Neighbourhoods

Social mobility

The Department for Work and Pensions has just published an extensive literature review carried out by the Policy Research Institute on Factors influencing social mobility.

Alright calm down, form an orderly queue. Emerging from the detail comes the conclusion that

Trends in social mobility are remarkably resistant to policy interventions. Those in higher social classes appear to have been able to take greater advantage of the opportunities created by policy interventions and more able to use a variety of additional social advantages to maintain their relative position.

The authors go on to point to the complex effects of a range of policy measures which require more prior impact assessment. Perhaps the most useful contribution the research makes is to clarify the need for a new hierarchy of social mobility, 'based upon both labour market participation and the quality and security of that participation.'

Oh, and I don't want to seem too picky but I do wish these things were done properly... Scanning through, I found myself wondering how come 'Murphy 2006' was cited so frequently. Must be special I thought, I should know about this. So it's a shame it doesn't get mentioned in the bibliography. Scanning the bibliography briefly revealed several other mistakes, so I decided it was time to look away. Hopefully they'll take advantage of online publishing to release a corrected version, because it looks like a valuable reference source.

Playing out

Adults were three times more likely to play out when they were young, than children are today. New figures released by Play England haven't made a big noise (wrong time of year, and I fear the world is tiring slightly of this thread), but they deserve reflection:

71 per cent of adults played outside in the street or area close to their homes every day when they were children, compared to only 21 per cent of children today.

It reminds me of a favourite quotation from She was aye workin, which documents women's experiences in early 20th-century tenements in Glasgow and Edinburgh:

You were never in anyway. When you say you lived in a room-and-kitchen, your mum and dad lived in a room-and-kitchen, but you played out in the street, summer and winter, you didn't come in till bedtime.

And my own memories, if I may, are of cricket and football in the street and late kickabouts at the rec' until we couldn't see the ball any more or hunger drove us home. Before that it was 'chicken steps,' 'pom-pom one-two-three' and other street games. Lauren Lacey's lit review for NCB notes:

There has been a decrease over the past thirty years in children’s access to the streets and outdoor areas near their homes. Increasingly their independent mobility is restricted by traffic and fear, which in turn causes them to spend much of their time indoors or at organised activities. The combination of an increase in vehicles on the roads, increased parental anxiety, and restrictions on children’s mobility in the form of child curfews and anti-social behaviour orders has reduced children’s outdoor play opportunities.

The qualitative research reported included focus groups with young people aged between eight and 18. From which comes this scary piece of news:

Ten of the participants said that they never played outside on the streets and areas near their home.

That's ten out of 64 participants. And in the light of my recent note about the importance of unstructured time, this point is noteworthy:

In all the groups, children and young people said that having the freedom to choose what to do, and where to spend time, particularly in contrast to time spent in school, was very important. Even the youngest children talked about having this freedom and time away from parents and adult supervision.

The quantitative research points to a complex range of interconnected factors such as intolerant adults, traffic, lack of facilities etc. Two things occur to me. First, I see no mention of the increasingly stifling competitive educational context in which many children are expected to complete ridiculous amounts of homework in order to try to fulfil their parents' ambitions for them, or die, emotionally, in the attempt. That's a social problem if ever I saw one.

Secondly, it's reassuring to note that in drawing attention to the combined effects of the decline in child-friendly public space, the increase in traffic, and the demonisation of children and young people, Play England don't seem to have slipped into the easy option of blaming screen-based entertainment directly. My suspicion is that for many children, screen-based entertainment is the non-preferred option often chosen for them by their parents, at least initially.

There's much more material here.

Youth centres: are we allowed to ask questions?

The government's youth centres strategy, flagged up by the Guardian a couple weeks ago, has been announced.

Some questions crossed my mind.

1. Will this scheme be inheriting from ippr its unfortunate over-emphasis on structure? ('Youth clubs should be vetted to ensure they offer structure and activity within secure environments... An element of compulsion should be introduced to young people’s participation in structured, positive extra-curricular activities... The proposed activities should be vetted to ensure the activities on offer will benefit the participants'). (I haven't made this up. Suggestions that ippr are advising Putin on his youth camps have not been confirmed). And how, we should ask, do their recommendations sit alongside the decline in the amount of structured sporting activity provided at most schools?

I offered some thoughts on this previously, shaped partly by thoughts from publisher Geoffrey Mann, and I think it's pertinent to repeat the point that unstructured time with young people is absolutely crucial: as a precursor to structured activity such as sport, drama, or volunteering; as a precursor to the provision of advice, information and counselling; and as something very important in its own right, largely because of the value young people attach to the relationships that they build up with trusted non-judgmental adults who let them be themselves and who listen.

