Neighbourhoods

"You can come back mate" - workshops with street reps

Running exploratory workshops with local residents tends to be less predictable than it usually is working with professionals, and it can be risky. But it's what I enjoy most and find most rewarding. I've just been in Shipley with my colleague Sarah Clow (pic, R) running one focus group on neighbourliness with older people, and two workshops for a new 'Street Reps' initiative. In a few hours of listening you can get a pretty thorough immersion in local issues in a low income area, and we did.

The basic idea of street reps (sometimes called street champions) is usually to give services keen and willing pairs of eyes and ears in the neighbourhoods, to alert them to issues that need attention. Much of the language is classically top-down (as in 'we will appoint you; you will do this' - one example begins talking almost straight away about 'professional standards') and suggests that some authorities have not done much thinking about it and start from their own preoccupations rather than the residents'.

It fascinates me, because the task is really to work out, for each individual and more generally for each network of reps, a role definition which is sufficiently formal for the authorities but sufficiently informal and flexible to make sense in the everyday life of the neighbourhood. (Since it's essential that the reps are volunteers, we can expect that some authorities will have to give weight on this particular see-saw. And in the grander scheme of things, this is exactly the kind of initiative which, in forcing the responsibilisation of citizens, will in turn, necessarily, reduce the public services obsession with performance measurement and thus could presage the demise of New Labour Managerialism. So that's a pretty good reason for getting on with it).

Our work is being funded by a grant from Bradford's Neighbourhood Management Team. To their great credit, they are not necessarily happy just waiting for local people to volunteer for a pre-defined role which saves them money while helping to meet service delivery targets. They've asked us to work with residents to define the role in their own terms (not as easy as it sounds). Additionally, without denying the role of street reps as 'Disorder Alarms', we're looking to emphasise the development and support of local social networks through neighbourliness; and for reps to promote positive initiatives like street parties or planting, not just passing on complaints or bad news. We'll also be looking, softly softly, for opportunities to introduce and exploit mobile online technologies.

Having served a modest, intermittent apprenticeship with games maestro Drew Mackie and participation guvnor David Wilcox over the years (see Useful Games) I know enough to know I needed to fictionalise things in order to get discussion away from the immediate gripes. What we came up with was more of a workshop exercise than a game - working in groups to invent and explore issues requiring attention for spring, summer, autumn and winter, identifying immediate and longer term actions, working out responsibilities, resource and support needs and so on - but for several people the experience seems to have been totally novel and refreshing.

At the end one of the participants said that if she'd been told beforehand that she'd be doing this - meaning, having to think things up herself and writing ideas down on a flip-chart - she would never have come. But she'd had a good time and enthused: "You can come back mate." Which, in the understated vernacular of community action, I think constitutes emphatic endorsement. And that gives us a buzz, cos there's plenty still to do.

Neighbourliness and neighbourhood management

I was recently asked by the National Neighbourhood Management Network for some thoughts on neighbourliness in relation to regeneration and neighbourhood management, now published in their newsletter. A slightly longer version is available for download here.

Designing-out aspiration: the history of council estates

At last a moment to put in a plug for Lynsey Hanley's Estates, an engagingly personal exploration of the history and experience of council housing. Hanley comes across as a lot more patient than I would be in explaining the politics and decision-making that gave rise to what have been called 'social concentration camps' and the succession of estates where desolation was designed-in.

We learn that the author herself 'escaped' from such an estate to accumulate otherwise-inconceivable sacksfull of intellectual and social capital by going to university, but there's no sense of confused guilt or pride. She writes with great clarity about the tangled issue of social class and the 'wall in the head' that characterises the experience of growing up on a council estate:

The wall in the head is just that - a state of mind - but it would not be so strong, or so seemingly insurmountable, were it not for the real walls that serve to strengthen it. Coexisting with the state of mind is a state of economics, a state of health and a state of education, a state of government policy and a state of segregation by class.

