Neighbourhoods

Platform 2: VSO meets community action

I think this looks like a really good scheme. It's partly about community cohesion, partly social inclusion, partly good old-fashioned volunteering:

A new Government-backed global volunteering scheme is being launched for 18 to 25 year-olds. 'Platform2' will offer young adults from less advantaged backgrounds the opportunity to live, work and learn about life in poorer countries while making a real difference to peoples lives.

Volunteers will spend 10 weeks overseas. On return to UK they will go on weekends away to prepare personal activity plans of how they want to raise awareness in the UK.

This scheme aims to give young British adults who wouldn't normally have an opportunity the chance to make a valuable contribution to the lives of people overseas who are blighted by poverty.

By living and working with people from very different backgrounds, facing very different challenges, they will learn new skills and help unlock the potential within them to become better global citizens. And on return they'll be applying what they've learned to activities in their own local communities.

BBC coverage.

DFID news page.

Post offices, informality, and participation

And so the threatened closure of too many post offices brews a storm, and the issues seem to get more complex. Today I was at an Involve workshop about community cohesion and participation, which might have had nothing to do with post offices had not another participant mentioned them to make a point, sparking a clarification for me.

It seems that everybody (presumably including MPs who voted for the closures but want to defend those in their constituencies) believes that post offices play a social role - variously described as being 'at the heart of' or constituting 'the hub of their communities' and a 'lifeline' especially for older residents.

There's no reason why there should necessarily be only one such heart or hub - indeed a mix of third places (broadly defined) is surely desirable. Pubs, cafes, libraries, parks, community centres and other venues claim this status from time to time.

But when the threat is made to post offices on economic grounds, as I've noted before, we don't have the methodology to defend them because we don't know how to quantify their value in terms that The Accountants Who Run Things would understand or accept. (Incidentally, the threat to post offices is commonly described as a rural issue, but closures in urban areas could also be devastating and there's a lot of concern in London).

My point is this: the reason we don't have the methodology to demonstrate the social value of such amenities is because no political value is placed on human processes that are informal and organic. Which also presumably partly explains why we don't get much research on social networks (eg on home zones).

To return to the Involve workshop, which was thoroughly absorbing, not least because I met some very experienced and articulate folk. I found myself banging the drum for informality because of the tendency (better expressed by others who, under Chatham House rules, I may not name) to discuss participation within a context of formal structures and strategic (service delivery) processes.

The point was made painstakingly by other participants that this is an unsatisfactory approach. We need to prize, stimulate and protect the values and knowledge that local people bring to their shared experiences in their neighbourhoods, for its own sake. To do that we need to ensure that there are more occasions for encounters, more conversations between different groups of people, more recognition - before oganised participation can be expected to have a role to play in promoting cohesion.

To put it another way: we need a healthy ecology of conversations and encounters and recognition and relationships, and places to bump into people or to sit and gaze or go for a natter or just hang out, before we can have meaningful 'participation' that in turn serves to strengthen cohesion. I guess you could say that this blurs into some forms of civil participation - being part of stuff that goes on in the neighbourhood.

So maybe the question, both for understanding the contribution of participation to cohesion and for appreciating the social role of third places, is perhaps something like 'how do we get our policy makers to place more value on organic development, informality and local social interaction?'

Answers on a postcard please.

Previously:

The local post office: a brand in jeopardy.

Post offices and social value.

Please serve yourself: rural post offices.

Neighbourhoods in an ageing society

The UK government describes its National Strategy for Housing in an Ageing Society, published today, as 'the first of its kind in the world,' which if true is slightly depressing but these things always take longer than you expect. Anyway, this is the sort of thing this government does well.

What I like about the approach is that this is not just about building to age-friendly designs - desirable and long-overdue as that is - and supporting that with  repair and adaptation ('handyman') schemes. It also seems to be driving deliberately at the idea of lifetime neighbourhoods and 'age-friendly cities' (which is one of the ways in which the new eco-towns are being packaged).

The Government is clear that urgent action is required now to better design communities and support older people. The Strategy is key to better meeting older peoples' aspirations to remain independent in later life.

Am I being naive and over-optimistic to think that lasting initiatives promoting neighbourliness could be built on this platform? I really think it can happen.

Press release.

Street of data

Here's an enticing, nicely-paced extended sketch on uses of technology in the high street, by Dan Hill over on City of Sound, arguing that

the patterns of data in the streets, the systems that enable and carry them, the quality of those connections, their various levels of openness or privacy, will all affect the way the street feels rather more than street furniture or road signs.

