Neighbourhoods

The perpetual neighborhood block party?

Hildy Gottlieb summarizes three social media services:

LinkedIn - the perpetual Chamber of Commerce mixer
Twitter - the perpetual party at the end of the universe
Facebook - the perpetual neighborhood block party.

Discuss.

 

Neighbourhood encounters

I took this pic some years ago but I think yesterday was the first time I used it, in a presentation to a British Council / iCoCo conference on community cohesion.

What I'd like you to do, if you wouldn't mind, is to ask yourself if these two people know each other.

And what is it that makes you think that?

Informal influences on local social capital

I love these little coincidences. This afternoon I was sitting in the final plenary at an international conference on community cohesion run by the British Council and iCoCo in Manchester. Just before Runnymede Trust director Rob Berkeley stood up to speak, an email from Communities and Local Government plopped into my mailbox offering figures released from the 2008-09 Citizenship Survey:

'76 per cent of people feel that they strongly belong to their neighbourhood with 81 per cent of people satisfied with their local area as a place to live.'

Presumably unaware of this news, although quite possibly already informed about some of the survey findings, Rob reflected quietly on the need to bring some refinement to the evaluation and measurement of cohesion and belonging:

'I live in south London. If my neighbours don't break down the door, I think we're getting on pretty well. In a rural village, if someone doesn't turn up to the fete, their neighbours might think relations have completely broken down. We do need to think about the different ways people think about belonging.'

This echoes a point I made in my own presentation yesterday, consolidating a strong sub-theme of the conference, which was best expressed in a comment by Haroon Saad, director of QeC-Eran (Quartiers en Crise). First, in his presentation, he observed that:

'Intercultural dialogue is taking place on Facebook' (I think he meant social media in general) 'and what's significant is that it's dissociated from institutions.'

Then in a discussion about how agencies were still trying to deal with tensions between local factions in Northern Ireland, Haroon said:

'What organisations are doing pales into insignificance compared with what's going on in the informal sector.'

And that's it: sooner or later policy makers and cohesion practitioners are going to have to get to grips with informal social relations, because everything else we do is not enough. Ciara Wells, deputy director of CLG's Communities and Faiths Division, spoke on Wednesday about the ongoing work on meaningful interaction. Substituting for one of her colleagues, I followed it up with some points about neighbourliness, home zones and neighbourhood online networks, contrasted with reflections on the slightly more organised, formal occasions of street parties and living library.

Devices like steet parties and living library justifiably generate a lot of interest, because they legitimise conversations that otherwise probably would not take place. But ultimately they're artificially constructed occasions, and however transformational the experiences they stimulate, it's hard to see how they can trump all the informal influences on local social capital.

I very much welcome CLG's commitment to further work on meaningful interaction, and I hope it will be seen as an opportunity to develop some more nuanced understandings of the sense of belonging, the importance of trivial encounters, and the value of social networks.

Previously:

On superficial neighbourhood relations

Enter the official local handyman

Left, shoes

A wet day. In car parks and lay-bys, dogwalkers and allotment users sit in their cars and exchange their muddy boots for shoes.

Usually they take them with, when they leave.

Talking about hope

Hope is exactly the kind of psychological resource you probably don't give much thought to if you who don't need it. I've just learned a little about how much it matters to refugees and homeless people. My colleague Linda Constable and I spent some time helping to run a living library session at Crisis in London the other day, and it was an absolute blast.

About a dozen members of the Crisis English Club put themselves forward as 'Books' to talk about their experiences; the 'Borrowers' were mostly Crisis staff and volunteers, gaining insights into how the process might work for the organisation elsewhere.

The pic shows the engaging Kazem, a Lebanese refugee who gave his book title as Homelessness, hopelessness and hope. Another described himself like this:

‘I became an alcoholic with my wife after becoming homeless and destitute. I am very proud because for ten years now I haven’t had a drink.’

We learned something else. When the Books were being briefed by our contact at Crisis, she said she expected them to hold back from talking about the more disturbing and harrowing experiences in their lives. On the contrary: every one of them took the considered opportunity to willingly discuss those central life-disrupting episodes and their lasting effects. Such is the power of this simple device.

Previous posts on Living Library.

You'd think we do nothin' but cookin' and eatin'

I had to return the NDN's soup jug as she'd brought me round some hot veg broth the other day. So I prepared a pretty decent orange and carrot soup - worrying everso slightly about complicating the reciprocity and the implication of snobbing-up the relationship - and took the jug back full. I followed it up later with a warm wholemeal loaf and came away with a couple of warm scones and a bit of gossip.

