Neighbourhoods

Family neighbours

Speaking about City survivors the other day, Anne Power was emphatic about the need for policy to help extended families stay together on estates or in the neighbourhood.

Her remarks are unlikely to generate much passionate opposition, but they did remind me of the Australian research which questions family support by comparison with friendship networks, in terms of the benefits for older people.

I don't think there's a conflict there, necessarily. The needs that parents of young children have are often acute and persistent, and may be best satisfied by other family members. For older people, family neighbours can play an invaluable role in informal support: in one study, 83% of the informal helpers named were family members.

Meanwhile, to my surprise, according to a recent BBC/ICM poll,

'Almost a quarter of people see the parent they are emotionally closest to every day, but 45% say they see them once a week or less.' (Emphasis added)

It could be that as local friendship networks seem to have weakened (if indeed they have), it places more demands on extended family and so they increase in significance for those that have them.

Community buildings

Latest from the Every Action Counts programme - Your community building counts: helping community buildings lead the way to a better future.

This guide outlines ways in which the use and management of community buildings can be seen as part of sustainable development, taking account of energy use, travel, shopping and caring for the local environment.

Families in cities

I'll come straight out and express a sense of mild jealousy here. Anne Power and colleagues at LSE ran a well-funded programme of work to generate seven years of interview data with parents in cities. That's a lot of material reflecting what it's like bringing up children in contemporary urban neighbourhoods. One result is City survivors, just published by Policy Press and launched last week.

I'll also readily admit to not being a fan of Anne's previous Jigsaw cities, which I found a real slog to read, with all the evidence of being hurriedly slopped together and crying out for an editor's attention. City survivors however looks much more significant, if only because the connection between the expressed experience of local people and the policy assertions is clear.

The edited material is interwoven with analysis and generalised reflections on the policy context. The book is packed, and punches are not pulled: a key message for regeneration is that 'neglect ends in disorder.' At the launch Anne said that regeneration needs to be brokered and 'any withdrawal of effort immediately results in a deterioration of conditions.' How do we explain, for example, how this sort of thing comes about:

'They've pulled all the swings down. The kids have nowhere to play. We tried to fight the council to stop them taking our play area away but they sold it to private buyers.'

(I don't know. Previously, eg, A crisis of community presence).

Here are some of the points I got from Anne's wide-ranging presentation:

• Community involvement really makes a difference: 'families are much happier if they're involved. Those who are involved, loosely or seriously, feel different to those who aren't.' (So why is there still so little investment in community development?)
• Keeping extended families together on estates or in the neighbourhood can make a huge difference to parents' ability to cope: this means housing allocation policies that prioritise relatives.
• People do notice when agencies attempt outreach.
• Establishing friendly rapport with neighbours is a significant factor in helping families survive. The usual constraints are apparent - precarious, unstable community relations with too many strangers.

And I noted Lynsey Hanley's striking observation in her comments, referring to the experience of neighbourhoods where there is constant building, constant traffic, and no sense of place:

'You have to be massively adaptable in order to get beyond just existing, in marginalised places.'

The overall message is that families are abandoning cities in large numbers, because they are such unsympathetic environments for young children, and this is bad news all round. The a rgument is made that families can regenerate cities if conditions are right:

• Neighbourhood conditions have a direct impact on family survival.
• Families can counter wider problems by creating support networks.
• Cities can help families by creating more locally based structures to deliver sensitive local services.

One further thought, provoked by various comments made by academics at the launch: why is the idea of talking to local people about their experiences seen as such an eccentric way of finding things out? You'd have thought, by the way people were talking, that some kind of methodological breakthrough had been achieved. More interest among funders to support this kind of work would be welcomed (he pleaded naively)...

I'd link to the publication page, but Policy Press haven't got their act together yet.* Get hold of it anyway.

* Update: it's here.

Gentrification

A shame if my last post seemed dismissive of people who are probably crying out for their community to be gated, but the local authority won't let them do it.

Well stand well back, cos gentrification, according to the blurb for this new book, has gone from being a small scale urban process pioneered by a liberal new middle class to being mass-produced as a ‘gentrification blueprint’ around the world.

'The process is shown to be at the centre of neo-liberal urban policy world-wide.'

Meanwhile Kit Hodge, who's been monitoring this theme for some time over on the Neighbors Project blog, offers Seven rules for talking about gentrification.

Property protected

I came across a string of these signs while running through an affluent neighbourhood the other day.

For some reason at first I thought it said: 'We're rich. Go away.' But then I saw the reassuring use of the C word.