She's maybe a little harsh on tower blocks - when they work, with proper maintenance and sensible allocations policies, there are many people who greatly appreciate living in towers; and I suspect she could be harsher on the current 'sustainable communities' building plans, where some of the classic errors like forgetting to provide local amenities seem to be being replicated. But this is a strikingly real book illuminated throughout, refreshingly, by personal experience.

As it happens, sometime after I started reading Estates I found out that I'll be sharing a platform with Lynsey at this year's Swindon Festival of Literature, on the evening of Thursday 10 May - it should be fun.

The bus stops here

Government has confirmed grants to over 3,000 primary schools in England as part of the 'walking bus' scheme. The idea is to provide support to schools that have made a commitment to reducing car use and increasing walking for journeys to school.

Living Streets note on the initiative.

DfT guidance for schools.

Make Space youth review

I missed this, and can't tell by how much, but the interim report of the Make Space Youth Review has been published.

They get nul points for issuing a press release with no date and a report in an unmanipulable pdf format. I would have liked to quote some of it here. In particular, a well-made point about how young people feel isolated and alienated in their own neighbourhoods, with little say over what goes on. The consistent sense of lack of belonging of young people to their own neighbourhood, reported in this review, is deeply worrying.

The review also passes on criticism of 'an overwhelming orientation towards adults - from use of public space and buildings to leisure and recreational services.' Nine key features are proposed for a new government commitment and vision for young people.

The pic is of a made-over Tony Blair.

Courage and cohesion

Nick Booth over on Podnosh has a little gem here - an 8-minute video featuring Linden Walcott-Burton's involvement in community cohesion and efforts to confront extremism in Dudley, West Midlands.

Linden is just right for delivering the messages: unpretentious, inquisitive, positive, engaging. Ballet changed his life, as a recent tv programme put it: now he's identified courage as the factor that changes other lives. Also on YouTube. (Thanks Nick).

Urban conflict: living with difference

I wouldn't expect to be particularly attracted to the pronouncements of The European Forum for Urban Safety, but this article by Mathilde Auvillain on 'Preventing urban conflict' in the Urbact newsletter caught my eye.

Forum director Michel Marcus seems to be predicting that issues of urban violence will be high on the policy agenda in the coming years. While I can't help worrying about the place of agencies that are set up to understand negative social issues somehow contributing to them and themselves becoming more-or-less permanent, I do agree that issues of 'living with difference' are not going to diminish in significance. And if we are to learn from the explosions of unrest such as those in northern England a few years ago, in France in 2005 and in Copenhagen more recently, it makes sense to develop a Europe-wide understanding of the issues and to explore possible solutions.

As Auvillain pus it:

when the art and pleasure of living together in public and private spaces is conspicuous by its absence, it creates the perfect breeding ground for such conflicts. And within this kind of context, conflicts that would have previously been seen as trivial, such as disagreements between neighbours or conflicts between different age-groups, cultural groups or groups with different interests, are exacerbated.

Well we could argue about whether this is really a new phenomenon or whether, as my sketchy knowledge of history suggests, there's been a lot of it about over the years. (The illustration above is by Phiz for Dickens's A tale of two cities). But that's not the point - just because it's happened before doesn't mean we shouldn't try and eliminate it. My angle would be that it's fundamentally about inequalities and disempowerment: the more unequal a society and unheard the voices of those who experience exclusion, and the more unfair those who are disempowered perceive their situation to be, the more likely they are to express their discontent in violence.

And what would a 'solution' look like? According to Auvillain, the Forum suggests setting up "mediation centres" or "mediation services" in the districts affected, 'whose role would be to deal with any mediation requests and to seek the most appropriate solution, by facilitating links and coordinating different interventions.'

This sounds like a good way of bolting the stable door, but doesn't really sound like a set of preventative options (which has to include housing, education, employment, community development and so on). In England, we've had very clear and positive strategies since the Cantle review in 2001, which I think have made a difference, but it's not an issue we can afford to take our eye off for a moment.

New fund to provide small grants to community groups

In the budget the other day came the announcement of a new £80 million fund to provide small grants to community groups. 'The fund will be distributed over four years by local grant makers with the greatest knowledge of their areas and local community groups.'

