Neighbourhoods

'We're most gregarious'

Some time ago I expressed a concern about the tendency to theorise and problematise social capital away from local everyday life. It's important to take account of shallow conversations and brief interactions that take place in the public realm. And now I've just been reading about some research into ephemeral relationships on the trams of Antwerp, carried out by Ruth Soenen.

Over eight months Soenen observed the kinds of brief relationships that spring up and disappear in this kind of public context - she notes for example how people start talking if they have to help one another avoid falling when there's a sudden stop, or if they see something unusual through the window. She records the catalytic effect of a colourful and talkative person stepping on board.

She tries to link this to notions of 'community', arguing that in-depth relationships 'don't have a priviliged status' in this respect:

'Duration doesn’t seem to be the essential marker for the experience of community... Ephemeral relationships can be a social base for the experience of community.'

Soenen goes on to argue that there are limitations in the measurement of social capital when we ignore the potential of ephemeral relationships. Her book about this study is published in Dutch only.

Thanks Jan. My title, showing my age, is from Flanders and Swan.

Previously: Segregation in public space (with reference to buses in Jerusalem).

Social capital entanglements

Here's an example of how difficult it can be to get clarity on where social capital comes from and goes to. Marilyn Taylor, in her recent assessment of the extent to which the neighbourhood management Pathfinders are generating social capital, refers to the significant growth in neighbourhood watch schemes in one of the case study areas, by way of evidence.

But neighbourhood watch organisations are based not on trust, but on distrust: hence their contribution to social capital is ambivalent. I think Marilyn's probably right, to the extent that these groups would be buzzing with bonding and linking capital. But they're probably not going to be doing much bridging: and in a lot of Pathfinder areas, bridging capital is in short supply as it is.

This is a reminder that we still lack sophistication in our analysis of social capital. Hopefully the report, which renews the focus on social capital, will stimulate more work to bring out the implicit contribution of neighbourhood management in its generation.

Previously: Social capital makes a comeback?

The welcome walkabout for new neighbours

I was walking with a friend in his neighbourhood last week when we came up with the suggestion that a walkabout for new neighbours might be a good welcoming device - kind of 'welcome-pack-cum-urban-safari'. You'd just invite your new neighbours and anyone else who fancies it, for an informal stroll round the area one evening or afternoon. Has anyone tried this or come across it?

I can see some advantages. Conversation is going to be easier and less stilted because you're on the move and there are different things to talk about. There's no reason why several folk shouldn't come along, whether they're recent or long-term residents. You can mix in a bit of history - 'there was a fire in that house once' - with useful information - 'Tom at no.4 has a ladder for borrowing' - and a few tips - 'that's a quiet pub, the other one's livelier'...

The more people, the more information gets shared: the buses are / aren't reliable; you can get penned-in by the rubbish truck on a thursday morning if you time it wrong; there's a footpath at the back of the crescent takes you through to the shops; it's safe for the kids to use that field unsupervised, and so on. I can imagine I might even learn something from someone I've lived next to for 20 years.

Yes, there's potential for misinformation and malicious gossip, but that's always there. Might be best to all be out there having the introductions and sharing the information in neighbour-space. And come back to a few glasses of something afterwards.

Ways to discourage cyclists

As someone once said, we don't ask pedestrians to lie down, why do we expect cyclists to dismount? This outstanding example in Harlow comes from Warrington Cycle Campaign's 'Facility of the Month' (well-worth back-checking for a chuckle), via the Streets list.

Thoughts on plain English

I recently received some text back from an editor with a light-hearted and well-intentioned remark about possibly needing a Plain English version.

Doubtless regular readers here, if there are any, will sympathise with his view. But it got me thinking that one day perhaps I should write a vigorous challenge to the Plain English Mafia, for their self-righteous determination to eradicate all poetry from the everyday (I mean the quotidian of course) and from Real Issues - when it’s the opposite that should be happening.

To those beyond enlightenment, language is just a tool for constructing a rational series of points. But it’s more, it’s a form of light, without which we cannot see the acceptable ambiguity of things.

Street meets cafe: the blending of third places

Sometimes the seats and tables push you right to the edge.

Sometimes they're strategically placed while a bit of cleaning is done.

And sometimes nothing less than the street will do, with a small challenge offered to car-drivers.

Amsterdam, Istanbul, La Palma.

The washing of cars

Cars aren't much good for neighbourhoods, and paved front gardens are not always good news. But of course car-washing can be one of those excellent occasions for nods of recognition or quick conversations.

