Neighbourhoods

Collective local reponses to climate change

NESTA has launched the Big Green Challenge, for groups and organisations (not just local ones) to come up with innovative ways of reducing carbon emissions by 60%. £1 million prize, deadline 29 February.

Local Links - let's hear it for informal networks

Last night saw the launch of the Local Links report, following a joint Common Purpose / JRF project run by Susie Hay. The project worked in four areas of West Yorkshire, stimulating active networks with the aim of uniting people and energising them 'to make networks more productive, worthwhile and sustainable.'

The project injected a lot of energy into local networks over a relatively short period, based on the assumptions that (i) there is often insufficient connection between existing active networks in a locality, and (ii) informal ineraction can make a massive difference to people's perceptions, confidence and contribution.

It's an important project but a difficult one to describe because it examines the benefit of informal networking at local level -

'meeting other people who are active and involved in the area, knowing what they do, talking and working together and forging stronger links.'

All credit to JRF and Common Purpose for making the case for what too many funders would see as 'talk shops,' too wishy-washy to justify resources.

To me, Local Links is an important contribution to the growing pressure to assert informality and the value of conversations in local life. This is not just about saying 'conversations around community action are a good thing' (ho-hum) but saying that culturally we should place more emphasis and value on them as indicators of engagement, participation and a healthy democracy. Thanks Susie.

Report.
Evaluation report by Icarus Collective.
Findings summary.

What makes a good childhood?

The Children's Society has set up an inquiry into what makes a good childhood and is collecting 'cherished early memories' in order to build a picture of what a good childhood should look like.

We are gathering hundreds and thousands of childhood memories... This will help us understand how to make childhood better today.

The memories exercise is likely to capture lots of mini narratives of decline, but perhaps there'll be a useful research resource, and some interesting questions of how the material gets analysed.

The inquiry seems like a useful idea, and it will do us good to examine what we mean by 'good' and 'better' and so on. If childhood was somehow 'better' in the recalled past, the value of the inquiry will be in the way it distils the truths and examines them in the wholly different social, economic and technological context. This is certainly the sense in which I think it's valuable to consider older people's descriptions of neighbourliness in their childhoods - not in terms of the accuracy of the reminiscence but in terms of the values (in this case collective values) described.

And maybe we should have an equivalent exercise for old age, based on Age Concern's 'ageing well' campaign - instead of 'cherished early memories,' how about 'cherished late anticipations'? Or should there be a site where the recently bereaved put forward views on whether their older relative or friend had a 'good' old age, and what was good about it?

Previously:

Children's contentedness as a social indicator.

Disrespecting childhoods.

Rule of thumb about word of mouth

I was talking to a group of community workers today, getting their views on the use of community centres and ways of getting people through the door. Most of the way through a 12 month funded programme, they told of an influx of new people coming in. This is in an area of low expectations and high needs.

The explanation is that 'word-of-mouth takes 8-9 months...'

'It's about people having the courage to act on what they're hearing. It can take you a year to get confidence in the community, that there's something new for them to try and to trust it. It takes time for the confidence to work through.'

Having spoken to quite a few of the residents about their levels of confidence before and after contact with the centres, this makes sense to me. Funders please note.

Video, stream

Nick Booth over on Podnosh has done a set of short videos about neighbourhood action in various urban areas, for a recent international conference.

I liked this story of how residents in Bordesley Green, Birmingham, dealt with a stinking stream running through their neighbourhood. It turned out that some dubious plumbers working on housing extensions had been connecting the sewerage into the surface water drainage. Reps from the Neighbourhood Forum went with the water company to explain the issues to the homeowners, and got it sorted.

Awaiting development

A typical estate, the blocks boarded up. I just wondered, do they always have to take the trees?

Friends Out There - 15 Feb in Watford

Here's my friend Bev Carter promoting a crazy event she's roped me into - the launch event for a charity which will run arts based projects with residents of Umulogho Village, Nigeria.

Friends Out There takes place at Watford Colosseum (WD17 3EX - just 20 mins from London) on 15 February. Map. Further details and ticket prices. It's going to be a blazing celebration of African dance, art and music.

• African drumming, dance, juggling and art workshops for children and adults
• Matt the Statue
• Food, refreshments and craft stalls
• Art exhibition and information about links made between Umulogho Village and schools in Watford.

