Neighbourhoods

Virtual city

Shelter, the housing and homelessness charity, is building its own virtual city. From early September 2007, visitors to the city will be able to buy virtual properties including hotels, shops, pubs and windmills. The money raised will help rebuild the lives of homeless and badly housed people.

(Via the National Neighbourhood Management Network).

The street context for youth violence

These are fraught times for street life UK. We've had a succession of knifings and shootings in London and elsewhere, followed most recently by the shooting of an 11 year-old in Liverpool and other driving-related shootings in the last few days.

Debate intensifies around the availability of arms, the penetration of the drugs business, the very notion of gangs, and the street context for youth violence. Some believe education is the key to a solution, or enforcement of gun laws, others refer to parental discipline and respect and the family as a cohering force.

I just turned to a piece of US research which certainly suggests a strong relationship between lack of family cohesiveness and youth violence; while struggling to identify a connection between such violence and community social capital (eg parental involvement in community organisations, or collective supervision of young people in the neighbourhood).

And the researchers note that while cohesive families do make a difference, statistically this difference can be completely wiped out by the strong influence for young people of witnessing street violence or being associated with 'deviant peers.'

I noted a couple of comments which echo conclusions made by Elijah Anderson in Code of the street: first, that

'younger children often witness the disputes of older people, which are resolved regularly through aggression and violence.'

And secondly,

'youth in disadvantaged areas often experience violence at the hands of others in the community.'

S. De Coster, K. Heimer and S. Wittrock. Neighborhood disadvantage, social capital, street context, and youth violence. Sociological quarterly, 47, 2006, 723-753.

Community engagement

'No-one wants to be ‘community engaged’ but many want to make their street a better place to live.'

Comment at a recent workshop I ran with street reps, Shipley, West Yorks.

Don't dump

To the left, an abandoned legless bed and mattress. To the right, the council's exhortation not to dump stuff.

Sad flowers

Caught without my camera again, I recently came across these flower tributes attached to the rugged gates of a waste processing plant.

Back to school: a context for intergenerational interaction

Many years ago I recall my old mum going to talk to a class at my son's school, about what life was like as a young woman during the war. I was struck at the time by how rewarding the experience seemed to be for all participants - the pupils, the teacher, and the older person herself.

More recently, a few focus groups I ran with older people highlighted a perceived problem of generations just not ‘being around’ each other, in the most informal, shoulder-rubbing mutually accommodating ways, in ways that reflect the give-and-take necessities of getting by. Younger people commonly are able to opt-out of spending time with older people. For many, the requirements of many situations that previously called for compromised and adjusted behaviour have been overcome. Indeed, in many ways we would not wish to revisit the conditions in which they flourished – conditions which might have been characterised by gender inequalities, poverty, overcrowding, and the bullying of children, for instance.

But it does appear that the freedom that many more of us now have, to choose not to be among people who are different – by age, ethnicity, socio-economic class, or whatever – presents our society with a new set of problems, the problems of cohesion, of living with difference.

So in my draft report I noted that while many older people could enliven young people’s understanding of history or geography, for example, and facilitate learning broadly, their knowledge is culturally devalued: they are too seldom invited into schools to talk about their childhood or war-time experiences, for instance.

So here's news: today's Observer reports that Ivan Lewis, the minister for older people, wants to see older people acting as role models for schoolchildren by going into classrooms to teach them about local history, British identity and values such as patience and hard work.

'I would like to see older people having their lunch at a local school, acting as role models and mentors for the kids, and then perhaps local families "adopting" older people to tackle the scourge of loneliness and isolation,' he said. 'At lunchtime in every school in the country, why couldn't older people be sitting down with pupils and sharing lunch instead of doing it at an older person's lunch club or at home?'

Putting the inevitable new labour moralism to one side, this kind of thinking is to be welcomed, if sadly overdue. Older people have had their hands up at the back for a long time without being noticed.

Existing schemes need to be publicised, evaluated, imitated. If this government has finally understood that social cohesion is not just about race, but also about age differences, it's time to pick up the pace a bit.

Locating Mark

I stand in a town square on the island of La Palma, watching the ancient geometries of spanish sociability. At the cafes, the gathering of familiar groups, the recognitions and half-friendships allowed to form gradually, the family ties extending, hugs and smiles and courtesies and enquiries, the language of touch, the sounds of time spent out-of-private.

Here is the solid framework of spanish custom - tradition in the structure of the day, infilled with informality. Near-ritual contains improvised social relations.

Laughter travels through the air without ever landing. Children pigeon-step to tenuous distance, improvise on an indistinguishable path, they play at play, their unplotted lines are faded after an instant. Oblivion must be getting clogged with traces erased, I thought.

To my left, up a side street, I can see the breath-taking mountain where my brother fell and lay for six days beyond discovery. But we who searched, with our claws in the scree, are not tempted by the illusion that we are somehow separate. So, in the vital square, there is something to be rescued from this incongruity.

