Neighbourhoods

Investing in playgrounds, investing in streets

I came across these two metal ghosts, looming from the echoes of playing children, defying the overgrowth. Then I trotted home and continued reading Tim Gill's No fear.

He recalls the execrable 1980s tv programme That's Life, which ran an over-excited campaign for safety surfacing on children's playgrounds. One consequence was that the costs for authorities to provide facilities rose steeply: combined with the fear of litigation, this gave rise to a reduction in funding for other measures, and then a reduction in the provision of play areas.

The rubber surfacing most commonly used costs up to 40 per cent of the total capital cost of a playground. This means that, over the decade or so following the That's Life playground safety campaign, perhaps £200 to £300 million has been spent on a measure that, on the most optimistic assumptions, would have saved the lives of one or two children.

The same period saw perhaps 1,300 child pedestrians killed and around 40,000 seriously injured, most on streets close to their homes. Cost-benefit analyses show that residential traffic calming is at least ten times as effective in reducing accident numbers as playground safety resurfacing... The same sum would beyond doubt have saved far more lives if it had been invested in streets rather than playgrounds. Simply providing more playgrounds may have saved more lives, since it would have reduced children's travel distances and hence the likelihood of being run over.

Claims over neutral territory

I took this hurried image with my phone when I was in Antwerp city centre. The building is a large school which apparently has pupils from about 80 different nationalities. It's adjacent to an area with street prostitution.

The sign says 'no peeing against our classrooms.'

Footnote on pavement chalking

Following a reference in Tim Gill's No fear, which I mentioned recently, I came across another couple of cases in the bizarre outbreak of criminal chalking. First this one (if you're of a nervous disposition, look away now):

Two teenage girls were fined £80 for drawing chalk pictures on a pavement in Bangor, Gwynedd. Hazel Mercer and her friend Charli Lyth, both 16, were given fixed penalties when a police officer saw them drawing hearts and rainbows.

(BBC Wales, 29 April 2007)

And then this one -

A group of youngsters has fallen foul of the law for playing hopscotch. West Midlands Police community support officers asked parents in Spring Street in Halesowen to remove chalk markings after complaints about them.

(BBC West Midlands, 31 July 2006)

In his book Tim Gill quotes the Chief Constable of West Midlands Police talking about complaints made to his force:

'The interesting thing to me is when you ask them what they are worried about, it's not young people committing crime or young people committing criminal damage... it is actually young people just being there. Young people simply existing is now a major source of concern for people.'

From private to civic to 'community'

The government has published a vision for 'a new generation of open, accessible, inviting and environmentally friendly fire stations where communities can come together socially and crucially hear key fire safety advice.'

Since I'm doing quite a bit of work with public libraries as local resources, I found myself reading the press release substituting 'library' for 'fire station'. The parallels are curious.

The design of many fire stations - often intimidating and closed-looking Victorian buildings - does not make them naturally inviting places for the public.

Stations can also play a greater role in promoting good community relations by opening up to them...

The guide also suggests new uses for fire stations that would encourage the local community to visit their local fire station and thus help in engaging with the community to spread fire safety messages. The suggestions are:

• hosting community events and services;
• on site cash points;
• providing car parks in rural areas; and
• providing space for art displays.

Some years ago I ran a workshop for the Library Association London branch, before which I put images on the wall and asked participants to identify the theme. The pictures included a doctor, a 19th century fire engine, a lifeboat, and a community-based online centre (I can't recall the others).

This was about perceptions of public ownership. People forget that until my parents' generation, medical care was not publicly funded in the UK. The lifeboat service has never been publicly funded, and the fire service developed as a private initiative of insurance companies.

So it's interesting to think about the transformation of fire stations from private through civic to 'community' buildings. Is this pattern comparable to that of libraries? If so, what comes after 'community'? Personal?

Eat local stuff and meet people

The beeb covers an experiment with eating locally-produced food in Scotland, including a week's worth of the Fife Diet.

The most difficult thing has been preparation time when cooking from raw ingredients. The most rewarding has been meeting people, and discovering what's available from your region.

One implication that I particularly like, when this becomes more commonplace, is that we'll all recover a stronger sense of the changing seasons. For people whose only experience of the outdoors is the few metres between front door and car, and whose diet comes out of supermarket bags, that could be a shock worth watching.

