Neighbourhoods

Juxtaprose 1

We have a small car park (which is private propert) for residents only with a clear sign stating this at the bottom of the drive. Visitors to residents keep parking in our car park & if a note is left on their windscreen asking them not to park here again they leave rather abusive & threatening notes, all residents know to tell visitors to park elsewhere. Where do we stand legally & what should we do please. (1).

First, we examined whether mole-rats scent-mark their territorial boundaries in response to the location of a neighbouring mole-rat. We found that when an intruder was introduced, the test animal almost always shifted its latrine location to the intruder's side. Then, we used soil plugs saturated with urine plus faeces or with water to determine whether scentmarks influence mole-rat excavation patterns and whether there are differences in mole-rat reaction to a stranger's scent. (2).

Clean up your trash

Nice example of neighbour 'blackmail' posted by Kit Hodge over on the Neighbors Project blog. Even if they haven't thought about the misuse of capital letters, somebody's gone to a lot of trouble: that's a large poster, they don't want you to miss it.

The naming and shaming game

Back in January I reflected at some length on the government's plans to 'name and shame' offenders who have been convicted in local courts.

Patrick Wintour, in a measured article, reports in today's Guardian that Ministers are looking at 'controversial plans' to distribute leaflets in neighbourhoods as part of this inititiative. I'm afraid it does suggest a degree of political desperation.

We (and the government, how could I forget them) should note in particular the huge and staring-in-the-face-obvious potential for these measures to amplify local social divisions, rather than stimulate cohesion.

I'm not sure if I can put it more simply than this: they won't work. And apart from anything else, the plans are a wretchedly unthinking dismissal of the professionalism and commitment of probation workers who do so much to help offenders recover and re-establish themselves. 

Something else - Wintour notes:

'Ministers recognise that the demise of local court reporting, due to cuts in local media journalism, has ended one source of communicating the effectiveness of the courts.'

Uh, have they heard of neighbourhood online networks? Happily, communication in neighbourhoods does not necessarily stop just because the economics of one medium becomes prohibitive.

People still have ways of finding things out, and with systems like Harringay Online (I know, I've mentioned it before, but it continues to amaze me) residents communicate more and more. Perhaps 'communicating the effectiveness of the courts' could be one of several reasons why government should invest in local online nets. Please.

Why pubs need the CIA

This morning to ippr for a seminar on the future of community pubs, meaning pubs that predominantly serve their surrounding community. Rick Muir at ippr has been working with CAMRA to research the decline of community pubs, the social implications, and the policy options. The ratio of pubs to people fell from 1:201 in 1871, to 1:761 in 1971. It's gone on falling: 39 pubs are closing each week.

We could rehearse the reasons but they're not hard to list. It's critical not just as an issue for local economies, but also as an issue of local cohesion and the health of social networks.

In ippr's survey, pubs scored highest as the local places where people meet others from different backgrounds. The community pub is widely seen as a great social leveller, although it was acknowledged that they can be exclusive. It's still a somewhat gendered institution with faith and age exclusions.

Apparently the average pub raises £3,000 per year for charitable causes. A lot of business is transacted in pubs, they're essential meeting places for numerous local groups. Unlike supermarkets, which encourage less convivial drinking, pubs tend to put money back into their local economy.

And tradition matters to people - the sense of continuity and authenticity matters, the resistance to homogeneity and anonymity. People call it 'character'.

CAMRA's Mike Brenner raised the question of defining what is meant by a well-run community pub. So right, let's have a debate that generates awareness, understanding and motivation. It's apparent that pubs could be run as community interest companies, let's get a model that recognises their social role instead of regarding it as coincidental.

I took the opportunty to bang the drum for the idea of Community Impact Assessments (CIAs). I just want to see a robust methodology using social network analysis so that we can demonstrate the social impact of significant changes at local level (like road changes, large developments, provision of amenities etc). I've thumped out this rhythm often enough before (eg) and I feel that if we'd started work on it years ago, we might not have got into the mess we're now in with post offices.