2. The strategy uses 'money sourced from unclaimed assets that lie in dormant bank accounts.' No problem with that, except to ask, is that what we've been waiting for all this time? The taxpayer can pay for a war in Iraq and a nuclear submarine, oh and there's the Olympic debt to look forward to. But wait, look, here's some loose change down the back of the Treasury settee, let's treat the kids.

3. Could officials please move away from the wretched Blair tradition of using the words 'national,' 'institute/academy' and 'leadership' in close proximity, if at all, when devising strategies? I'm prepared to be persuaded by some as-yet-unheard argument that we really really need a 'National Institute of Youth Leadership,' but it's hard to see where that will come from; meanwhile I reserve the right to be intensely sceptical ('realistic') about the combination of wasting money on new jobs for established professionals, and a continuing, apparently endless obsession with forming elites.

Apart from that I welcome the strategy, let's get on with it.

The role of street reps

'Tell your neighbours the truth as you know it!' - a jotted note for a 'job advert' for street reps, contrived during a workshop exercise I ran with a group yesterday. This was in an area of intense and complex regeneration, so perhaps it was not surprising how often the notion of truth and fact came up.

In this locality, street reps see themselves almost entirely as conduits of information, flowing in both directions, between residents and agencies. Notions like 'positive gossip' and 'squashing rumours' highlighted the importance to them of information quality. Unfortunately, the nature of the renewal issues - housing allocation, demolitions, relocation, developers' timescales, planning regulations etc - means that hard facts are hard to come by. The role therefore risks becoming a thankless one and even confrontational, with local people getting worked up about change especially when they think their homes are threatened, and the street rep becoming the lightning conductor for their disquiet.

You might therefore think there'd be something to be said for the reps getting involved in positive initiatives like border planting or barbecues or street parties or similar. The fact that they felt this to be beyond their remit suggests to me that the pool of people to whom this role will appeal is likely to be quite small - limited to the kind  of person who likes to be the first to know what's going on, ready to commit time and energy to finding out and sharing the information with others, comfortable with going to meetings and committees, and willing to put up with some irritating and irritated neighbours. And just because we all know people who fit that description, it doesn't mean there are ever likely to be enough of them. So perhaps it's worth trying to broaden perceptions of the role a little.

Meanwhile, I'm looking at how the role of street rep has evolved elsewhere, and hopefully there will be a chance to bring some of the variety together to see what's common and what's transferrable.

People, place and policy

Sheffield Hallam University has begun publication of a new free access online journal People, place and policy. What a good idea.

'This major new journal provides a forum for debate between academics, policy-makers and practitioners thinking about major societal challenges and concerned with identifying problems and suggesting solutions.'

Issue 1 includes:

• What future for social housing: Ian Cole
• Continuing dilemmas for area based urban regeneration: evidence from the New Deal for Communities Programme in England: Paul Lawless
• New Labour and evidence based policy making: 1997-2007: Peter Wells
• Understanding the idea of 'grant dependency' in the voluntary and community sector: Rob Macmillan
• The margins of public space - Muslims and social housing in England: David Cheesman.

Residential segregation and community cohesion

The recent report of the Commission on Integration and Cohesion was important partly in giving new policy emphasis to what's known as the 'isolation thesis' - the notion that residential segregation restricts social ties between minority ethnic groupings and the host population, and that these ties are important.

I've just been reading some research based on survey analysis in the Netherlands which appears to confirm the first part of the argument:

spatial segregation hampers the social inclusion of ethnic minorities, as it stands in the way of contacts between ethnic minorities and native Dutch.

Perhaps surprisingly, this conclusion was found to apply more clearly to 'non-deprived ethnic minorities' than to deprived.

van der Laan Bouma-Doff, W. Confined contact: residential segregation and ethnic bridges in the Netherlands. Urban studies, 44(5-6), May 2007, 997-1017.

_________

Update

Meanwhile, guidance published today sets out what schools in England will have to do under a new duty to promote community cohesion. The press release includes a broad definition of community cohesion which I haven't seen before.

Housing associations and neighbourhood governance

The Young Foundation and the Housing Corporation have just published Good neighbours, their report on the role of housing associations in neighbourhood governance.

The report argues that housing associations succeed in pushing forward neighbourhood governance when they:

• combine neighbourhood level partnerships and strategic involvement with the local stretagic partnership
• invest their own resources in neighbourhood governance
• value both formal and informal resident involvement.

This last is of interest to me, as another little example of the accumulating attention being paid to informal social relations at local level; and because I've been having one or two conversations lately about the overlap (or lack of) between community activists and people who are neighbourly. We don't know much about this - it seems to be assumed in policy that people who participate in local civic life tend also to be 'good (informal) neighbours,' and vice versa, but personally I don't think there's a particularly strong overlap. However, neighbourhood governance through residents' associations and similar groups could well be one arena where we see more of it emerging, if we're watching (by which I mean, if someone recognises it as a research opportunity, please).