Refugees and libraries

The Welcome to Your Library project, which worked on connecting public libraries and refugee communities in five areas around England, has come to an end.

The evaluation is primarily oriented towards library services, although it also points to some interesting case study material. Most strikingly, it suggests that, even in this outstanding project, the libraries' contribution to community cohesion cannot be described as embedded practice. The researchers note:

• a pattern of delivery where services predominantly continue to be delivered “to” refugees rather than “with” them
• conclusions from the refugee environmental testing exercise, which reported there were no visible signs of refugees being an integrated part of the overall library user group
• rare examples of the project advocating on behalf of refugees and raising awareness in the wider community of refugees’ contribution to the community.

This comes across as negative but I think it's a clear indication of just how long some of this stuff takes. As we'd expect from the library sector, achievements in more 'internally focussed' themes, such as reading and learning, were more consistently embedded into practice.

One hopes the momentum from practical initiatives such as conversation clubs, when extended from refugee communities to the general public, will cause a significant benefit spillover. As usual, the message is 'we're not done yet.'

Pavement chalking epidemic?

I've just been reading some interview and survey material from a range of local residents who attended street parties, as part of a wee project I'm doing with Chris Gittins at Streets Alive. Let me share this extract with you:

How do you get on with younger and/or older people in the street generally?

Fine. Except someone in the street called the police about our 2 young children drawing with chalks on pavement outside our home. We actively want our kids to play in the street and were shocked and depressed by that attitude.

This took place in a city in England. I have no more information and don't know if it took place during a street party or not. But it's an eerie echo of the story of the Brooklyn sidewalk-chalker who received an official fine - indeed it may pre-date that story. What next?

In both instances, I'd have hoped the officials would have taken the time to make a point to the complainant, because it's in the authorities' interest that civil relations prevail, and it can't be hard to do that when there is no serious threat to anyone or to any property.

I can remember when I was a kid, with siblings or friends, riding small bicycles up one end of our street invariably caused one particular older woman to step out her door and tell us to go away. Presumably, she wanted that portion of the planet over which she had some control to remain just so. Is that what drives this uncivil anti-neighbour nastiness? The poverty of generosity under which she existed must have been wretched.

The idea that civil relations with the people who live around us is universally regarded as desirable seems to be simply false.

Sense of place: designing-in neighbourliness?

With all this housebuilding going on and planned, questions are raised more often about the quality of residential design and layout. Even getting that right isn't going to guarantee the promotion of neighbourly relations, but you'd have thought it was an important start.

CABE is on the case, and has just published research into the views of residents of new homes completed within the last three years. The study blends two surveys, one involving 643 residents living in 33 new developments; the other covering 704 residents at six case study developments.

A key point is that being highly satisfied with the home itself does not necessarily imply a high degree of satisfaction with the wider development, or vice versa. People may express satisfaction with their new home (and often are reluctant to acknowledge problems with it), but very significant numbers of respondents expressed negative views about their neighbourhoods.

For example, although 82% of residents thought that their development was attractive and 69%found it had a pleasant road layout:

• 40% thought that there was not enough public open space in the development
• 48% thought there was not enough play space
• 34% thought the layout of their development was unsafe for children to walk, cycle or play in the streets, and
• 45% say that they live in the kind of neighbourhood where people mostly go their own way rather than doing things together and trying to help each other.

Well, the sense of belonging on new estates is unpredictable. The received wisdom is that you usually get an initial high level of interaction because people move in at around the same time, have similar issues, and may be at a similar stage in the life-cycle (especially parents of young children). Car-based lifestyles make a massive difference of course; and after a few years anyway this sense of community often dissipates or settles back down.

But in a recent conversation at a fast-expanding housing association I was told that lack of social integration on several new developments was giving rise to a lot of problems.  I suspect social landlords are generally well aware that it won't do to lay all the blame on the designers or the developers.

Meanwhile, CABE says:

This is not about a failure of national government policy: there is a perfectly good policy framework in place, which puts a strong emphasis on the quality of residential design and layout. It is housebuilders and planners who need to take more responsibility for creating a sense of place within new housing developments.