One of Mark's talents was to identify the unusual, in others and around us, the foible and the curious, the mannerism and the oddity. It's not that he was exempt from the ordinary or conformity: but he could find the extraordinary in people and things, to reveal and share its value with inclusive delight. He created contexts in which people discovered that they were of interest.

He did fragments and he did panoramas. People were engaged around the insights that were possible by the way he lifted covers or just quietly pointed out. He was a connoisseur of the quirky, and champion of the oblique. Perhaps his social network was unparalleled, I don't know, he never did parallels. He met the world aslant.

About a dozen of us eventually learned how the truth had slipped from the ridge of our defiance. We came down. In this small town under an inviting old volcano, many saluted the massive humanness that was already welling up. Heat-seeking equipment is finally superfluous, the warmth is irrepressible, and ritual has framed it.

Mark took to the edge. His spirit cascades angles and tangents of affection for the oddness of us all. The wonky framework of his humanity is indestructible, built with unsentimental love and compassion, overheard among friends sitting at a table, a joke spilt while playing ball in the rain late in the evening, glimpsed perhaps in a sudden shift of light over those trees there. You'll know it when you see it.

Revised 29 September 2007

Mark Jackson Harris, 1950-2007

   

The social impacts of heat waves

Here in the UK summer forgot to show up this year, but it's reassuring nonetheless to see that the Environment Agency has published some research into The social impacts of heat waves.

In our family we joke about how my mother used to put on Factor 50 to sit in the shade, but sometimes there's no joke. As Eric Klinenberg's famous study of Chicago showed, excessive protracted heat can be deadly, especially in urban areas, and there are social dimensions (eg strength of social networks and neighbourhood ties) which impact on the chances of survival.

And as it happens, Kit Hodge was reflecting on heat in Chicago just the other day over on Neighbors Project.

The great neighborhood book

This book is a delight. (It was published a couple months ago and a well-known online book company rushed it to me in, er, less than seven weeks. As my friend Tim Owen once wrote; it's no wonder carrier pigeons went out of business).

Jay Walljasper presents a wide range of positive aspects of neighbourhood life in short, digestible, well-illustrated chapters. His range of examples is broad - one of the strengths of PPS that I've always liked is that they recognise that there is life outside the USA, and they make an effort to find out about it. And the book sparkles with enthusiastic tips and suggestions for actions, little and large, that can be taken by residents. Chapters are rounded-off with a convenient short resource list.

If you're one of those who get put off by the relentlessly upbeat cheeriness of american neighbourhood involvement, it's true this one may not be for you. But it makes a good complement to the seminal Shaping neighbourhoods guide published in 2003.

The great neighborhood book: a do-it-yourself guide to placemaking, by Jay Walljasper, published by New Society for the Project for Public Spaces.

Social capital makes a comeback?

I've pondered a few times the curious way in which the term 'social capital' (and the debate around it) seemed to disappear from publicly articulated policy in the last few years. The notions of well-being and happiness flickered on the screen, for a time, presumably in anticipation of greater resonance.

Some people of course have kept talking about s.c. anyway, not least the excellent North East Social Capital Forum, which has now organised a conference 'Social cohesion and community wellbeing: is social capital the secret ingredient?' for 28 September in Sunderland.

And here's a recent report by Marilyn Taylor for the Department for Communities and Local Government, on Neighbourhood management and social capital. The report is based on three case studies. It looks at activities which can be seen to contribute to social capital and explores ways in which their impact can be assessed. Is the term making a come-back because we can't do without it, or is this just a bit of conceptual archaeology?

'Can't complain'

Defra have included a provisional list of 'wellbeing measures' in a recently published set of sustainability indicators.

Fear of crime
  - Perceptions of anti-social behaviour
Workless households
Childhood poverty
Pensioner poverty
Education
Healthy life expectancy
  - Self-reported general health
  - Self-reported long-standing illness
Mortality rates (suicide)
  - Mortality rates for those with severe mental illness
Accessibility
Social justice
Environmental equality
Housing conditions
Satisfaction with local area
  - Trust in people in neighbourhood
  - Influencing decisions in the local area
Wellbeing
  - Overall life satisfaction
  - Satisfaction with aspects of life
  - Frequency of feelings or activities which may have a positive or negative impact on wellbeing
  - Level of participation in sport
  - Access to greenspace
  - Level of participation in cultural activities
  - Positive mental health

The document acknowledges that there is quite a bit more work to do. I'd say this list seems a bit weak on personal and social relationships - friendship, friendliness, neighbourliness, and 'sense of community.' But according to a survey summarised in the Guardian,

While over 85% of those questioned were satisfied with their relationships, less than 65% were satisfied with feeling part of a community.