So if my son has to have a car, which occasionally has to be washed, it's not a bad idea if one his local friends pops round for a chat meantime. The conversation paused only a couple of times with a hastily shut door.

Seminar about Living Library

The idea of ‘Living Library’ originated in Scandinavia. It's a scheme that gives direct access to someone else’s experience, by allowing people to ‘borrow’ someone who is an expert in their field, has significant experience to share, or is passionate about a hobby.

‘Loans’ take the form of a conversation, and can last for half an hour, a morning or an afternoon.

Living Library has been developed in a number of countries and experience seems to illustrate the contribution that library, museum and archive services can make to community cohesion. I've been working with the Community Services Group of CILIP and the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council to organise a seminar in London which will share experiences from Australia and Belgium.

Among the questions we hope to explore are:

What ways can be found to link the topic ‘borrowed’ with existing, more permanent, resources?

Should Living Library be mainstreamed?

Is the MLA sector the appropriate place for such initiatives?

Here's the line-up:

Chair: Catherine Max, Head of Policy Development, MLA

Speakers:

Martin Field, Director, Richmond-Tweed Regional Library, New South Wales, Australia

Katleen Van der Straeten, Jeugd Rode Kruis, Belgium

Helen Carpenter, Project Co-ordinator, Welcome To Your Library

Cost: £45 including coffee/tea (CSG members £40).

Blurb and booking form. The pic above is taken from Lismore's Living Library, New South Wales.

Who is a neighbour to inquire?

I've been tinkering with definitions lately and trying to articulate the view that it is recognition, and not the content of interactions, which is central to neighbouring. Now by chance I rediscover this in Patrick White's wonderful novel The tree of man as Stan Parker reaches old age:

'although that smile was somewhat abstracted, everybody read it as a sign of contentment and amiability. He had acquired a reputation for being a good-natured old cove, and who is a neighbour to inquire beyond the mechanics of the face into the states of soul?'

'Wrong turning, dead end'

I see the Howard League has published a work by a police officer which is critical of ASBOs. The book, by Chief Superintendent Neil Wain, argues that:

• ASBOs fail to prevent further crime and anti-social behaviour among offenders
• Leaflets naming and shaming those who receive ASBOs could endanger vulnerable children by publishing their contact details, while also risking vigilante attacks, cases of mistaken identity and turning offenders into the resident scapegoat
• Many ASBO conditions actually encourage crime by preventing offenders from getting help from their families or going to work in a normal day job
• Offenders receiving ASBOs are given little or no support to get back on the straight and narrow.

As I wrote about a year ago, it's very questionable whether the government's anti-social behaviour policy, central to the Respect Agenda, is contributing to the promotion of respect.

It's interesting that the author works under the aegis of Greater Manchester Police Force, famous for its ASBO appetite. A year or two ago I heard a presentation about 'respect' from a representative of that city's coordinated response to anti-social behaviour and it gave me the creeps.

Street games

Having to prepare a few words to speak tomorrow in memory of my bro, up pops my other bro to talk about street games when we were kids.

Like the slow bike race. All the kids in the street had bikes, we formed a disorderly cavalry and it was the last one across the line who had not put their foot down or fallen off. We played bicycle football too.

And Squashed Tomatoes. We can't recall the rules but it was an elaborate variation on a 'Simon Says' or 'What's the time Mr Wolf?' type game, if I have that right, in which someone calls out instructions and people advance variously towards a line.

One of the calls required you to lie down in the road, then assuming a new (upright) position at a point level with the top of your head. I can't help suspecting that this condition was introduced by, and to favour, the taller members of the group.

But anyway, it tells you something about expectations of traffic in those days. From time to time the cry 'car!' would go up and we scattered. And it's true, we were out there most of the time, summer and winter.

Voluntary and amateur arts

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport has commissioned a new study of the voluntary and amateur arts sector, with Arts Council England.

'Nearly 70 per cent of people in England attend and participate in a huge range of arts and craft activities from book clubs to amateur orchestras and from lace-making to ballet and ballroom dancing.'

'As well as trying to provide a national picture of the sector, the study will explore what prompts people to take part (and what barriers there are) and the impact voluntary arts groups can have in their communities. A second strand to the research will seek to determine the contribution Adult and Community Learning makes to public engagement with and participation in the arts.'

Press release.

The washing of hair

Here's something told me by a community worker recently. She went with some local women from a low-income neighbourhood on a residential trip, where some of them encountered shampoo for the first time and didn't know what it was, or what to do with it. They always use washing-up liquid.