But how? I think there is some confusion about expectations of neighbouring. First, a general disinterest among people looking for housing (and I have only contempt for the stream of television programmes encouraging people to buy, make profit and move on without a moment's reflection on the social context of the home). Cultural expectations of local social interaction tend to be low: for the prospective resident they're a matter of chance not choice. Neighbourly relations are an afterthought.

And secondly, perhaps there is sometimes a naive assumption among developers and planners that people are motivated to be neighbourly, as if it just needs an appropriately-designed environment and we all live happily ever after. There's a whole stack of sociological issues waiting to tease us for this approach.

I've always said that since it seems possible to design-out neighbourliness, it ought to be possible to design it in. But that is certainly simplistic. Perhaps we need a study of evident neighbourliness in a poorly-designed environment, and of low levels of interaction in a development described as well-designed, in order to understand a bit more.

The right to an impermeable front garden?

One of the issues that comes up consistently in consultation and mediation at local level, is the rights of the householder vs wider impact. Noise remains the classic theme of course, but other issues emerge from time to time such as Christmas lighting, car parking, trampolines in the garden, smelly garbage and so on.

My little theory is that the age when the rights of the householder seemed to trump most other rights could be coming to an end, because its ambiguities and contradictions are becoming more frequently exposed, and awareness of collective environmental impact is growing fast. Here's an instance now:

Householders should no longer have the automatic right to lay impermeable surfaces in gardens or driveways according to an independent review of the summer's flooding.

The measure is one of a number of proposals for mitigating surface flooding outlined by Sir Michael Pitt in his interim report on managing flood risk.

The report said that in urban areas, permitted development rights allowing private property owners to carry out works such as paving driveways can prevent the drainage of surface water, which accounts for two-thirds of all flood waters. It concluded that in areas of high flood risk, this right should no longer be automatically assumed.

(Planning resource).

This could have heavy implications for urban and suburban streets, where improvised parking across pavements is already excessive, inconsiderate towards pedestrians and often dangerous. Which brings us round to the need to stop people buying more cars. Some households near me appear to occupy more carspace than floorspace. Paved tracks, with permeable surround, would seem a sensible solution in many cases. More in the RHS guide.

Previously:

• Front gardens.
• More on front gardens.

Lifetime neighbourhoods

Many neighbourhoods fail their residents because important opportunities for development and regeneration go ahead with little consideration of age in their planning. The International Longevity Centre has published a paper arguing the case for lifetime neighbourhoods which 'involve the creation of multi-generational space where the needs of all ages are catered for with a considered, negotiated balance.'

Lifetime neighbourhoods should also constitute a preventative investment in good health for future generations... They provide both a built environment and an attitudinal environment in which people of all ages feel both comfortable and informed when taking part.

Towards lifetime neighbourhoods: designing sustainable communities for all.

Community. Centre.

Yorkshire in frost. The light fractures the trees, or is it the other way round. Ellie crunches across the estate part-seeing, sort-of knowing the unfinished scrawling on the walls, the mutterings in the corner shop, a charred tyreless car up against a house, the litter half-swept.

Alone or not, people walk in an isolated way here. Nothing seems rendered. But there's a hope of garden outside these flats, and Merry Christmas being sadly insisted at the window.

She said, before, most days I'd just go to Morrisons, every day, on the bus, with me little boy, getting out of the house, it were like prison, nobody to talk to, and go to Morrison's on t'bus, walk round, wander round aisles, have a cuppa tea and come back, at least you got out.

I was walking dead most of the time, I just couldn't be bothered cooking. We'd come to the community cafe and we'd both eat well for a quid.

I help out here now a lot of the time. There's a big women's social isolation problem in this area. The group that's here now, quite a few have found themselves single parents, they come here and find there's a few more in the same boat, and they support each other.

Social capital in schools

Social capital continues to make a comeback. Last month the Department for Children Families and Schools published research into 'the development and impact of young people's social capital in schools.'

Drawing on survey and qualitative interview data from two inner London schools, the researchers looked at the sense of school belonging, access to social support networks, and attitudes to diversity.

As we'd expect, their conclusions assert the importance of the school context in the social life of young people. They emphasise the uneven distribution of social capital (with white boys from lower socio-economic backgrounds having the lowest levels of social capital, and white girls having the lowest levels of socio-psychological resources).