I quite like the vignettes he didn't develop, like ‘a writer denotes the ghostly presence of a 12th century market using psychogeographical markup language’ ...

This piece got me leafing back through stuff by Stephen Graham and William Mitchell, and other work that hasn't really aged but is nicely crystallised by Hill's crisp scene-setting. Enjoy.

Found, ring

I came across this simple notice at the end of a cul de sac, on a gate where a path leads across a field. A resident has gone to a bit of effort because a visitor crossing their patch has lost something potentially of value.

Lights, camera, just popping next door

Channel 4 are showing a Cutting Edge documentary called My street on Thursday 21 February 2008 at 9pm.

After 14 years of living on the same road Sue knew practically none of her neighbours. Intrigued by what stories might lie on her own doorstep, she began knocking on the 116 doors on her street and meeting some of the 300 people who are her neighbours.

Or you could organise a street party. Try to stifle the allegations of cheap programme-making, nothing wrong with that, and it looks like a good initiative.

I'm more curious about this as another example of the grudgingly slow recognition by the media and politicians that, as forces associated with globalisation stretch their influence ever thinner, there's often something quite interesting at local level that the rest of us are already talking about. It sounds as if the programme may be almost confessional in that respect.

More here, including a clip with this comment from Sue Bourne, the director:

I didn't find a huge sense of community and neighbourliness but there were pockets of it...

It will be interesting to see whether the programme spends any time exploring why this is; whether it is as widespread as my forthcoming Age Concern review suggests; the factors that explain why she knew so few of her neghbours in the first place; and to what extent it matters.

Friends Out There: launch event

Fings are fairly frantic, frazzled and fraught for Friday's funfest charity launch event Friends Out There in Watford. If you're within striking distance, I hope you'll find your way there, come and feast yer ears and eyes. Here's the blurb. Here for bookings.

We need £5,000 before we're allowed to establish the charity so please come and help make it happen! Tickets available on the night, just mind the fire-jugglers and Mad Matt the robot statue as you come in.

Meanwhile, among my less exciting roles, I've been tinkering at the charitable objectives. Here's the pop version -

• Friends Out There will create connections between different schools and neighbourhoods across the world – working at the local level, globally.
• Friends Out There will use art, music, dance, drama and writing to help people explore diversity and to promote understanding of different cultures.
• Friends Out There will record, evaluate and publish the processes and outcomes of our work so that it can be shared and experienced widely.
• Friends Out There will contribute to the relief of hardship where appropriate in the areas where we work by helping to build financial, social and cultural capital.

If you'd like to get on board, say hi over on the FOTblog.

How 2 gras sum 1 up

'Young people on a London estate are using text messaging to report antisocial behaviour discreetly and without fear of recrimination, in an initiative which is believed to be the first of its kind.

'Young residents on the Campsbourne Estate, in Haringey, are being encouraged to use MSN, texts, email or phone to secretly report any trouble they witness or fear on the estate.'

More here - Children & young people daily bulletin.

Street parties for engagement

Chris Gittins of Streets Alive is running a training event on street parties, for the National Neighbourhood Management Network, in London, 27 March 2008. Details.

Places to Go? conference

The latest Living Streets newsletter tells us that to get back to child-friendly public spaces we need 'a range of concrete measures.'

We can be sure that the real and the metaphorical will be clearly distinguished at the conference Living Streets are running with Play England, Sustrans and the National Children's Bureau:

The Places to Go? conference will explore the opportunities represented by The Children’s Plan and address some of its challenges. It will present policy and practice for professionals in planning, landscaping, play, school travel, public health, traffic and transport. It will explore links between the twin imperatives of creating a public realm that is enjoyable, healthy and accessible to children; and environmentally sustainable.

The conference takes place in London, 20 May 2008. Flier.

Talking about consultation

I was in Bradford the other day with my colleague Martin Dudley, talking to people about the consultation process for Manningham library. Although turnout for the event was disappointing, it was good to have a combination of local residents, professionals from the library services and regeneration, plus a councillor. In working on consultation and engagement, this is the kind of mix we're after.

Uncertain attendance is one of the hard-truths of consultation and community engagement. But what's struck me most about the process we went through in this little exercise has been the ease with which local people, given the chance, appreciate the limitations of consultation (especially in terms of referring to expert advice) and the way it fits into a mix of democratic processes.