I've never before considered shampoo in terms of cultural capital, although I've reflected often enough on the role of hairdressers in social capital. It did strike me that there may be many 'heavy-users' of shampoo who don't know what washing up liquid is.

Move along now please

To continue the themes of officialdom and the policing of the public realm... there's an article in the latest Living Streets newsletter (subscribe) in which outgoing Chief Exec Tom Franklin describes his day shadowing a traffic warden (unh, make that 'parking attendant') (which sounds like someone who guides you into a space within sight of the kerb).

The article reminds us how vilified these public servants are; and it made me wonder to what extent their work might get the support of those who leapt so vehemently to defend the Merseyrail official who brought a rail traveller to court for putting her feet on a seat.

Tom talks about the 'total disrespect' and abuse some motorists showed for the attendant, but also the visible effectiveness of their presence. He offers three suggestions. First, that their role could be re-cast to include reporting of street issues such as abandoned vehicles or street lights out of order; and 'a bigger role in enforcing decent behaviour on our streets.'

It seems to me this would put them more firmly into the 'extended family of policing': and it might also send a signal that motoring is only one of a number of overlapping sites of activity where the public realm needs to be monitored, as opposed to being such a dominant site that it needs its own force in addition to the police.

Secondly, he calls for more backing to enable attendants to do their job without intimidation. And thirdly - with characteristic lateral thinking - Tom suggests that on a given day all parking attendants should be given the day off.

'It should be publicised widely - the chaos that would ensue might convince people of the vital role that parking attendants perform, and then perhaps they might be allowed to get on with their job.'

(Unfortunately it might not have that effect).

It's sad that Tom is himself moving along - to head up the Ramblers Association - but I wish him well in that role and I expect his name will crop up on this blog in due course.

And in a similar vein it's an appropriate moment to pay tribute to Bill Sticker, now retired as a parking enforcement officer and travelling in Canada, but still blogging and Walking the streets.

Incivility in the dock

A young woman had to go to court the other day for putting her flip-flopped feet on a train seat. The Guardian reports.

There was a similar case some months ago, when a bloke was taken to court for 'behaving in a disorderly, indecent or offensive manner that interfered with the comfort or convenience of a person on the railway' - (yup, putting his feet on a seat). In this report, there is also mention of an attempt to prosecute someone for putting their feet on a station bench.

Personally I think Merseyrail deserve all the formalised contempt that can be mustered: they got a mild bollocking from the court for being silly, but don't seem to have heard yet that zero-tolerance doesn't work, nor thought it through.

And reading through the Guardian readers' comments is salutary for revealing the number of vehement, savagely punitive supporters the rail company seems to have found. Apart from the occasional alternative view ('What a bunch of secret fascists you lot are') the perpetrator of this not-very-hideous crime gets no mercy from the baying pack.

And I know, from having visited some of these comment blogs before, that you tend to get these kinds of aggressive shoot-from-the-hip, bring-back-the-birch reactions - even from readers of a newspaper generally regarded as liberal or even 'left-leaning'.

What hope is there for respect in the neighbourhood? If a kid plays ball near a 'No ball games' sign, better be ready for the righteous fury. I'm reduced to a state of gloom about attitudes towards behaviour and institutionalised discipline in this country. Think I'll go out and smile at somebody.

Block Parties 101

Neighbors Project in Chicago has just published a short guide to organising block parties. (Nb some of the online content is not suitable for vegetarians).

Compare Chris Gittins's street party content.

Keep your distance

Ooh look - a few years old, but maybe still of interest, an article what I wrote for the Journal of community work and development on face-to-face and online 'community' has been made available online.

Localism. Worth fighting for?

Over in the Demos greenhouse, Simon Parker suggests that 'the war for localism is won, sort of.' Given that his post is titled 'Fighting for the soul of localism,' you're going to wonder about the metaphor of belligerence.

Was it really just public school boys scrapping in the Westminster playground? Another, perhaps more historical perspective, might see localism as a near-inevitable consequence of a number of other forces. While waiting for that to become clearer (and let's see if localism works shall we?) - I don't recall anything worthy of being called even a sleeves-rolled-up skirmish; but I do recall lots of misgivings about the impact on local people of some of the measures (eg).

Well ok, if the 'soul of localism' wasn't really fought for by the infantry of residents' groups and tenants associations and so on, would they fight to defend it if it was threatened?