They also point to the need to relate the citizenship curriculum to the neighbourhood context and build extended services that promote collaborative relationships between different social groups.

The report refers to the new duty on schools to promote community cohesion, and I noted one striking finding described in the summary:

The schools in this study were highly ethnically diverse and, on average, students tended to hold positive attitudes to cultural and racial diversity... However, in both schools gay people were perceived as a small minority, and students seemed much less positive to diversity in terms of sexual orientation. Hence, while cultural diversity appeared to be valued, or at least regarded as a non-controversial issue within school, the data suggest that homophobia was a considerable problem in our two secondary schools.

Hello Bin Gents

I came across this thorough example of community communication recently, heavily taped to an outside door.

I like the way it seems to represent quite closely what the communicator would probably have said face-to-face, if they'd had the chance. I note the matter-of-fact assumption or acknowledgment of gendered roles. And most of all I like the civil negotiation of a minute change in working practice that could make a welcome difference to someone else's daily routine.

'Strong safe and prosperous communities'

It's near christmas, and here's a glimpse of the government's scintillating choice of wrapping paper for the draft guidance on 'creating strong safe and prosperous communities.'

OK calm down, I'll be Santa and give you the link now, the way you'll have a topic of lively conversation to liven up parties the next few weeks. If someone else gives it to you on christmas day, appear thrilled and try not to look as if you've seen it before.

The closing date for responses is 12 February 2008, and yes, it is important stuff for neighbourhoods in England.

It covers for example the new 'duty to involve,' what is meant by 'representatives of local persons,' the role of information provision in consultation and involvement, establishing the 'distinctive vision and ambition' of an area, what is meant mean by a 'sustainable community strategy,' and how everything (especially local area agreements) relates to everything else.

Discovering local democracy: local people design their own consultation plan

Last night I ran a workshop with residents in Manningham, Bradford, to help them design a public consultation process.

Bradford Libraries have won funding to refurbish and extend Manningham library; and to their great credit, rather than specify how the consultation process would be run, the authority wanted to help local people to design it. A key starting point was for us all to appreciate that what we were doing wasn't about the new library, it was about designing a local democratic process. Once we'd worked through a couple of warm-up exercises to help us clarify this, I was struck by two things: the sense of fresh excitement that people brought to the process, having never before had the chance to participate in a public issue in such a way; and the sense that it's not at all straightforward.

I had asked that recruitment for the group did not result in domination by people who are particularly experienced in community activity, and we had a refreshing bunch of folk with an age range from 19 to 86 years, none of them bruised or made cynical by over-exposure to community and civic politics. And once you start talking to people about their general experience of democracy it can be surprising how strange the notion seems to them, while at the same time seeming to be perfectly natural if only they could get some of it.

Of course we tried to make sure we had a bit of fun, which included using children's bricks to design a 'public building' while simultaneously inventing a character who has to visit and use the place. I'm not sure how come these young women decided they would create a night club (the other group showed less imagination by coming up with, oh dear, a library), but we used the process to tease out some decision-making issues and areas of potential conflict.

The hard work hits next week, when the group starts filling in a matrix of themes and consultation issues. No-one said democracy is easy: perhaps we'll find out at the end of the process whether they think it's worthwhile.

Banal encounters?

It could be that the cohesion movement is discovering the importance of informality. A report by the Institute of Community Cohesion on divisions among young people in the London Borough of Hounslow has apparently floated the idea of creating more 'banal encounters' where children and young people from different communities meet.

This gradual recognition is very welcome. I recall some background unofficial conversations around the work of the Commission on Integration and Cohesion, which indicated how difficult it was to get even those who are very familiar with the issues to appreciate the significance of everyday unstructured encounters with diverse others. If I go on about it a lot (eg ephemeral relationships; or respecting informality as a principle) it's because I'm persuaded that it's under-appreciated.

The point surely is not whether this makes sense, because it's attention which is obviously overdue; but how to ensure (i) that the occasions and opportunities for encounters are constantly there, maintained and reinforced, and (ii) that people have the confidence and competence in social interaction to manage and benefit from encounters with diverse others.

Source: Children and young people now. (Thanks to John Vincent of The Network).

The value of community centres and the costs of sociability

I was talking to some young mothers the other day about the use of their community centre, and what they went there for. In these cases, in a low income neighbourhood with demanding toddlers at home and nothing much to do, it's mainly social contact.