I did my best to pass on this message to the library staff and managers because so often, misunderstandings of what 'consultation' means confound people's readiness to get stuck in. There are widespread assumptions in public agencies that inviting people to give their views is inviting chaos and mistakes, and that consultation trumps other processes. Sometimes this is based on the misleading idea that consultation leads directly to inescapable consensus, like referenda. Of course it's usually neither consensus nor inescapable, and if you start from the right angle - processes, not decisions - such assumptions just seem strange.

Image (c) Martin Dudley.

Pssst, heard what they're saying about rumour?

Word of mouth doesn't have to take months. I was talking to a couple of residents a while ago about rumour and misinformation in an area of intense regeneration activity, and we touched on the value as well as the problematic nature of rumour. The following anecdote was offered with the conviction of truth of someone reading a log book.

A community activist was busy organising a meeting about an issue they perceived to be important, but too few people promised to come. Tactics adopted included getting on a local bus with a colleague, and using a loud whisper, convincingly foretelling a negative development which would have an unhappy effect on everyone locally. According to the story, this did the trick: the meeting was very well attended.

Public libraries and multicultural relationships

Helen Carpenter, who managed the Welcome to Your Library project, has just published a very readable report about her international study tour on the role of public libraries in multicultural relationships.

She considers the relationships in terms of:

• how public libraries connect as institutions with all relevant stakeholders
• how they plan and deliver services that reflect, support and promote diversity
• how they enable inter-cultural dialogue and encourage active citizenship in a rapidly changing environment.

Helen visisted Canada, the USA, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium, and the report offers numerous little snapshots of good practice with professional reflections. More insights on her travel blog.

Community cohesion: stimulating more interaction

The government's response to the Commission on Integration and Cohesion, published today, anounces new actions including guidance for local authorities to consider how funding can better be used to support greater interaction between people from different backgrounds.

The proposed actions are:

* Specialist cohesion teams to be established by central government to provide advice on conflict resolution, mediation, leadership and on the steps that local leaders might take when new people arrive in their area.

* Local authority twinning - between areas of the country experiencing similar issues in order to share ideas and solutions to inspire innovation to respond to these challenges.

* New guidance for local authorities on developing Information Packs for migrants.

* Consultation on cohesion guidance for funders - to encourage local authorities to consider how funding can better be used to support greater interaction, and reducing funding for single groups.

* All local authorities will have access to an impact assessment tool to assess whether the activities they are planning will have a positive impact on cohesion in their neighbourhoods.

Press release.

Memories of childhood and street parties

With the Children's Society's project on 'cherished early memories' we're sure to hear plenty about how the childhoods of many older people were happier and their neighbourhoods blessed with a more 'enfolding community.'

I don't dispute the validity of many such accounts, any more than I'd dispute the reported unhappiness of much contemporary childhood. But in trying to write about intergenerational aspects of contemporary street parties, in work I'm doing with Streets Alive, I'm struck by the feeling that childhood happiness was so often constructed in a way which no longer applies.

Some of the photographic evidence (eg) from the mid-century street parties (VE day, the coronation, the jubilee etc) suggests insights into the differences in older people’s perceptions of community and public occasions.

Typical images (eg) show children sat at a row of tables along a street or in a playground. Bunting and flags distinguish the occasion. Adults, mostly if not exclusively women, stand round, usually at the children’s backs, policing the territory. The menfolk, we’re sometimes reminded in reminiscences, had performed their roles in securing the bunting, sorting the wiring for loudspeakers, and setting up the tables, and were most likely down the pub by tea-time.

Scanning these images, it’s often difficult to discern many smiles on the children’s faces. This adds to the niggling impression that they have been corralled into this arena, been told that they will enjoy themselves, are prohibited from escaping or improvising their own entertainment, and afterwards, will be told that they enjoyed themselves.

And surely, for many, that’s how the world was. There were hierarchies of authority which knew what was best for you (not just government, council, church, teachers, extended family, parents etc, but other institutions such as the BBC and the police as well) and it was culturally eccentric to question them. The world had an order to it and street parties, like so much else, conformed to that order, that sense of solidity.

What we have here are some of 'the solids' whose turn has come, according to Zygmunt Bauman, 'to be thrown into the melting pot and which are in the process of being melted at the present time, the time of fluid modernity.' These are

'the bonds which interlock individual choices in collective projects and actions - the patterns of communication and co-ordination between individually conducted life policies on the one hand and political actions of human collectivities on the other.' (Liquid modernity p6)

If studying street parties and childhood memories (and responses to climate change, come to that) show us nothing else, they should help us understand how individual action in relation to collective initiative is changing at local level.