Neighbourly baking

I took my neighbour to the health centre this morning and brought him back, so I had a fair idea the Doyenne of Neighbouring would be tappin' at the door some time today.

And here she is now: 'I'm just making a christmas pudding, will I do you one while I'm at it?' As an endurance athlete I'm not beyond consuming a modest-size christmas pudding in a single calorie-binge, so I managed to say yes please.

Local trade

More evidence of backlash - a unanimous decision by North Norfolk District Council to refuse a Tesco superstore that would have 'wiped out local shops.'

According to Planning resource a Tesco spokesman said: 'We want to secure the future of Sheringham and its high street.'

You bet they did.

Everyone's welcome

From a cracking new resource on migration just launched by our excellent National Archives.

Collective responsibility for children and young people

There is a perception among adults that the community is currently fractured and that it needs to unite and recognise the collective responsibility of all for the children and young people in their midst.

People see the role of the community as providing guidance and support for young people, but also spending time with them and providing activities for them to do. This suggests the potential for the community to get more actively involved with young people, giving time, skills and resources to promote happy, healthy and safe childhoods.

This comes from a lengthy consultation report published today by the Department for Children, Schools and Families, which summarises 'knowledge on the wellbeing of children and young people in England today' and will form the basis of the forthcoming Children's Plan, due next month. It incorporates the views of children, young people and adults.

It's unfortunate how a statement like this one (especially the last sentence quoted) suggests the resilient notion that there is something called 'the community' which government still feels it can exhort or conjure up for a given cause.

Off-hand I can think of a few points to be taken into account before the problem can be cured by community involvement; such as -

• the extent to which informal social control has been designed-out and people encouraged not to occupy their own neighbourhoods, and to drive all over other people's;
• the difference in scale between the mental map of 'community' held by an official (local government or similar agency) and the neighbourhood as perceived by even moderately localised residents;
• the contribution made by policy over the past ten years towards a culture which vilifies young people (the Blunkett legacy).

But meanwhile, it's reassuring that the importance of informal social control emerges when government starts talking to people and listening to what they say. Press release.

Criminalising kids: questions about risk and respect

It may be that the story about the delinquent Brooklyn sidewalk-chalker could be trumped in England. According to this BBC report yesterday, children in this country have been arrested (unh, arrested?) for:

• drawing hopscotch on a pavement
• taking a slice of cucumber from a sandwich and throwing it at another child, and
• damaging a tree while building a den.

Not perhaps in the same league, but we've also had the heinous disgrace of flip-flopped feet on seats.

Meanwhile, the risk aversion debate has received significant renewed momentum from publicity following Tim Gill's No fear, published recently. (Various links currently on the Gulbenkian home page). And some energy is being coordinated in the US with Playborhood.

Questioning risk aversion was a rumbling cross-departmental sub-theme in Whitehall in the early years of the Labour administration at the end of the nineties, but it didn't stick. Maybe the urge to control took over, and anyway the culture is highly resilient, resisting some passionate challenging, eg What are we scared of? And yes I do accept the importance of recognising, as the Health and Safety Executive put it, that the term is shorthand for 'excessive risk aversion.'

It seems as if there are two trends in tension here, with two related themes - risk and respect - but I'm not clear how they are related. On the one hand we have attempts to program most risk out of children's lives (which is profoundly disempowering, and means that many seem to grow up expecting and accepting disempowerment as what society does to them). But measured exploration of risk can be stimulating and creates bonds: games and sport, still occasionally practised in some quarters (although very much subject to risk averse policies) offer semi-formal arenas in which such exploration can be played out.

And on the other hand, we have created neighbourhood contexts in which learning the give-and-take and cheek-by-jowl rubbing-along of socialising, getting along with people you might not necessarily choose as friends, is structurally minimised. And we have overseen a degree of family disintegration so that many young people can avoid having more than the most minimal contact with older people, and the separated generations are often bewildered by each other. Result, a crisis of respect. On its own, transforming the design of neighbourhoods won't cure this combination, it seems to be a deep cultural problem.

I was having a conversation the other day with a teacher who was telling me how depressing it is to have to try and deal with young people when they relentlessly swear and spit (in the classroom or corridor, this is, when in conversation with a teacher). It's unambiguously disrespectful behaviour, which must have some basis in the sense of not being cared about or valued.

How does that square with a society which appears obsessed with protecting its children from risk? I think it's partly because systematised risk aversion is in conflict with notions of genuine caring, it reflects self-interested detachment that says - children are too much trouble to be bothered about, we must constrain what they do. Bollocks.

