Neighbourhoods

Moments felt globally, experienced locally

Around the world people are watching the Zimbabwean election. At local level in that country, families and friends must be discussing issues in buoyant excitement mixed perhaps with trepidation at the prospect of change, dreading fierce confrontation.

In Florida a few years ago, with surely the best available technology at their disposal, a tragi-comedy played out. In Zimbabwe now, just to illustrate the contrasts, it seems that votes were counted by candlelight in some areas due to a lack of electricity.

If democracy wasn't the pinpoint of global-local meaning, you wouldn't even know what I'm on about.

Citizen participation is not community engagement

I've been advising a few public library authorities on their community engagement plans under the Community Libraries Programme, and been struck in one example by the way citizen participation can come to disguise a lack of community engagement.

The proposal involves engaging a number of volunteers who will serve, with officers, on 'community management groups' (note the term) and in other activities; and the groups will take decisions throughout the life of the project. Because it's possible to point to the participation of local residents in decision-making processes, it seems to be legitimate under the conditions of the scheme for the authority to describe this as community engagement.

But the decisions to be made are in this case part of the library service agenda, not an agenda decided by local people. There seems to have been no attempt to engage with the interests of community groups and explore how the library service can support and contribute to those. What's interesting here is that the funding system appears to allow this kind of blurring. (The library authority is aware of my misgivings and sought to reassure me that they will crack on with genuine CE once they've got the oppressive bureaucracy out of the way).

Beyond all this there is a troubling sense of flakiness around community engagement generally. With the track record of the regeneration industry on CE increasingly under question, it's unfair to pick on the library sector. If there is a little lack of clarity about what the community libraries programme is trying to achieve, I think it's definitely tweakable. Ben Taylor notes in a recent MLA baseline report for the programme:

'there is a lack of fully shared agreement about what community engagement entails – a critical part  of the vision. This includes a few respondents who still believe that community engagement is simply based on library use and issue numbers, rather than changing the relationship with libraries and empowering communities and individuals. While many have a more developed approach, the question remains unanswered: Are we trying to get people involved in libraries, or in their community?'

To put it another way: is this about local people being involved in library services; or about libraries playing a role, along with others, in promoting community cohesion and empowering people to get involved in local life on their own terms?

Things are not critical here, not least because one can envisage a progression: lots of libraries already work with local reps and volunteers to manage, deliver and perhaps develop their existing services. This gets them into a position where they play a supportive role in whatever local groups decide they want to do; and hopefully into being consistently a proactive, deliberate stimulus for local social interaction.

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, we'll see) it comes at a time when the practice of community engagement is under critical examination.

A JRF report on Communities First in Wales notes that:

'There was little evidence of community influence over statutory members of Communities First partnerships and no evidence of significant mainstream 'programme bending' where statutory agencies prioritised actions and expenditure in the Communities First partnership area.'

Earlier this month Regen & renewal reported on Graham Gardner's (questionable) fault-finding over the government's community empowerment policies.

And here's New Start magazine reporting on a New Economics Foundation report which suggests that regeneration programmes are failing to reduce inequalities because they are good at measuring things that make no difference to the lives of local people, and poor at measuring things that do. (Covered here by Regen.net).

According to New Start, the report (which I haven't got to yet, sorry) shows how government measures focus on objectives that are either unrealistic or totally miss the point.

What I think we have here is the growing sense of a miserable mismatch where the fussing pedantic slob known as New Labour Managerialism (groan) somehow shacked up with naive and seductive young Principles of Community Governance (gasp). In the romantic history of social policy, were there ever two concepts so lamentably unsuited to one another?

Control over communities

See if you think your understanding of the politics of empowerment would be enhanced by this event, publicised with this image and described in the email blurb I just received as follows:

"The Empowerment Action Plan: Making Empowerment a Reality in Every Community" takes place on Wednesday June 18th 2008 and will examine how authorities will be given increasingly greater control over their communities.

I don't care about the grammar, I'm upset to learn that people 'inside government' hold this understanding of empowerment.

Looking after our houses

I have long found that the occasional glimpses I get of tv programmes about property speculation make me cross. If people try to make conversation about the value of their houses or, worse, anything to do with having more than one, I have to knock together an imaginary trapdoor and exit unapologetically.

Recently I've spent time up a ladder painting awkward bits of wall, it's so much fun, and pondering the responsibility of looking after the housing stock we're lucky enough to have. And I just came across this forceful line in Joe Moran's excellent Reading the everyday:

A whole cultural economy has evolved, consisting of out-of-town stores, television programmes and books, to persuade us that DIY is a source of pleasure and profit, instead of a form of unpaid labour in which an economic system that has singularly failed to replenish an aged housing stock sells us back the tools to patch up our dilapidated houses.