Once upon a time, this sort of funding all went through local authorities. Not sure who 'local grant makers' are but the details are being worked out as part of the final stage of the Third Sector Review.

Press release.

Individualism, responsibility, and listening

I've been puzzled at how reluctant commentators have been to finger Thatcherite individualism in seeking to understand contemporary problems of anti-social behaviour. Just now, most of us are sufficiently detached from the present flashes of gun and knife violence glinting on our news-screens, and probably don't know what to make of it. These are local experiences for which broader cultural explanations are sought.

So thanks are due to Josh Freedman Berthoud who in a Guardian article this evening exposes the lasting twisted effects of individualism. He points out that these attacks can be - are sometimes meant to be - indiscriminate and unmotivated:

a chilling indication of the kind of society that many city-dwelling British youths now inhabit - a rampantly individualistic society, in which each boy does everything he can to prove that he has no sense of morals or attachment to the society around him.

We are finally beginning to gain focus on one of the central social policy issues of our age, in which notions of collective association or responsibility can readily be shrugged off, and behaviour that discounts the humanness of others has swollen grotesquely in the vacuum. Give them credit, government and agencies have spotted the connection here - hence the Respect agenda, among other things - but there's another message less well-grasped: a message about how to hear messages.

Certain messages that government sends out - if you do not consume, you have failed as a citizen; you are either with us or against us, so compete or be defeated, and so on - are hard to miss. I'm not sure that messages coming from citizens (or discarded citizens) by contrast, are being processed where government is.

A year or two back I heard a government minister refer to the community sector back in 1997, in the early days of 'the New Labour Project' (his words, worthy of capitals on the grounds of pomposity) as not getting the message and being 'somewhere else'. What a hollow irony. Given the inescapabale compulsion towards responsibilisation of the citizen, the possibility that others' views might be genuinely valid and not just there for the purposes of spurious consultation, may finally be unavoidable. Could it be time to stop telling people, from a position of moral bankruptcy, how to behave, and start listening to how they react to one another's behaviour and attitudes?

How about this at the simplest level, for example: I've often heard older people, in  discussion about kids causing trouble on their estates or in their neighbourhoods, make the point that there's nothing for them to do. It's not unusual to hear older people call for youth clubs and youth work: of course they are frightened by the hoodied clusters on the street corners but they also tend to look for understanding and solutions. So nothing happens for a bit, and then we get ASBOs.

It would be nice to think that we could clinch this notion of a conversational democracy, a style of government that listens and doesn't seek relentlessly just to regulate on its miserable moral basis. The idea continues to gather momentum and is echoed in another Guardian item, in today's published, by Lucy Ward.

Ward notes that when Gordon Brown recently met parents, they favoured 'an independent information and discussion forum separate from government.' She detects a need for 'some way of eavesdropping on a wider range of voices' and finds that what is crucial is not what parents say to the government, but what they say to each other.

Collective behaviour and climate change: why would anybody bother?

Twice recently at events, I've raised the possibility that responses to climate change represent a potential sea-change in collectively-oriented behaviour. More and more people, I suspect, are taking everyday life and lifestyle decisions less on the totally individualistic basis of our Thatcherite inheritance, and more in recognition that there are others around us and to follow, who might be affected by those decisions.

And now I'm just catching up with a recent study by CDX and the Centre for Sustainable Energy
on Mobilising individual behavioural change through community initiatives. The study investigated 'what kinds of local and community initiatives are most effective at influencing changes in behaviour and at what levels, and whether any lessons learned from these are transferable to the issue of climate change.'

The report provokes thinking about important issues. The key message seems to be that what is lacking is 'a realistic sense of agency,' and this is the problem to be solved. Part of the argument is that people are not motivated to take action (jointly or individually) on an issue which is not local, where their action has no immediate impact (or indeed any significant impact), and where the scale of any action taken is dwarfed by the impact of the inaction of others.