Previously: Hot soup

Reciprocal neighbouring

Talk About Local

William Perrin has announced his Talk About Local project which will promote the model of neighbourhood online networks, training local activists to exploit the technology to communicate and network.

Talk About Local will train several thousand people in 150 disadvantaged places in England to set up locality/community/neighbourhood based websites. The project will use UK online centres as its delivery backbone. Talk About Local will catalyse an online resource and community for people publishing neighbourhood or community websites, so that people can help each other.

Talk About Local will give these citizens the basic skills to communicate online more effectively and at less cost than using traditional means. By networking citizens together, they will be able support each other in their local activism, as well as on technical publishing issues. This will lead to stronger more effective community action.

The project couldn't be led from a better source nor have a greater chance of success. All power to his elbow.

The pic is of a young journalist I met at an inspiring project called Harlem Live, which was training young people to be online reporters back in 2000. Looks like they've travelled a fair way.

On superficial neighbourhood relations

From time to time I argue that 'shallow' informal interactions, such as simple gestures of recognition at neighbourhood level, are more significant in terms of social capital than is generally recognised.

I raised this recently in relation to the CLG guidance on 'meaningful social interaction,' which argues that for social interaction to be 'meaningful' it needs to go beyond a superficial level and to be sustained. My view is that yes it makes a difference if it's sustained, but 'superficial' does not mean trivial. Superficial is good.

Now I'm just catching up with a paper in BMJ last month about happiness and social networks, which got quite a bit of publicity for its finding that happiness is 'contagious'. The researchers looked at 20 years of data from the Framingham heart study in Massachussetts and found that:

People’s happiness depends on the happiness of others with whom they are connected.

This includes close neighbours, but apparently next door neighbours have a much stronger influence than neighbours who live a few doors down in the same neighbourhood. The researchers observe:

the strong influence of neighbours suggests that the spread of happiness might depend more on frequent social contact than deep social connections.

So let's take that as a tentative endorsement. More evidence needed of course.

And behind all this are the challenges of defining (without solidfying) what we're talking about. A few weeks ago I was questioning some of the assumptions about definitions of 'belonging' in the methodologically-creaky Changing UK research, and perhaps there are comparable dangers in assumptions about 'happiness'. One commentator on the BMJ paper observes:

Happiness research that attempts to find generalisations about happiness...  will not challenge inherent assumptions about what makes people happy, what is happiness, and who is happy in society or indeed, as Anthony Storr suggests, who is 'happy alone!'

Six per cent would prefer no contact with neighbours

A quick update to my note a few months ago about the evidence from popular surveys of neighbouring. I concluded that about 5% of us have no contact with our neighbours.

Last month HBOS released another in this entertaining series, finding that 6% of respondents thought that good relationships with new neighbours were 'not at all important' and would prefer not to have any contact with them.

Mending broken window theory

What's the effect of a disordered physical environment on children's behaviour and exam results? Here's a Guardian article by Jessica Shepherd on recent (apparently qualitative) research suggesting that boarded-up houses and shops, and littered scruffy pathways aren't exactly going to inspire young people to pro-social behaviour.

Indeed. So has the death of broken window theory been exaggerated? The Harcourt and Ludwig (2006) research discrediting the original theory may tell us that physical signs of disorder do not predict neighbourhood crime; but what they do predict is more physical disorder. And on what grounds is it deemed acceptable that people should be expected to live in such an environment? Where broken windows are not being repaired and other maintenance is not being carried out, residents (yes, that includes schoolchildren) are being subjected to disrespect on the part of the services established and funded to maintain order.

From work I've done on estates in the past I'm sure that local people often sense the danger of a tipping point of disorder, although they might not articulate it in terms of 'broken window theory' or collective efficacy or whatever.

And schools are, or should be, an integrated rather than separate part of their localities ('community' if you like). As the researchers point out:

'throughout government policy, schools are presented as though they exist in isolation from the surrounding area.'

Too many schools resemble fortresses or prisons, and I guess this research could help begin the reversal of that trend.

Previously:
A crisis of community presence

It's curtains for broken window theory

Town closed

Someone's put a bit of time into this. Originally it read 'This store is now closed.'

Not the killer app

Kev is sitting at home digesting his dinner and wondering why people Twitter.

He is not yet a grandparent, but suspects that if and when he is, Twitter might assume some sort of pertinence.