Civilised streets

Is it actually possible to design a street that meets everyone’s needs?

'Most of our streets are not civilised, enjoyable places to be. They are mainly noisy, polluted, hazardous and unpleasant – with serious social and environmental problems the result.'

This is from a new CABE briefing on Civilised streets.

'This briefing is about the sort of streets that are – or are intended to be – used for a range of different purposes, such as walking, driving and shopping... It is about why, and how, we should be creating streets that are civilised...'

CABE rightly argues that streets that have no casualties simply because people have deserted them are actually failures in terms of their social function.

'We think it is vital that streets are designed and maintained in a way that attracts people and we support street design that encourages users to consider others.'

I gave someone a lift in my car recently and she was bemoaning the high cost of petrol. When I told her I thought the price should be considerably higher to reflect its real cost, it shut her up completely - I suppose because some people find it hard to think beyond their own lifestyles.

So given the gloomy prognosis that the voice of the car lobby will for some time remain dangerously strident, this document is for me a contribution to the sound tactic of undermining it by subversion rather than confrontation. We may well come to be very thankful for the political balancing acts that outfits like CABE are playing.

'Life is a reciprocal business'

Tuesday's Night waves on BBC Radio 3 featured a discussion around the idea that 'there is no such thing as society' with David Willetts MP and Geoff Mulgan of the Young Foundation.

They rode together floor-by-floor in a conceptual lift, taking turns to press the buttons and glancing out at personal social networks, how 'community' is reflected in civil society, our confused associations with national institutions, and the growing acknowledgment of global connections.

Available here for a few more days. This item starts about 15 minutes into the programme.

In passing, the programme claims that Margaret Thatcher's famous remark about society has been 'spun out of context'. We're reminded that she never actually said 'There's no such thing as society.' What she said was 'Who is society? There is no such thing'. Sounds pretty close to me. And it seems she also said 'life is a reciprocal business'.

What it really means to lose the plot

Tesco takes on its competitors in Hadleigh, Suffolk:

Valerie Barber, 67, a member of the Bridge Street Allotment Association, stands to lose the plot she has nurtured for 42 years if Tesco is given the go-ahead to turn allotments into a car park.

More here.

The supermarket's response was of interest:

"No allotments will be lost, but unfortunately some will be moved, and we will be happy to meet and discuss these issues with all those concerned. We will work with them on the best soil for new plots and will bring in professional help if needed to ensure allotment holders get the best possible growing conditions."

When I think about the politics of this massive company in its dealings with small local councils - let alone small local vegetable gardeners - the comment suggests a degree of consideration that we might not have even imagined twenty years ago.

All the same, the UK's dominant supermarket, doubtless defended by some very sharp legal and accounting brains, is unlikely to be able to calculate the value of the emotional investment that this woman has made in her small patch of land over four decades of tendering. It's called growing food, and it matters.

The pic I took at about this season, a couple of years ago.

Empowerment and civic participation

A long conversation this afternoon with my old buddy Gabriel Chanan in which we touched on the puzzle of whether policy on 'empowerment' is starting to get elided with job creation (see Unlocking the talent of our communities). If we're going to have disempowerment confused with worklessness, it will just serve to further marginalise older people, most of whom are outside the labour market and quite disempowered enough already thanks.

In the national indicator set, the key indicator for empowerment is NI4:

'The proportion of the adult population who agree that they feel able to influence decisions affecting their local area.'

More description and explanation here.

I think the indicators in themselves look very progressive. Of course, there's always concern about how they will be used, and we'll all take some convincing that they won't be turned into irritating and counter-productive league tables. And there are other questions.

The way the indicators will work, as I understand it, is that local authorities and their partners will establish a baseline and seek (be expected) to improve by 4 per cent subsequently.

Well let's see now, if you've got a given percentage of people in your area who have not said that they feel able to influence decisions, who do you target in order to increase the proportion by 4 per cent?

You're going to start with people who are indifferent but relatively empowered, and maybe persuade them so that they do feel they can influence things. You're less likely to start with people who are relatively disempowered and certainly not with the most profoundly disempowered. So what are we trying to do here - to equalise empowerment or just come up with an acceptable proportion of people who can influence processes?

Well, there's plenty in the empowerment action plan to bring about change, and hopefully a lot of that funding will be used for community development to promote lasting, collective empowerment where most needed. Meanwhile, in a post on the Guardian blog, Richard Wilson observes:

We have seen the emergence of an empowerment gap. Since 1997, the subjectively empowered have become yet more empowered and those with the least personal empowerment more disempowered.