And yet, and yet. We know there is evidence of changes of attitude, and local councils have had relatively little difficulty imposing regimes of recycling which have transfomed attitudes. The media too have played a hugely significant role in the subtle shifting of attitudes.

I suspect that because this is an (apparently hurried) report to government, the assessment remains implacably hard-nosed (indeed, in an odd sentence towards the foot of p7 the authors suggest that, in the absence of evidence that community-based environmental initiatives influence behaviour, the challenge for policy-makers and funders is to justify supporting them - the report thereby seems to defy its own existence).

There have been numerous local projects over the years that have engaged people in reducing their negative impact on the environment and changed people's attitudes to the ways in which it is managed.

Surely it's time for better evaluation, not time to abandon evaluation and pass the buck back to policy-makers? I think this is an issue where the notion that there is no such thing as altruism has become a blinding presumption, to the extent that we do not recognise the possibility that people will change their behaviour for any reason other than immediate personal interest.

But some people will do, have done so, are doing so, and, crucially, are now living in a social context which encourages them more than it did in the past to engage with others and persuade others to do so. Perhaps the notion of a renaissance of collective behaviour is not so far-fetched.

Where my naive optimism springs from I'm afraid I cannot say, since earlier this evening I felt physically sick at the televised image from our House of Commons, where elected members had committed this act of inexplicable collective folly. Perhaps it's the lasting influence of Dickens and his famous declaration of political creed:

My faith in the people governing is, on the whole, infinitesimal; my faith in the People governed is, on the whole, illimitable.

Tenant empowerment: free telephone conferences

Tenant Empowerment Programme (England) 

Free one-hour telephone conferences organised by the Association for Tenant Involvement and Control

Tenant empowerment – what are the choices? An introduction to the Tenant Empowerment Programme
Tuesday 20 March 2-3p.m. - Lead speaker – John Farr, Snu 
Tuesday 27 March 7.45p.m.-8.45pm – Lead speaker – Jane Hartley, Solon

As a tenant representative have you looked at tenant control?
Tuesday 10 April,  7.30p.m. - 8.30p.m.    Lead speaker Trevor Bell, NFTMO

Not just housing - neighbourhood options
Wednesday 18 April 11-12 noon -  Lead speaker – Marje Bridle, Birmingham Co-operative Housing Services (BCHS)

As a Tenant or Community Involvement Officer, what’s your experience of the Tenant Empowerment Programme?
Wednesday 25 April 11-12 noon    Lead Speaker – Tom Hopkins, Open Communities. 

Investment and regeneration through community–led stock options
Wednesday 25 April 7.30-8.30pm - Lead speaker – Ed Isaacs, Partners in Change                              

These telephone conferences are free to all participants. For further information and to book a place contact Sarah Bird, 01761 412495.

A future of participation?

Seems you can't move these days for articles pondering how erstwhile Labour voters feel seduced by the commonsense emanating from Tories, contrasted with the miserable folly of some of our leader's all-too-lasting policies.

And so to an Involve participation seminar this evening, which included a speech from Oliver Letwin on 'a conservative vision of citizenship,' buttressed by Bill Wiggin MP, with some apparently harmless waves of reality from Mary Ann Sieghart allowed to lap gently some way below their lofty outlook.

They were all preceded by Mori's Ben Page who neatly and unceremoniously packed all the real issues into about five minutes, only to find they too were mostly overlooked by the subsequent speakers.

Oliver Letwin offered a vision of citizenship as 'citizens taking responsibility for what goes on around them, not commenting on or responding to what goes on around them' (I think I jotted that down correctly...) His key message was that a Conservative government would press the participation button just as firmly as the current government does, but (mercifully) without the ridiculous over-emphasis on managerialism which has so thoroughly spoiled the best intentions of the past ten years.