Doors open at 6pm with live performances from 7.45pm until 00.45am, featuring -

• Kakatsitsi, Master Drummers from Ghana
• Chimanimani from Zimbabwe, music to which apparently even I could not remain seated
• Fire juggling and stilt walking by Area 51, the Masters of Breathtaking
• and Rolf Harris has kindly agreed to perform live, accompanied by his friend Shining Bear on didgeridoo.

More details and tickets available from the box office: 01923 225671, or contact Bev Carter on 0208 387 0483, bevalittlesomething (at) hotmail.co.uk

The main aim of the event is to raise funds to improve facilities in Umulogho village and establish a new school building. We also expect to have an outrageously good time. I'm helping with event management so if you are able to come, ask for me and come and say hello. But be warned, I may be on the lookout for volunteers.

Commuting and local acquaintances

The other day I posted a comment over on Front Porch Forum in a discussion about the effect of commuting on local social networks. It was sparked by a post by Facebook's Cameron Marlow, picking up some Putnam material which noted that:

The car and the commute... are demonstrably bad for community life.

I was just adding a point that, if people have to travel for economic reasons, some forms of commuting are not totally detrimental to local social relations.

That same day I was at a meeting in London, after which I met up with my brother and we took the tube for a few stops. When we got out he said, wow, talking on the train, I don't usually do that, that doesn't happen on the trains I use.

Later that evening I took the overground train to my home in the sticks, and as I left the station chanced to meet an acquaintance I've got to know over the years from our local gym. He lives about half a mile from me, so I'd certainly not classify him as a neighbour. We walked up the hill together chatting. 'Tell you who I haven't seen for a while' says he - 'Irene.' (Another long-time fellow gym-user). Nor I, says I. Hope she's ok. I know whereabouts she lives, but not where exactly. We may have just missed her. We could ask the staff at the gym.

Which sort-of illustrates not just the way local connections can get reinforced in the commuting context, but also the limits of this kind of relationship. Maybe it's not my role to check on Irene, although she's getting on a bit and always on her own. But the missing component is the communication channel which would legitimate such a role - the local online network of course.

Hans Monderman, 1945-2008

The death has been announced of Hans Monderman, pioneer of shared space. Have we learned enough to cope without his wisdom?

From the Times obituary:

Hans Monderman pioneered the concept of the 'naked street' by removing all the things that were supposed to make it safe for the pedestrian - traffic lights, railings, kerbs and road markings. He thereby created a completely open and even surface on which motorists and pedestrians “negotiated” with each other by eye contact.

Comment from Ben Hamilton-Baillie on wikipedia:

What is so remarkable about the man is that he has achieved such a transformation in thinking from the basis of a traffic engineer (not a profession famed for its profound thinking and original analysis). Through remarkable persistence, patience and professional commitment he has managed to put in place well over 100 'shared space' schemes, transforming the urban and rural landscape of his native Friesland, Groningen and Drenthe. I have never met a man so generous with his time, so modest and unassuming about his achievements, and so humane in his application of technology to the benefit of everyday human society.

Previously:

Cross with caution

Psychological traffic calming

Formal and informal in public space

The revenge of the public realm.

Neighbourliness and older people

In the autumn I prepared a research briefing on neighbourliness and older people for Age Concern England, which they've now published. This publication is based on a review carried out on behalf of Community Development Foundation in 2007.

A full version of the review is now in the editor's hands and as always, it's a shame the shorter version appeared first because it necessarily skips over a lot of issues and even omits some. (Meaning, I hope you'll read the full version!)

Respect, neighbourliness and narratives of decline

Community safety journal has just published a piece I wrote on the theme of 'respect in the neighbourhood.' I drew on sections of the book plus interviews and focus groups I ran last year with older people and street reps.

A key argument I try to make is that serious policy attention being paid to social networks is long overdue:

Once the discredited ‘crack-down’ policies have been cleared away and the rhetoric of community engagement has stopped echoing, what remains is a lasting failure of policy to acknowledge the significance and vulnerability of local social networks, and to minimise damage caused to them...

Because we know too little about how local social networks function and how vulnerable they are, we lack the intellectual resources to defend them or to detect weaknesses; and it is not until they have gone missing that we begin to recognise their significance.