The report also points to the need to ensure synergy between housing associations’ neighbourhood working and LSP strategies.

There's a sensitive attempt to develop a typology of HAs along four dimenions of neighbourhood working, considering the extent to which they involve local people; the extent to which the local authority dominates their perspective and actions; how broadly they view their constituency; and the degree of emphasis placed on formal partnership.

Neighbourhood governance isn't suddenly going to dissolve, and nor (unless 'the new homes agency' comes up with some radical surprises) are housing associations. So there is probably still a need for some research looking at why some HAs either don't see the value of community engagement and neighbourhood working, or struggle to overcome the barriers that they confront in attempting it.

Research that tells us things, please

It's curious how things collide sometimes. I was very recently in a seminar where two esteemed academics presented research to practitioners. Afterwards they were rightly challenged by two members of the audience to say what the lessons are for local regeneration practice: one even said that she was going to a board meeting later that evening, what should she tell her board-members?

Astonishingly the first response was that the questioner "shouldn't expect answers to questions like that from researchers." (I wrote the words down at the time, half-expecting some kind of brawl to ensue; but probably because of the status of academics and the inferiority-complex of practitioners, nothing happened). The second speaker, with ten years of research to tell us about, invited to respond to the same points, felt unable to add anything.

This little tale will re-emerge because coincidentally I've just been asked to speak at an event in Belgium about research in social work (broadly defined). It seems there is a tension - who'd have thought it? - between the incentive system under which academics provide robust, neutral, peer-reviewed bullet-proof research, and the needs of practitioners for stuff they can use. This is not to say that compromises don't happen of course: sometimes everyone benefits, including policymakers and local people.

And why should any of the rest of us expect to benefit, necessarily? Well it depends on the topic and the funding I suppose. I'm ready to hear justifications for 'pure' research in almost any field.

But in this case the issue for me is that a couple of highly-qualified researchers swallowing public money to investigate the effects of policy measures, should not have been wrong-footed by such a question but should have had it at the front of their minds from start to finish.

Name dropping

Has the C word had its day? Regen.net reports that the government has decided to retitle the brand-new Communities England. It seems that until a new name can be pulled out of some onsite hard-hat, it is being described as the 'new homes agency.'

Partly this is because Gordon Brown has swept in a new and overdue urgency to the housing sector. But I wonder if someone has also finally realised that you can't go round calling everything 'community' in social policy and expect magic to follow.

In the backyard of this is the question of the joining up of policy and what happens to the regeneration and planning parts of the equation: we were told that Communities England would 'join up the delivery of housing and regeneration'.

Previously: Enter Communities England.

Defiance

I was being shown round a struggling estate in the midlands recently, with depressing amounts of the housing boarded-up, and came across these two examples of defiance.

In a bungalow designed for older people, someone struggles to keep up standards, with net curtains and a plant-pot outside. How does it feel to have heavy steel shutters right next door and a sign saying 'Danger - Live wires'?

Here's another, perhaps more masculine, approach: the fence, the gate (even the postman is excluded), the surveillance camera, the alarm system. Next door is boarded-up. There's a hanging basket but it seems to be empty. It all says, I live here and you're not gonna drag me down with you.

Friendliness and satisfaction with neighbourhood

Ipsos MORI have some new data from New Deal for Communities programmes, which were presented by Bobby Duffy at a Shared Intelligence seminar this evening. He included an analysis that appears to suggest that the most important factor for people who expressed satisfaction with their area, was that 'people are friendly.'

The negative factors were all about disorder - gangs, vandalism, evidence of drugs etc. Pointedly, as Bobby showed, there was no reference to any aspect of 'influence' or 'involvement' (or community engagement) as a factor related to satisfaction.

The implication seems to be that if you invest a lot in helping local people to get involved, to the extent that they feel they are able to influence decisions and change, you still cannot necessarily expect them to feel more satisfied with where they live.

Whereas, it would seem, were you to invest in people being friendly to one another (and get results from that investment), you could expect that to show up in your satisfaction survey in a couple of years time. Yet another argument for more street parties and new ways of promoting neighbourliness? It does seem as if social relations and behaviour at local level are gradually coming to be perceived as being of significance.

Street why's

CABE have just published another excellent and digestible briefing, on the design and use of streets, This way to better streets, which summarises recent research into ten 'successful' streets in England and Ireland.

They range from a waterfront on a seaside town to a busy urban arterial route. This briefing, which also draws on CABE’s expertise on street design, sets out five key principles that local authorities and others involved in street design should follow – vision, commitment, integration, adaptation and coherence – if they are to achieve the same results locally.