The teacher and I reflected on the fact that we both know plenty of remarkable young people - far more mature and socially-supportive than most of us were in my day, inspiring young people who are a privilege to be with. And we were left wondering whether there is some kind of divide developing, between those who have had the chance to explore their own potential and responsible social relations, and those who haven't. I suspect I'll be revisiting this theme.

Consulting older people

On the question of consultation with older people, to paraphrase Gandhi, I think it would be a good idea. I've just found out about some interesting work that Urban Buzz funded in the London Borough of Lewisham as part of the Thames gateway development, which resulted in the publication of a toolkit and guidelines for consultation with older people, prepared by The Centre for Urban and Community Research at Goldsmiths.

It's a thorough and welcome document and appears to try and cover everything about the process they went through, which included field trips and mental maps of the neighbourhoods. It's important because the sense that many older people remain inexcusably excluded from consultative processes is widespread. But some of the tone leaves me a wee bit bothered. Like this:

'It is important that you present your project in a way that makes it relevant to them.'

Radical stuff eh? There's more.

'Incorporate older people’s knowledge in the planning process, by consulting them if an area is going to be changed. Make use of their old photos, listen to them talk about the history about the spaces.'

'Free lunches and refreshments should be provided to offer something for their time and effort.'

So long as the points get made, what am I bothered about? Well, I'm uncomfortable thinking that I live in a society where it's really necessary to make such points. It implies that there are people charged with 'consultation' for whom such things are not fundamentally obvious. But maybe the authors are right, maybe it does have to be pointed out. Many people are emerging from an embedded non-consultative authoritative culture and this is strange stuff for them. <Shudder>

If I were being picky, and it's not unheard-of, I'd have added a section suggesting that people doing consultation didn't feel the need constantly to refer to one another as Dr, Professor, 'professional' or 'expert.' The entire document is suffused with a sense of the implied superior status of such people, and of councillors, over older residents. It reinforces my desire to keep pushing for a neighbourhood-mapping process designed by older people themselves.

Online game about being a refugee

UNHCR has just launched the English language version of an online game created to increase students' awareness and knowledge about refugee situations, by putting them in the position of a refugee.

In Against all odds, the player is interrogated, hears the sound of guards' footsteps approaching, and senses the urgency in finding safety while racing against the clock.

Press release. Via Welcome to Your Library digest.

Kicking up a stink

So how do we define 'nuisance'? Homeowners in the vicinity of Hinton Organics near Keynsham, Somerset, say their lives are being made a misery by the stench of rotting waste from one of the UK's biggest composting recyclers.

Residents successfully applied for an interim injunction which means the company will have to abide by a waste management licence designed 'to curb the smell'. I'm really not sure how you do that. I wonder if Hinton Organics will end up using chemicals to neutralise it: that would be a shame.

I'd quite like to be there, but not downwind, when the High Court judge pays a visit to the site to sample the air quality.

Rumours that King Abdullah of Jordan has been invited to give evidence are unconfirmed.

From: Planning daily.

Out in the open

Many neighbourhoods in England experience occasional or persistent tensions due to the lack of adequate and appropriate sites for Romany gypsies and Irish travellers.

This year's Building and Social Housing Foundation consultation report is on the theme of providing accommodation, promoting understanding and recognising the rights of gypsies and travellers. In 2006, it says here, 21 per cent of gypsies and travellers had no legal place to park their caravan. (Although we're also told that estimates of the numbers of gypsies and travellers in Britain vary widely, with nothing like a definitive answer; so take that as 21% of roughly 100%).

Out in the open - full text download and summary available .

Interwoven freedom

One of the most striking features in the long anti-slavery campaign was the role of women and the degree to which this involved local networks and highly organised community action (Adam Hochschild, Bury the chains). Local responses to global issues are nothing new.

Now here's an attractive exhibition put together by English Heritage and the Sparkbrook African and Caribbean Women’s Development Initiative (SCAWDI) in the west Midlands.

Interwoven Freedom enabled a group of women to explore slavery and abolition in Birmingham. They visited archives, exhibitions and historic sites with links to slavery and worked with creative writer Ava Ming and textile artist Karina Thompson. Taking inspiration from Birmingham’s abolitionist women and Black enslaved women who campaigned for the end of slavery – they have interwoven their own personal response with the story of freedom.

Drawing on the tradition of abolitionist women who created and distributed workbags filled with anti-slavery manifestos, the participants have written their own manifestos which mix historical facts with vivid fictional stories and powerful poems. They have made workbags from fair trade cotton and African cloth. Woven into their bags are integrated references from their past and personal histories, images of slave ships, photographs and Jamaican and Ghanaian flags.