Which allows him a bit of time to come up with a better term than 'killer app'.

How does regeneration benefit local people?

Not through employment. According to Regen and Renewal an inquiry by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Urban Development finds that, while UK cities have undergone comprehensive physical regeneration over the past two decades, with resultant economic growth, those living near regeneration areas have not benefited by way of employment.

'In many cases, newly built city centres and other areas of successful physical regeneration have been juxtaposed by continued deprivation and worklessness.'

The inquiry report is out Monday 19th, check here.

Sipson may or may not be a community

I don't want to hear people banging on about how cosy and convivial is the village of Sipson.

The village is in the news because a brain-free decision by the UK government today means that if appeals fail, it will be buried under Heathrow's proposed third runway. (The decision ultimately could be close to suicidal for this government because the opposition is bound to attract votes for vowing to reverse the decision if elected).

I like what the BBC have done here in bringing the views of local people to the foreground, and I've been listening to radio reports where, with an echo of doom, residents celebrate the existing sense of community. I came across a note on London RIP from an apprentice reporter whose patch included Sipson in the 1980s:

Just a few fields away from the airport, the villages then were bucolic dots on the very edge of London. Old (Harmondsworth boasts a 11th century church and ancient barn) and surprisingly quiet (no detention centre there then), they coexisted uneasily with the airport – which was much resented by old-timers for apparently never having had planning permission in the first place. It started off as an airstrip in World War One and just growed and growed.

My job involved spending hours tramping around the villages to find news stories to fill the paper every week. This was a truly epic struggle. Cat up tree was big news in Sipson and Harmondsworth at the time.

The debate has polarised around environmental concerns and national economic competitiveness. But there are other axes, particularly the line beyond which broader national priorities can trump local community concerns, or indeed individual private rights. In Sipson there is a man in his 90s who refuses to move: I wish him many more years in his chosen, legitimate place.

And I hope that confrontational anti-expansion campaigners with global perspectives will show due respect for the residents' own, locally-focussed campaign. People live here, and don't you forget it.

But the emphasis on Sipson as a cheerful, close-knit village bothers me, because it seems to imply that without this sense of community, verifiable by visiting journalists, the place - and the people who live there - wouldn't matter. But it would, as long as people wanted to live there.

The image is by Stephen Hird for Reuters and I found it here.

Social media and local democracy

Paul Evans is forging towards a clearer understanding of how we use social media to contribute to local democracy, not just for citizens but also for councillors. He notes that there's plenty of welcome effort going into freeing-up central and local government datasets for re-use, but 'making data available to clever techies so that they use it in mashups is all very well'.

What about the more qualitative data? The pamphlets that make arguments - the kind of things that politicians really do get overloaded with?

What seems to be needed, he suggests, is for local government to find a way of motivating citizens' groups 'to survey all of the policy information on a given subject and to discuss it in an eavesdroppable way'. What will make a difference is being able to evaluate public policy options. Which may mean

finding local co-ordinators to establish policy discussion groups - using collaborative filtering media to identify information of interest, isolate the useful data, and present it in a way that local councillors can use it.

What this seems to amount to is acknowledging more voices while encouraging them to cluster. Democracy will change with us as we go.

Older people in rural areas

The Social Exclusion Task Force (SETF) in the Cabinet Office has put out a call for evidence for a short study on older people in rural areas. They seek evidence of good practice and innovation related to:

• Social inclusion and participation
• Improving health and well-being
• Supporting older people to live independently
• The provision of transport.

Neighbourly relations play an under-appreciated part in all four. Deadline for contributions 30 January 2009.

Regeneration and neighbourhood relations

All round the fringes of London in the south east counties of England, there is regeneration work going on around numerous huge solid Victorian public building complexes - hospitals and asylums which were testament to a characteristic approach to social and health issues of the time. I once had a guided tour round one of these - Broadmoor high-security psychiatric hospital - and was hugely impressed by the reassuring solidity and detail in the architecture and the sense of space that was created for people condemned to its confines.

In some cases the regeneration, which is largely about housing from a mix of refurbishment and new-build, seems to have been brought to a halt by the recession. Arguments about our 21st century notions of 'sustainable communities' characterise the contemporary use of this land. Here's Andrew Simpson, Regeneration Programme Director at Springfield Village in south west London, in a recent IDeA interview, talking about what they're trying to achieve:

We are working with Queen Mary’s Medical School on what constitutes a good environment for people’s mental and physical health. Their work to date shows that the stress associated with noise outside of your home that you have no control over – loud music, traffic and so on – is one of the biggest sources of potential health problems arising from your environment.