Sadly, there was too much to be said and too many people trying to say it - just like real-time participation - for anyone to grab the issues and try to list them. FWIW, with the benefit of a train ride home, here's my personal two euro's-worth for starters:

• consultation without engagement is damaging and always has been. So -
• start community engagement at the most local level and take the lessons up a level at a time, cautiously (Ben Page made some potent points about scale)
• do not use the C word to imply consensus
• try to create a culture of genuine participation in all arenas of social life, including the family, school, and work environments: the habit of participation is precious and a society that neglects it is vulnerable
• understand that at the present rate, politicians will be following, not leading, this debate (possibly trailed only by the established broadcast media)
• try and celebrate the hits for participation that are independent of the availability of resources: there are still too many people baying for funding even though we have an unenviable tradition of wasting it because we don't know how to work collaboratively.

Testing the temperature of local tensions

Regeneration and Renewal reports that a system of indicators is being tested, with DCLG funding, to help monitor levels of 'community tensions' in order to try and avert riots and disturbances.

The early warning system will consist of 30 to 40 indicators taken from datasets already in use by local authorities, and will be piloted in London.

Ted Cantle is reported as making reference to the ways in which local people are sensitive to tensions often long before confrontational behaviour erupts - local taxi drivers for instance express disquiet about entering certain areas.

It's interesting to see this as an example of formal and informal systems coming together. I'm curious to see precisely how neighbourhood management systems will interface with the grapevine, to get the necessary data. The better they do it, the less they'll need it, probably.

Social capital, ethnicity, and cohesion

I sometimes think we're a society that snacks voraciously on weak ties, and when it comes to strong ties, the appetite has gone. But (to hold the analogy for as long as I dare) the nutritional benefits of each may not be comparable.

OK, forget that. I've just been scanning some papers dated December and announced today by the Family and Parenting Institute, on social capital and transnational families. There are three research papers described in this summary, and they seem to clarify the significance of, and continued need for, bonding capital among ethnic groupings:

The research found that the minority ethnic communities studied utilised bonding strategies within their families and communities which then provided them with the support and resources to participate more fully in the wider spheres of education, employment and building intimate relationships and friendships.

Although the research acknowledges that being part of a close-knit community can sometimes have negative implications for individuals, the social capital afforded by the solidarity and reciprocity of those communities provided a secure base from which to bridge into the wider community. So far from encouraging increasing social segregation, the adherence to socially accepted norms of their ethnic communities created a resilience that allowed greater involvement in societal life in general. [Emphasis added]

The research also highlighted that the reciprocity within the ethnic groupings studied 'encourages a greater sense of caring for members of the community that need more support.'

The bonding contexts include family events, cultural rituals and community groups. The bonding networks represent a ‘survival strategy’ as a response to issues arising from social exclusion and marginality, providing support for participation in education, employment and forming intimate friendships in other groups and communities.

All the papers are available from the FPI site here.

Hang it all

A wave from my neighbour next-door, she spotted me at the kitchen window. I potter out. Are you hanging washing today? she asks, shielding her eyes from the sudden spring sun. I'm not. It seems she has the entire wardrobe of her extended family in the washing machine, as we speak. Of course you can use the line, and a good day for it.

Then because I'm such a slow thinker, I have to shuffle out there again because I forgot to offer extra pegs.

Ages together

Magic Me, the intergenerational arts organisation based in east London, is featured in a BBC Radio 4 programme, Ages Apart, next Monday 12 March at 2000 gmt, and available for a week thereafter.

The half hour documentary follows two Magic Me projects and eavesdrops on young and older people meeting and building relationships as they work together. Magic Me enables neighbours of very different ages, cultures and ethnicities to come together, so expect insights into working around diversity and cohesion.

Press release.

The practice of neighbouring

A week ago at a seminar I was lamenting the inadequacies of research on neighbouring, largely because we only have data from a few case studies (I think there may be many more undiscovered), from specific surveys with questions of dubious worth such as 'how many of your neighbours do you know by name?' and from large national datasets which lack, er, granularity shall we say.

Since when, my attention has been drawn to a paper by Margarethe Kusenbach published in Symbolic interaction last year (29(3)), on 'Patterns of neighboring: practicing neighboring in the public realm'.