We have to accept that CABE's duty seems to be being stylishly upbeat while promoting relentless change within a project culture - the target audience is built environment professionals, not users or other interested parties like me. I mention this because the document will be of interest and value to others, but you can be put off when it starts like this:

Maintain a strong physical and organisational vision. Solve problems within that framework, adapting structures and service delivery accordingly. Be confident as an organisation.

Hmmm, it works for them I guess.

There are some slightly afterthought-like remarks about climate change as an impending issue. But it's interesting to note the continuing gradual erosion of expert scientism in fields like this, as more attention is paid to human intangibles like users' experience of streets:

Streets can serve as important statements of intent, helping to raise aspirations and demonstrate potential standards and quality.

What's this, the morale of the economic troops? Civic leadership is trying to get up and strut like it used to. More here.

Community information

Community noticeboards still perform a function in many places, providing just the right channel for some kinds of information for certain kinds of people. Here's a nice example I picked up recently - plenty of variety with announcements of events, things to be sold, and services to offer.

Yes I know, neighbourhood online systems provide this and more, but there's still something enchanting about the scruffy visible publicness of this as a role for a local venue like a post office or newsagent. I think I've seen similar in launderettes and chemists, but not in pubs, which is curious; and only 'official' (not personal) items in libraries.

A youth centre in every neighbourhood?

If like me you found the Respect agenda and its media coverage uncomfortably closely associated with young people, it's time for a rethink. That agenda is now being subsumed under the responsibilities of the Department for children, schools and families, the 'children's ministry'.

But Polly Toynbee in today's Guardian urges us not to be sceptical, regarding this as 'one of the best changes' in the brief for Ed Balls, the minister in question.

As the emphasis shifts from punishment to prevention, expect a breath of fresh air. Balls says: "Respect goes both ways - respect by young people for others goes together with respect for them by the wider community." He talks enthusiastically about plans for a good youth centre in every neighbourhood, started up with £150m taken from defunct bank accounts.

I don't know anything about these defunct bank accounts, although I can think of another budget, a small matter of £20bn, from which a fraction might have been handy.

But I do think that a youth facility in every neighbourhood - and a 'good' one at that - is far closer to common sense than a single nuclear submarine farting around somewhere in the ocean.

Curiously enough, I was in a workshop about neighbourhood care for older people the other day, where there was discussion about funding for quality neighbourhood schemes like the one in Brighton and Hove. Asked why there seemed to be no government funding, one of the members of the scheme said with quiet irony, 'I think it's all gone to Trident.'

And if I'm sceptical about anything at the moment, it's the government's ability to include older people in its agenda. In the meantime, with regard to the future of the Respect agenda and policy for young people, I'll trust Polly's optimism.

'Do you get on alright with next door?'

Here's the aerial man fitting a digital aerial so I get the benefits of all that technology I occasionally hear about. Except he can't conveniently reach the right side of the chimney stack, you know how it is. Hence the question, which I daresay he often has to ask of residents, so he could position his ladder and walk on her roof...

He wasn't to know, and I wasn't going to mention, but his tap at the door to ask interrupted me in drafting a report section about how privacy and publicness are constantly in tension in the practice of neighbouring. And there I was pasting in a reference to an entertaining paper by Elizabeth Stokoe about 'neighbour relationships and complaints,' in which she uses discourse analysis to explore how transgressions of the norms of neighbouring often occur around the boundaries of the private home - through the wall, over the fence, out of the window, in the garden and so on.

Boarded up with flowers

Cycleways and footways

Here's some straightforward thinking about neighbourhood design, sparked by a discussion on cycle ways:

If lots of pedestrians were ignoring a footway and walking in the road amongst the traffic, I hope that most responsible designers would think "There is something wrong with the footway" - too narrow / overgrown / flooded / the mother of all potholes in it / completely off everyone's desire line / excessive waits at crossings etc, and set about fixing it. I know of course there is always the element who will ignore the source of the problem and put up guardrailing instead.

It is the same with cycle infrastructure - why would any sane individual want to ride in traffic when there is a perfectly good cycle path right next to the road ? Answer, the cycle path usually couldn't be further from "perfectly good". Compelling people to use it will only deter people from cycling, to nobody's benefit. If we want people to use cycle paths then we need to design them to fit the needs of cyclists (of all abilities), including of course, speed, comfort, convenience, attractiveness, safety, visibility etc, and not expect people to use facilities, such as pavement conversions, that are almost entirely unsuitable for the purpose.

If it is a good cycle path then people won't need telling to use it. If you have to compel people to use your cycle path then the design is rubbish and you have done nobody any favours.

From a comment made today by Alasdair Massie, Senior Engineer, Hannah-Reed Associates, on the Streets-L list.