In the work I carried out last year for Age Concern (not yet published, watch this space) people were describing the density of the enfolding networks in the past, in neighbourhoods characterised by a greater volume of available connections. Reflecting on this leads me to comment in the article on the notion of 'community lost':

People readily describe acts of helpfulness and friendliness around them now. But these interactions and exchanges are more individualised and do not seem to amount to a healthy stock of neighbourliness, as a resource on which everyone can draw with confidence and without hesitation, as of right. For the people I spoke to, the resource of neighbourliness has somehow become impoverished. A sense emerges in their accounts of a former enfolding community now mysteriously mislaid.

To what extent is the local close-knit community recoverable, given the networked nature of contemporary relationships? Various researchers have contested the general validity of the ‘community lost’ thesis: Sampson for instance suggests that it ‘was wrong 100 years ago and remains so today’. But there is a question of degree here: on an individual level, and within many neighbourhoods, a sense of loss is what people experience and express.

There are two points I’d like to make about this. First, ‘community’ lost or mislaid is demonstrably recoverable. The notion of a surrounding sense of ‘mutual support spanning the generations and involving everybody’ – a sense of community as sanctuary, as fostering, and as protecting – has not disappeared entirely, and those who dismiss it as a myth in the past may need to spend some time examining its contemporary manifestations...

Secondly, however - while filtering out some over-romanticised claims for such close-knit communities, which could be harsh and unforgiving – we should reflect more carefully on the feeling of loss that is being expressed. The sentiment points to the validity of a secure, enfolding community, for older people especially, one in which norms are readily absorbed and recognised, and which also offers interdependence.

A version of the article is available here.

Neighbourhood communication

Communicating with your neighbours - latest in an inexhaustible series. From the letters column of a local newspaper in Andover, MA, USA:

We would like to take this opportunity to apologize to our neighbors on and around Pasho Street for disturbing their sleep in the early morning hours on Friday, Jan. 4. We were unaware that one of our automobile horns had malfunctioned due to the extreme cold and was incessantly blaring until the Andover police made a courtesy call to our home to make us aware of the situation.

Via the Neighbors Project blog.

Older refugees

The Refugee Council and Age Concern England today ran a conference about their work with older refugees, which has included a set of interviews and three regional 'listening days.'

Key points I got from the presentations I heard:

• Older refugees define integration in terms of their labour market experiences and their local social interactions.
• Many refugees feel isolated and this is related to the sense that neighbours are seldom welcoming.
• Service providers tend to assume that older refugees are invariably cared for by their extended families, which is often not the case.
• There are intergenerational aspects to integration - being accepted by people of different ages is important, and having all generations of one's family accepted is important.
• The lack of (unconditional) respect shown to older people in the UK is very offputting to many people from other cultures and can seem a barrier to integration. (There's a nicety here, which I tried to bring out in Respect in the neighbourhood, about distinguishing between respect for others as a default value of human relations, and unconditional respect for an office or status, such as being a teacher or being old. It may be that we have lamentably low levels of both kinds in the UK, but seeking to re-establish the latter may not be the way forward...)

Copies of reports are available via Age Concern on this page.

Ask them what they want

Last night I ran another workshop with local people in Manningham, designing a consultation plan for their new library.

Participants worked on eight themes - such as access, governance, stock, the garden, décor and furniture etc - and in each case looked at who should be consulted, how they should be consulted, what need there was for 'expert' or professional advice to consultation groups, and so on. They used the pink boxes to keep their notes and ideas in place, and it certainly gave a sense of accumulating achievement which you don't quite get from a pile of flipchart sheets. Using small slips of paper probably helps to get contributions from the less forthright or confident; and the boxes will be shared with others groups in the coming weeks to generate more input.

By the end of this third session I was struck by the clarity and immediacy with which people were deciding, for instance, whether or not it was appropriate to consult everybody or just a core group; when (eg with regard to décor or the garden) they thought it appropriate to let a design team come up with options first or after a brief from residents; whether or not to consult on a short list of options or to use open questions; what face-to-face or remote methods were appropriate, and so on.

There were none of those naïve claims that everybody has to have a say, or that professionals shouldn't move a finger without local people's approval. More a mature recognition that there are various ways of soliciting people's views, based on a mix of methods, a stimulated culture of involvement and a flow of information. And that consultation does not remove the responsibility for decision-making, rather it clarifies the requirement for those affected by decisions to be given the time, information and opportunity to contribute views, and that those views be taken into consideration.

It's not difficult: so why is it not commonplace?