Thanks to Keith Hampton for the nod on this: Keith warned me that it is 'one of the best neighborhood articles I have seen of late' and I'm not going to argue with that. Kusenbach does two key things: she provides us with valuable insights from scarce material from ethnographic observations in two Los Angeles neighbourhoods, and she puts this in a framework of 'four normative principles of neighboring' - friendly recognition, parochial helpfulness, proactive intervention, and embracing and contesting diversity.

The paper is important because at last we have an academic placing emphasis on neighbourly greetings which 'tend to be superficial and do not take much effort'. I no longer feel like quite such a lone obsessive. At the same time, Kusenbach places stress on the notion of 'rules' of neighbouring, for example to do with reciprocity. Personally I suspect it might be better to talk in terms of 'codes' rather than 'rules', at least until we've got a bit further in appreciating the voluntary and essentially informal nature of contemporary neighbouring.

(Incidentally, there's one particular curiosity about the paper, in that the literature review almost completely overlooks European sources (the Dutch, Scandinavian and UK traditions in this field, especially Philip Abrams, do not feature: my information-work background makes me wonder impishly if the research team forgot that we spell some words differently...)

Some of these niceties - especially the notion of neighbouring 'rules' - were floating around in my head yesterday because I was running a workshop for Age Concern England, based on a background paper I had circulated. I woke up this morning realising that we'd had fifteen of us discussing neighbourliness for four hours, which itself deserves mention.

Before I get to grips with the flipchart sheets, two things were particularly striking. The first was how easily our discussion kept slipping into issues of care, family networks, and the nuances of friendship and acquaintance. I'd like to think that this reflects my decision to take an ecological approach to neighbourliness within the context of social support generally, but maybe it's just reality poking through all the time.

The second was that the issue of local social relations, with its baggage of respect, civility, care, consideration, participation, responsibilisation and so forth, is clearly of swelling social policy significance. Agencies like Age Concern are right to try and get in front of the issues as governments are increasingly turning their attention to influencing the ways in which people behave.

As for the notion of 'rules', the group was emphatic about seeing neighbouring as a code of informal voluntary behaviours, so I wonder if this highlights another cultural difference between the UK and the US. And we hardly discussed notions of respect for privacy because it's undoubtedly taken for granted as one of the central pillars of neighbouring.

My thanks go to the enthusiastic group representing various Age Concerns who shared their ideas and experience yesterday. It's not yet clear what products will result from the project, but there's likely to be some form of guidance for local Age Concerns and perhaps a more general document reviewing the theme.

Easy guide to social capital

One reason why social capital may have disappeared from the language of policy in the last couple of years could be to do with its semantic awkwardness. But this hasn't put some people off. Thanks to Karen Dent of Community Foundation for drawing my attention to a recent 'easy guide to social capital' which, it says, 'is targeted at the grassroot level.'

It explains social capital, discusses why it is important and how it can benefit communities, and gives some ideas of ways that you can get connected and act collectively. It also includes a list of resources of other information and support on social capital.

The guide is published by the North East Social Capital Forum and is available here.

Local experiences of 'super diversity'

'Local neighbourhoods – particularly in large cities – are now characterized by a condition of superdiversity, which describes an increasing number of people of different ethnic, socio-economic and religious backgrounds along with mixed legal statuses. This workshop will look at the “micropolitics of everyday interaction” in these contexts. Of particular interest are papers which, rather than looking at specific migrant ‘groups', focus on localities of every-day encounter, for example religious, political, and professional associations, community centres and youth clubs.'

This is a workshop theme description in a call for papers for the annual conference of the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS): Between ‘parallel lives' and ‘community cohesion': toward new models of immigration, integration and multiculturalism, 5-6 July 2007, University of Oxford. The cfp deadline is 26 March.

Parks and sociability

I spent some time today with committed dogwalkers in a park, talking about sociability. For some people, the park is the place for social connection, in their case local connections.

Now here's someone's myspace address, scribbled on the wall at a skateboard park, the image captured on a mobile phone, relayed to me, and I publish it online. The invited connection is still local, I think. (And the idea is not that you should be able to link to the site from the image). My thanks to Gail Bradbrook for her part in this combination.