Various locations in the west Midlands until 19 May 2008.

Young people and social networks

Recent JRF report shows both benefits and disbenefits in local social networks.

Place identity can be a source of strength, but it also appeals to the parochial.

Local connections can give some young people strong advantages in the labour market, with family and friends providing valuable support; while wider social and spatial horizons can expand the range of opportunities young people consider and improve their prospects. In more peripheral areas their choices may remain constrained because of limited employment opportunities.

The authors conclude that:

• policy needs to recognise that local, place-based social networks affect aspirations and behaviour;
• it is important that young people are aware of and can access opportunities beyond their immediate neighbourhood.

Petanque alone

What an opportunity spoiled by bad photography. Sorry.

Halloween, bonfires and diversity

Halloween last week was a disappointment for me. Having invested in the usual disgusting sweets as I thought was my duty, no-one called. Did I give the wrong stuff last year? Did I scare them with my smile? Are they getting picky?

So it's bonfire night, no neighbourhood responsiblities, I can reflect on the way these occasions can get hijacked and, er, inflamed, in unpleasant ways; most depressingly, in 2003 when an effigy of a gypsy caravan was burned (see below). And it seems a good time to note down a couple of interesting articles in a detached sort of way.

Unmasking racism: halloween costuming and engagement of the racial other / Jennifer C. Mueller, Danielle Dirks and Leslie Houts Picca, Qualitative sociology, published online: 11 April 2007.

Abstract

We explore Halloween as a uniquely constructive space for engaging racial concepts and identities, particularly through ritual costuming. Data were collected using 663 participant observation journals from college students across the U.S. During Halloween, many individuals actively engage the racial other in costuming across racial/ethnic lines. Although some recognize the significance of racial stereotyping in costuming, it is often dismissed as being part of the holiday's social context. We explore the costumes worn, as well as responses to cross-racial costuming, analyzing how “playing” with racialized concepts and making light of them in the “safe” context of Halloween allows students to trivialize and reproduce racial stereotypes while supporting the racial hierarchy. We argue that unlike traditional “rituals of rebellion,” wherein subjugated groups temporarily assume powerful roles, whites contemporarily engage Halloween as a sort of “ritual of rebellion” in response to the seemingly restrictive social context of the post-Civil Rights era, and in a way that ultimately reinforces white dominance.

Burning issues: whiteness, rurality and the politics of difference / Sarah L. Holloway, Geoforum 38 (2007) 7–20.

(This is a cracker, I may have refered to it before but make no apology for referring to it again).

Extract from abstract

This paper examines how the concepts of race, racism and rurality are deployed by different commentators as they debate the place of one specific minority ethnic group in the English countryside. The route taken into this is a consideration of print-media reporting of events in Firle, Sussex, where, in 2003, some white rural residents symbolically purged their village of Gypsy-Travellers by burning a mock caravan complete with effigies at their annual bonfire celebrations.

'If it can be washed away, it's not graffiti. But'

Ian Bertram over on Panchromatica picked up this story of everyday vandalism: a 6-year-old girl from Brooklyn is facing a $300 fine for drawing a picture with chalk.

Obviously not all of Natalie Shea’s 10th Street neighbors thought her blue chalk splotch was her best work — a neighbor called 311 to report the “graffiti,” and the Department of Sanitation quickly sent a standard letter to Natalie’s mom, Jen Pepperman.

As Ian says, 'what sort of idiot reports a 6 year old for chalking on the pavement?' - that is indeed the scary part.

Commenting, a spokesman for the NYPD said 'If it can be washed away, it's not graffiti, but it still could be criminal mischief.' My suggestion would be for a mass sidewalk-chalking day, with a major focus on the area around city hall. The city could be invited to sponsor the day, which would help pay for all the chalk. With a little sleight on the grant application it should be possible to make a $300 profit on the occasion, covering Natalie's costs. I hope she doesn't have a criminal record, but it wouldn't entirely surprise any of us anymore.

The story was followed up by the arrest (yes, arrest) in New York of a more mature street artist, again for chalking the sidewalk. Tsk, do I begin to sense a civilisation in decline?

I wonder what Banksy thinks about it?

CDX annual conference

Who cares about neighbourhoods?

Community Development Xchange annual conference organised in partnership with Tenants Participation Advisory Service.

19-20 November 2007, Harben House, Milton Keynes

Details.