Also: New Economics Foundation press release on the Happy Planet Index.

Albanian rope trick

Via Roadwitch, here's a witty example of DIY traffic calming in Tirana - two lengths of thick rope spread across the road.  And apparently it works:

Surprisingly, traffic approaching these almost always slow to a crawl while crossing them.

But for how long? I've sometimes thought you could achieve a good traffic-calming effect by placing dolls (how about life-sized ones?) in the street - perhaps half-cementing them in place, maybe with a bicycle scultpure alongside.

After a while you'd have to come up with something else - just as with rock-solid engineered speed-humps, because the SUV industry markets vehicles designed to treat them, and human beings, with disdain.

Incivilities in public space

Here's an interesting list of 'incivilities related to different users sharing public spaces' (in order of the degree of annoyance they generate) -

• Cars badly parked
• Roller-bladers or cyclists that don’t pay attention to others
• Drivers of cars who don’t respect pedestrians and cyclists
• The use of cell-phones and Walkmans in public places
• Difficulty in moving around on the pavement with prams, strollers, caddies, suitcases, etc.
• Aggression between drivers
• People who are impolite, nervous or aggressive in public places
• People who throw out bits of paper or other rubbish on the street
• People who let their dogs to leave their mess just anywhere
• Lack of planning for the elderly or the handicapped.

This comes from an article on perceived environmental annoyances in urban settings, which just bumped into me. It's based on research in France, published in the Journal of environmental psychology, March 2007. In case you're wondering what happened to noise, it crops up elsewhere in the scale of seven dimensions which the researchers came up with, of which the above represents just one.

Public space, diversity, and social interaction

Back on the theme of public space, I just found out that Demos have published a report on public space and interaction between diverse communities, by Joost Beunderman and Hannah Lownsbrough, about the extent to which public spaces can foster everyday positive interaction between people.

It's hard on a quick reading to say what this report adds to the recent glut of material on this theme, particularly following the rich stack of JRF work published last year. It looks to me like it brings together some key threads from all over the place concisely and, as we would expect from Demos, there's the customary intriguing list to provoke us:

• Exchange spaces: places where people exchange ideas, information and goods
• Productive spaces: used by people engaged in activities to grow or create goods
• Spaces of services provision: support services are run from these spaces, either by statutory or voluntary providers
• Activity spaces: where people gather for leisure, such as for play, sport or informal events
• Democratic / participative spaces: for shared decision-making or governance
• Staged spaces: ‘one-off’ special occasions where people are brought together for a specific purpose
• In-between spaces: places which are located between communities
• Virtual spaces: non-physical spaces, such as those created online by social networking sites.

The authors also note that the number of spaces which fall unambiguously into the category of ‘public’ is dwindling; and that 'many seemingly "public" spaces have implicit barriers to entry that diminish their truly public character.' The lessons put forward, however, don't feel as if they are going to transform practice:

1. be flexible in the use of space, understand the grain of people’s everyday lives and reflect it in the design of public space;
2. aim to create the setting for ‘trusted’ spaces, where people feel secure to take part in unfamiliar interactions;
3. foster positive interactions but don’t promote them: take an indirect approach to changing behaviour;
4. embrace creativity and innovation in finding new and imaginative uses for spaces that will transform interactions between people.

As so often I think the missing voices in this debate are the community and social psychologists. I'd like to learn more about how we associate value or non-value or distrust with confused or neglected spaces, especially those leftover spaces of uncertainty that attract some and repel others. I can't believe that the psychology of space doesn't have a refreshing contribution to make to the issues of cohesion and integration, towards which this report and others (eg Dines and Cattell) have been groping.

This report was prepared for the Commission for Racial Equality, referring to diversity in its sub-title, and Beunderman and Lownsbrough have woven-in some interesting points about territoriality and segregation both in general terms and with reference to their case studies. As the list of lessons above suggests, however (at least to me) we still don't have the confidence to make clear statements about the way some spaces seem to promote and some discourage interactions with people from different backgrounds.

And I do wonder if we don't have too much emphasis on the engineering of sociability, as in phrases like 'the design of public space.' As I've argued often enough, sometimes the first principle is for professionals to make sure they're not doing damage to social networks, and to respect informality as a principle. But then, me putting it like that isn't going to transform practice either.

Shared space

Living Streets are reviewing their policy on shared use, shared space and shared surfaces and have published a consultation document.

The text offers helpful distinctions (shared use is about movement; shared space is to do with place) and describes situations where there's a risk of policy coming unstuck, for example in relation to the preferences of guide dogs for blind people. Just asserting the priority of the pedestrian in the residential street, as courageously insisted by the Manual for streets, doesn't necessarily provide workable solutions for all.

Living Streets have engaged survey monkey for their questions. (Must admit I always hesitate with these because of the implication of nit-picking. Is that why it's so-called?) Deadline 30 September.