How you don’t manage this, as far as I can see, is through ASBOs and central government diktat. So we are trying to codify what it is that we need to build into the management of Springfield Garden Village to encourage people to respond to the needs and wishes of their neighbours, but within boundaries that people will see as acceptable.

My assessment is that this readiness to think about neighbouring is still quite rare, in spite of the inevitable rhetoric about 'community' in every masterplan for projects of this kind.

The image is from the Springfield Village vision and masterplan.

Zap thy neighbour

Volunteers in a Suffolk village have been trained to use laser monitoring equipment, which records the speed and registration of passing vehicles, information which can then be passed to the police.

Such community speed watch schemes are a logical development of citizen involvement in policing. Another parish council decided not to be involved in the scheme because they felt that the public should not be expected to do the police's job.

“It involves quite a bit of cost to set up, we would be doing the police's job for them, you get people to stand out there in the cold and possibly catch their friends and neighbours which could cause problems.”

So once again the technology helps us focus in on the extent to which we've outsourced responsibilities for the co-production of safety and security in our neighbourhoods, to external formal agencies - and got so accustomed to it that we think it's right.

People are justified in getting agitated about the disregard with which motorists are allowed to speed through the neighbourhoods, but I wonder about a couple of things.

First, there's something sinister (but not deceitful) about the power of this technology to monitor other people's behaviour. Have we really worked hard enough at more human persuasive processes to encourage civility on the part of the cocooned motorist to other members of the species?

Secondly, village life being what it is, there could be a concern about the extent to which volunteers are known and identifiable. Have there been inclusive engagement exercises within the village to explore consensus around the issue and the process, so that harmful and lasting social divisions don't begin to appear?

Social interaction and mobile technologies

Keith Hampton describes research findings (in press) which suggest that social interaction in urban public spaces (parks, plazas, and markets) is likely to be more diverse than interactions through wireless internet use, which in turn are likely to be more diverse than interactions through mobile use.

I think this is just what we would predict, because the serendipity potential of the mobile is negligible compared with face-to-face, and wifi use is more open to interruption than is mobile. But that doesn't mean it isn't reassuring in a way, and you can be sure the methodology was robust.

It builds on Keith's previous paper which looked at wifi use in cafes and included consideration of the possibility of

‘contextual’ or ‘neighborhood effects’ within cafes, whereby the lack of sociability of some cafe users has the potential to reduce the overall sociability of a public space.

Try a little MSI

Communities and Local Government today published guidance on 'meaningful social interaction,' reassuringly sub-titled 'How encouraging positive relationships between people can help build community cohesion'.

It needs to be seen in the context of the work and recommendations of the Commission on Integration and Cohesion, and more broadly of the debate on how policy can influence behaviour.

I happen to think this is an under-appreciated topic and deserves more policy attention, and more media attention, than it gets. And to be fair, the document also deserved a bit of copy-editing: that might have helped avoid the feeling that this theme is given a relatively low priority in a tiny corner of a huge government department.

Here's my quick take on it for the Joe Public blog.

 

Spare a thought

It would be nice to think that organisations like the Dalia Association in the Palestinian Territories could really be given the chance to show what community development can do. (Thanks once again to Hildy for the link).

Their site carries a thought-provoking note from Avila Kilmurray, Director of the Community Foundation for Northern Ireland:

What was overwhelming about the situation faced by the Dalia Association was the need to work in a society where freedom of movement is so stringently curtailed; where a people are grasping desperately at protecting their own story and culture; and where even the best efforts at reconstruction can be swept aside by the politics of the day.

The pic is from the Dalia site, taken by Muthanna Al-Qadi.

Vote 'stocks' while local villains last

Patrick Wintour reports in yesterday's Guardian that the government is preparing a green paper which may allow local people to vote on what form of punishment is handed out to convicted criminals in their neighbourhood. This would apply to low-level crimes such as disorderly conduct. (Daily Mail coverage here).

It does have the unfortunate feel of government by the miserable standards of contemporary broadcasting. As I understand it, a broadcast programme can have expert judges dismissing a comic-but-flat-footed celebrity in a televised dancing competition to the resounding displeasure of millions, who then overturn the decision by the power of popular vote. Be sure the message did not go unnoticed in Whitehall.