Once they've gained the confidence to get across the threshold of the centre, they would do pretty much whatever course was available if there was free or cheap creche provision. And when that course's finished they sign up for the next.

Two of the women I spoke to had decided to set up their own group at the end of a course on self-esteem and stress management. One of them told me the only problem was the extent to which her mobile phone bill had gone up:

A year ago I didn't have any friends. Now I make so many calls I've had to switch to a contract.

'Are there any nice vintage clothing stores in Charlotte?'

I somehow clicked through to this. As they say across the pond, 'Oh my'.

Regeneration damages community. Discuss.

A community activist and local shop-owner, who is also chair of the local Neighbourhood Action Group in Sefton, Liverpool, is challenging a compulsory purchase order that is part of a regeneration scheme.

In a witness statement before the court, Mr Powell says the Klondyke community was once a friendly and viable one, with many generations of family living together in a close-knit neighbourhood.

He says it was a popular neighbourhood which was in demand for people looking for homes.

However, since the start of regeneration in 2004 and resulting compulsory acquisition of properties, he says the area has suffered from increasing anti-social behaviour, including vandalism and joyriding, and he says the trade in his shops has begun to decline. He says he has had to reduce staff as a result, costing jobs to the local area.'

Source: Planning resource.

Neighbourhood branding

What's the significance of an area's 'image' when it comes to regeneration? We don't hear so much about labelling these days, but with the enormous power and influence of local broadcast media, the stench of stigma can be hard to rinse off.

A recent European project called IMAGE has just reported on the testing, use and evaluation of an 'integrated regeneration process,' including tools for branding neighbourhoods. It's argued that 'successful neighbourhoods are usually those with a definite identity,' so it makes sense to raise the notion of identity up the regeneration agenda - but from local people's perspective, not necessarily that of a developer, landlord or local authority.

The report begins with a short essay on the history of high-rise housing in Europe which is worth knowing about. The project concentrated on five neighbourhoods:

• Europark in Antwerp (Belgium)
• Barton Hill in Bristol (UK)
• Poptahof in Delft (the Netherlands)
• Ballymun in Dublin (Ireland)
• Schwamendingen in Zurich (Switzerland).

'All the partner neighbourhoods are characterised by multiple deprivation, often combined with cultural diversity. Of the physical factors, the anonymous open spaces and isolation from the rest of the city (perceived or actual) are mentioned as the most important key issues.'

In exploring these characteristics, the IMAGE project used this two-by-two typology of neighbourhood:

1. A good neighbourhood is a place of trust. People communicate well with each other. The atmosphere is relaxed. New people integrate naturally into the neighbourhood.
2. In a place of hope the problems are not that big. Residents are motivated to work together to improve the neighbourhood.
3. In a place of loss residents are frustrated by the problems. If they had the chance, they would move to another neighbourhood. Groups of residents are in conflict and are looking out for their own interests (such as young people versus old or ethnic minorities that do not integrate into the wider community).
4. In a place of crisis the problems are so big that everybody is only interested in his or her own position. People feel they need to defend themselves against the outside world.

Toolkits were developed for the overall regeneration process, branding, and self-evaluation (yes, another self-evaluation toolkit). The second of these stands out as easily the most significant to me.

'We can describe the identity of a neighbourhood through its key values, an interrelated framework of norms and beliefs relating to the specific area and the community. Well defined key values can inspire the direction the regeneration process takes over a long period. They can answer the questions: what will we have when it is finished and who is it for?'

One way of thinking about its significance is to reflect on the number of occasions when there has been a bit of community development or community activity take place in a neighbourhood, but not enough to force meaningful change: wouldn't articulated consensus around the identity of the neighbourhood have made a difference? I can certainly think of examples, and I can see the value of bringing 'key values' to the surface. Here (to coin a phrase) are the results from Rotterdam (not part of the IMAGE project):

The report says the term neighbourhood branding is used to mean “the search for the character of an area, its identity and its community.”

And this image seems to be the brand statement for Poptahof: 

Citizens' day framework

The Citizenship Foundation has published guidance for local authorities and community sector partners on how to set up citizens days.

The booklet offers a range of advice and examples to explore how projects can help bring together people from different backgrounds.