Much to be done.

Green cheer

I've been in the Lake District for a few days, which got me pondering the way in which landscape (any landscape, it doesn't have to be A Grade) seems to make people more agreeable.

With impeccable timing, here's Natural England, arguing that people living in towns and cities should have:

• an accessible natural greenspace less than 300 metres (5 minutes walk) from home;
• statutory Local Nature Reserves at a minimum level of one hectare per thousand population;
• at least one accessible 20 hectare site within two kilometres of home; one accessible 100 hectare site within five kilometres of home; and one accessible 500 hectare site within ten kilometres of home.

There's a glossy, a report on accessible natural greenspace in towns and cities,
and a report on green networks with multiple uses in and around towns and cities.

Confession: the image is from Scotland, not the lakes.

Citizenship as credo

So former Attorney General Lord Goldsmith has called for children to pledge an oath of allegiance to the queen, as part of a review of citizenship carried out at the request of the Prime Minister.

And he gets a well-earned round of derision. Simon Jenkins, for instance, points out that the man's paternalism

has nothing whatsoever to do with the civic space in which ordinary Britons live, breathe and conduct their politics, which is based on neighbourhood, community, village, town and city.

There's no need to rehearse the critique here - hopefully this folly will drown quickly and silently.

But there's another question to be asked, which is why a lord of the realm (is that the way to refer to them?) was invited by a Labour prime minister to carry out such an exercise? Why not a panel for example, including several citizens and those who work among citizens? It might have saved some embarassment, but the likelihood that it probably didn't occur to anyone close to the PM is as scary as what Goldsmith came up with.

Shifting institutions

A few weeks ago I had an absorbing discussion with a friend who works at a college, about the systematic reduction of funding, and other obstacles introduced by government, to minimise the contribution of further education institutions to community education. My friend's college, with a distinguished tradition of socially-committed work at local level with people on low-incomes, is being forced to abandon it.

It's hardly contentious to record that the present government has presided over a shameful starvation of learning opportunities for people who lack chances, in spite of the originally earnest tone of social inclusion educational policies ten years ago.

Since that conversation, it happens I've started doing some work under the current lottery-funded programme for community libraries, and been surprised at how many of the bids I've seen include the provision of spaces and activities for various forms of stuctured and semi-structured learning. One legitimate response to many of these might be, how come the education sector is not already doing this?

And then I spotted a note in Monday's Guardian in which it is claimed that:

Schools are having to give moral guidance to pupils which should be given by their parents at home... For some children, schools have had to take the place of the institutions that used to set the boundaries of acceptable behaviour.

This is from a report of a speech by the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, who says that:

For many children, school and its values, its clear boundaries and moral framework, are the only solid bedrock in their lives.'

Well, something's going on here - schools claiming they have to carry out a parental role, libraries expected to do the work of schools and colleges, colleges obstructed from providing community education... The roles of institutions are shifting, and I suspect that most of those within the institutions think they occupy terra firma.

Bog post

A few years back I quoted from Paul Carter's book Repressed spaces -

“Residents don’t need signs, only foreigners do… In this sense, all signs are signs of not belonging, of coming from somewhere else."

To a lesser extent this applies to toilets, at least at the neighbourhood level. If you live there, you probably don't need to know where the bogs are. Nor do you want visitors pissing on your park shelter, cos it stinks. Good, I'm glad that's clear.

Now, here's the government coming up with a strategic guide on improving public access to better toilets, and quite rightly telling us that

the state of our public toilets should indeed be a mark of civic and community pride.

Good initiative, no doubt there will be lots of talk about floor targets, and worse jokes to come. I note that proposed measures include the new 'SatLav' schemes, whereby you can receive information on your nearest toilet and opening times by text on your mobile. 'In three metres, take the first urinal on the left.'

The press release tells us that 'Communities Minister Baroness Andrews will encourage councils to consider a range of innovative ideas and actions to boost the availability, and quality of, public toilets.'

How sweet is that? After 100 years of the Labour Party, mostly oriented to the interests of ordinary people, we have their policy on our slashpans announced by a baroness. And I don't even know what a baroness is.

What Robin Hood did for the poor

There's a short BBC news piece by David Sillito about growing disagreements over the proposed demolition of Robin Hood Gardens in east London - yer classic slab estate, or a masterpiece of twentieth century design? As David says:

It's a familiar process, blowing up the sixties' and seventies' mistakes.

Cut to Lord Rogers taking the chance to tell us how marvellous the architecture is. More here on the campaign to get it listed. Hang on, what's it like to live there? According to Sillito 80% of the residents don't think it should be saved.