Maybe it's just one of those 'test-the-water' ideas which policy makers dribble from time to time, to see if anyone's paying attention. But it has its justification in Louise Casey's review of community engagement in the justice system, which I mentioned a few weeks ago.

I note also that the green paper will be published (this spring) by the Ministry of Justice, not by the Home Office; and that Communities Secretary Hazel Blears is said to be supportive. So it may well come to pass in some form.

Watch out for the option of online voting to spice it up. A few moments thought about just who would be motivated to review thoroughly the available evidence in any given local case and make a judgement on it, should be enough to shiver the spine a little. The potential for amplifying local social divisions, rather than stimulating cohesion, is not trivial. It could force people to 'take more of an interest in local issues' (and is this the best way to achieve that objective?) or more likely it could lead to more people withdrawing from local affairs in despair.

But let's say a senior civil servant, having worked hard promoting this policy measure, is making their way home one evening in spring. Turning the corner of their home street they are accosted by a local person coming out of a pub.

Believing themselves under attack and lashing out, the official's elbow strikes the other's head (who, your honour, was just asking for a light). Down he goes, striking his head against the kerb. Blood on the pinstripes, sirens in the night, intensive care, incensed relatives and furious friends who, ah, happen to live nearby. The case comes to court: the official is found to have acted with unreasonable violence. Invited to decide on the punishment, how do local people vote? Would you be ready to accept the outcome yourself?

Wintour writes in the Guardian:

The home secretary, Jacqui Smith, said that she favoured local people being given a much clearer choice in deciding what form of community punishment is imposed in their neighbourhood.

['Community punishment'? What does that mean?]

Smith told the Guardian it was wrong that Casey, former head of the Respect unit, was not retained in the Home Office but was moved to the Children's Department soon after Gordon Brown became prime minister. As a result the government lost focus on antisocial behaviour, Smith argues.

Three separate points strike me, to do with the misguided respect agenda, understandings of the role of expertise in governance, and the historical precedent for locally-meted punishment.

(i) The government ought to refocus on civil relations, but it was right to drop the Respect agenda. It was a half-baked set of policies which used disrespect, through an emphasis on shaming, to promote a peculiarly partial approach to civil relations. In particular, it completely failed even to acknowledge that our society is riddled with sanctioned disrespectful behaviour on the part of 'respectable' citizens. More, if more is needed, in chapter 1 of this.

(ii) In three or four presentations last year I used a slide about the three roles in governance, emphasising the need for a balance of influence between elected representative, citizen, and public sector officer. I expressed the concern, which seems to be recognised by people I've spoken to, that most of us emerge from our education system with a feeble understanding of the role of officers (expertise) in local democracy - how important their expertise is in areas too specialised for most of the rest of us to follow.

Broadly speaking, this lack of understanding is reinforced by our popular media. They bash our public services at every opportunity and central government stifles support - for social workers, teachers, probation workers and many others trying to compensate for all sorts of social shortfall.

If this new initiative erodes the ability of the courts to apply their expertise - for instance, in an understanding of research which explains the effects of different punishments in different circumstances - it could be diminishing democracy, not enhancing it. And as one of the commentators on Comment is free puts it:

surely we vote for people who then represent us -

not vote for people who then say "i can't be bothered - YOU do it"

Oh yes and there's that irritating little point (picked up recently by Paul Evans over on Local Democracy) that it's not unheard-of for the public to be wrong.

(iii) Sometime last year I got interested in the system of gebuurten developed in medieval european cities of Belgium and the Netherlands. These were neighbourhood associations and in Ghent each covered an average of 45-50 households. All adult inhabitants were full members of their gebuurte, regardless of their wealth or social status. Heads of households elected a 'dean' who could exact punishment through fines for a wide range of offences related to anti-social behaviour and community norms.

The deans' role was to keep peace and order. They carried out a form of locally-accountable justice, and the system survived in cities like Ghent and Leuven for something like 500 years. I hope to be able to research the geburrten in more detail in future, because I suspect they point to an achieved equilibrium in terms of maintaining local involvement in justice. I'm particularly curious about one possible implication, suggesting that neighbourhood online networks might function most effectively if they include a governance role.

Meanwhile, back to the future: I'm not at all averse to this government exploring as far as it can the limits of local involvement in public services, in fact I applaud that. But I would rather they did so with a better record of having listened when arguments built up against them.

Previously (selected):
Criminalising kids: questions about risk and respect

Respect agenda dissolves in self-parody

Young people, respect and uniforms.