah of Jordan has complained to the authorities about the smell of manure wafting over his palace near the Red Sea from a farm in Israel.

Israeli radio said King Abdullah had told the Israeli environment ministry that he'd had to cancel an international conference last week because of the unpleasant smell. It's a tough world out there. I heard this on the Beeb this morning but could only find this (Hong Kong) source.