Here's an alternative take on the architects in question, the Smithsons:

Robin Hood Gardens, a 213-home council housing complex in East London, gave them the chance to practise what they preached on a grand scale. It was disastrous. The brutalist concrete structure turned out to be defective, but the social aspects were worse: Robin Hood Gardens became a hotbed of crime. The Smithsons were exposed as both arrogant and fallible.

I'm not qualified to conclude what would be best here, but I want to just note the way in which the architects' arguments tend not to give primacy to the question of what it's like to live there. There seems to have been thirty-five years of accumulated misery for a lot of people, but that's not necessarily part of the equation. The terms of the debate about Robin Hood Gardens, for the professionals, risk putting housing as artwork (or perhaps prescribed lifestyle as artwork) right in your face, non-negotiable. Which is interesting because the lifestyle prescription was problematic precisely because so little of it was negotiable.

Here's a flavour of the recognition for the building (from):

As a crucial part of the very small built oeuvre of Alison and Peter Smithson, it is hardly impossible (sic) to overestimate its value, esp. with regard to the international debate on modern architecture in those years.

We're invited to help save this building because of its iconic aesthetic status, according to standards largely independent of the quality of everyday low-income life. Maybe there could be an argument for such detachment, but it gets clouded by the economics of social policy. I guess the folk at CABE work all the time where these tensions are crackling.

And the trouble is that as soon as you see Peter Smithson mouthing about it as 'an exemplar of a new mode of urban organisation' (in a spooky clip reminiscent of Peter Cook) you know you're up against that fundamentally stupid human habit of telling other people how they should live and using some system to try it out on them. (Stupid in the sense of repeating an approach that has failed in the past). Modern architecture was fatally corroded by insistent rhetoric (still echoing) about brutalism, which sought to deny variety.

One of my lasting early memories was of going round some east end estates with my dad, delivering christmas parcels for Stepney Old People's Welfare Trust: I didn't know it at the time but I glimpsed a moment in the exhaustion of working class culture. The ghostly poverty that brushed against me was very modern in its disconnectedness, which I suppose is why we were there, being hesitantly philanthropic. At a relatively tender age I knew about not imposing, about what I now call 'allowing people', but I didn't realise the architecture was the supreme imposition, the supreme way of not allowing. What I think I did understand vaguely was to do with people's right to be different within their commonality. And the way we built in those days was unmistakably trying to deny that right.

Curtain-twitching and eyes on the street

The other day, on the point of going out, I glanced out the window and saw a delivery van in the street, the driver with a parcel at a neighbour's door.

I knew they would be at work, so I popped out and offered to take the parcel to save all that hassle of signed notes and 'collection between the hours of'. Apart from anything else, this meant that when I took the parcel round that evening, I had the chance to ask after my neighbour's health, knowing he'd been unwell the previous week. All sounds perfectly routine don't it?

Only later did I ponder that whole biz of looking out on one's neighbourhood - referred to as 'curtain-twitching' from one point of view, or 'eyes on the street' from another. I reflect on it here because I'm going through the proofs of a forthcoming text and just came across this bit in a section about privacy:

"Older people can use signs of occupation of the home for mutual support, taking a degree of responsibility for one another. Against this, the phrase ‘curtain-twitching’ is commonly used to denigrate such or similar actions. The easy misuse of the phrase is damaging, since the readiness to have ‘eyes on the street’ is a key component of neighbouring. In this sense, over-emphasising privacy threatens older people, both as subjects of concern (whose difficulties might go unnoticed) and in their legitimate role as co-custodians of the neighbourhood."

Well I'm not that old yet, but I'd like to think that if I ever get to be, social attitudes towards curtain-twitching will have dissolved in favour of more sensible notions of 'eyes on the street'.

And if you want the source for the above quote (and you do, badly, in order to help keep an impoverished consultant fed) watch this space.

Music and collective wellbeing

A while ago my daughter got herself a t-shirt printed with the inscription 'What if the hokey-cokey is what it's all about?' Community singing certainly does something special for some people, but why?

There was a totally absorbing programme about music and health, broadcast on R3 today, parts of which explored how 'music facilitates communication and community'.

I learned about one project, Singing for the Brain, which taps into the associative memories of those with dementia and Alzheimer's and has a demonstrable healing effect. I heard from people who have studied the ways in which music affects our brains, emotions and wellbeing, telling us that in health terms music is 'not a drug - it's the opposite', and

It only works when it's part of a relationship.

And if like me, you wondered whether the legendary longevity of many musicians was something to do with socio-economic class, here's a more likely explanation: musicians are 'self-medicating'.