Home improvement: women on housing estates

Yesterday I was at a really cracking event organised by the London Women and Planning Forum, on 'Home improvement: women on housing estates.' There were presentations by Lynsey Hanley, Rebecca Tunstall and Jess Steele - which frankly ought to have been a good enough line-up to attract many more than the 30 or so of us who took part in an informative and absorbing discussion. (Where was everyone?)

Lynsey Hanley offered a presentation on 'estates and women's mental health' based on her book, Estates. She talked in passing about 'the wall in the head' - the idea that once you're there, on an estate such as that where she grew up, you’re not expected to leave. With sensitive reference to family and social history she talked about how, after the war, the class system was reinforced through housing policy.

Lynsey also spoke about how the estate on the edge of Birmingham had no clear identity. It wasn't a town, it was described by planners as a township, but people who live there describe it as an ‘estate', a term which has a lot of negative connotations. She talked about the 'siege mentality,' the negative sense of community, and the lack of available 'talking therapies' for women, describing their experience with the sense of being cast away and cut off.

Becky Tunstall reported on her research into 25 years on twenty estates (which I also covered previously). There's a huge amount of detail in the research to which I can't do justice, but her conclusions seemed to be that improvements in the conditions of our least popular estates were more down to basic housing (allocations) policy than to regeneration policy, and to the national context of an upbeat economy, rather than to estate-based factors.

I was struck by Becky's identification of a 'dilution of decentralisation' on these estates, from estate offices to area offices - ie previously there was a move to provide highly localised services in a selection of estates, whereas now the trend is to provide such services area-wide but more comprehensively.

Jess Steele, now Head of Consultancy at the Development Trusts Association, made some big points about community action and community development on housing estates, stressing how the relationship of poor women with the state is particular, very intense and often fraught.

Her main point was about the need to recognise that estates house concentrations of claimaints, and she called for their needs to be linked to the creation of work in the 'phantom economy' of everyday local tasks ('mini-jobs' like low-level care and support, shopping, cleaning, school crossings, basic warden roles and so on) which are not part of the standard labour market. (Some of this of course is estate management with added social care, as practised very succesfully for example at Pembroke Street in Devonport). Jess wants a system of ‘community allowance’ which would allow people to do these jobs under contract to community organisations without losing their benefit entitlement.

Each of the speakers referred to the importance of community action on estates and women’s dominant role in that. Becky for instance, reviewing the twenty estates covered in her research with Alice Coulter, said that ‘community activity has been extremely important in the way these estates have developed’. While we touched on the question of whether or not practitioners have learned from the mistakes of the past, it was striking that there is a huge gap between the significance of community action and its influence on policy. Will that really change, in our looming age of localism?

Another major theme to emerge was a widely-shared scepticism about planned mixed tenure as a policy. Becky Tunstall, who is currently researching this theme, confirmed that there is no evidence to suggest that it ‘works’. (Hopefully, her research will clarify what we mean when we say it works or doesn’t). (LSE have a lunchtime seminar on this theme coming up, London 6 July 2007, with Susan Popkin from the Urban Institute, Washington DC: for details 020 7955 6562, a.tamas(at)lse.ac.uk).

This is essentially about living with difference, and I note that the theme is touched on, without a great sense of authority, in the recent report of the Integration and Cohesion Commission:

Cohesive and integrated communities are more easily achieved where there is a mix of housing types and tenures, and where people are able to move between tenure types and between sizes of home as they move through life and face different personal demands. (para 8.30)

I keep returning to this question of living with difference because it feels like an iceberg social problem and we’re on a collision course. That doesn't mean I'm into rearranging deckchairs when I say I look forward to future events organised by the forum: I'm told current plans include seminars on art in public places; and gardens.