Apart from anything else, having and using an accepted device to demonstrate 'community impact' could create an incentive within the pub industry to make a contribution to local community cohesion.

One of the MPs present said that it 'would help massively'. A ministerial adviser followed up with a call for the think tanks to get together and sort it out - which sounds either naive or ironic, given the way think-tanks behave, but encouraging, because I've been suggesting this for some years with understandably have less influence.

I propose to try and get a few folk around a flip chart and see what can be teased out of their brains.

Four types of deprived neighbourhood

It's theory time. Here's the new typology of low-income neighbourhoods, based on the dynamics of household mobility.

The overall level of mobility in Britain is about 11% per year, and it's mainly a function of the age structure of neighbourhoods and the life-cycle stage of households. Brian Robson and colleagues at the Centre for Urban Policy Studies in Manchester have proposed and tested a model of four types of deprived neighbourhood:

• Transit areas are deprived neighbourhoods in which most in-movers come from less deprived areas and most out-movers go to less deprived areas.
• In Escalator areas, most of the in-movers come from areas that are equally or more deprived, so that the neighbourhood becomes part of a continuous onward-and-upward progression through the housing and labour markets.
• Gentrifier areas are ones in which there is a degree of social improvement since most in-movers come from less deprived areas and most out-movers go to similarly or more deprived areas.
• Isolate areas represent neighbourhoods in which households come from and move to areas that are equally or more deprived. Hence they can be seen as neighbourhoods that are associated with a degree of entrapment of poor households who are unable to break out of living in deprived areas.

The report, published by CLG last week, draws particular attention to Isolate areas:

Isolate areas may provide the strongest case for comprehensive policy intervention to improve the prospects of all households since the areas are unlikely to improve without intervention.

In Isolate areas, especially those whose adjacent areas are also deprived... the opportunities for residents are likely to be more restricted and... the net result of in-flows and outflows is unlikely to lead to ‘natural’ improvement in the stock of households.

Also, the authors note that deprived neighbourhoods which are surrounded by other deprived areas could face greater problems and present more challenging contexts than those that are adjacent to more prosperous areas. In the latter, local opportunities – for employment, for access to higher-performing schools, etc – are likely to be markedly greater.

How we communicate with our neighbours #27

I just wanted to ask, are you sure it's not a fox?

Meanwhile, to redress the regrettable imbalance in communication of this kind, I long for an example of complaint about cats. Without prospect of being controlled, they crap all over the gardens of people with children. And yet somehow, cat-owners seem incapable of recognising this as anti-social. Wait, don't go, I haven't started on the bit about their habit of killing birds...

Creative writing, alive

Thanks to the folk at zero zero for the heads up on 826NYC. It's a volunteer-driven project which gets young people excited about writing through drop-in tutoring, field trips, after-school workshops, in-school tutoring, help for English language learners, and assistance with student publications. The video.

View

Annie lives on the seventh floor and hates with hardening passion the trudge up when the lift fails. Coming home to a flat at height is a committed action, you wouldn't feel like popping out again shortly after, for anything.

To the window now. It's early evening, a thin light is being peeled from the old earth. Bits of city are seething away somewhere completely out of reach. The patch below unpeopled, but it hardly looks as if they'd belong there anyway. Her tea cup rattles on its prim saucer as she slops to a chair, relishing the wobbly silence.

Then I see what it is, the cost and benefit of detachment. Living in a house separates you, living in a tower separates you more, until you begin to like it. Of course Annie works at that with the tenants committee but it was the sound of the door catch closing behind her that refreshed her most.

And looking out I have the most profound sense of unbelonging. Not to this place or person, not to the tangent of this view, or the conversations before with those around who might move or speak or dream as I do.

Before my eyes a bird unhurried sets off to separate the sky.

How we maintain the public realm

What can you tell about our society by the way we fund the public realm? School libraries are an interesting example - not exactly public, but a kind of sandpit or practice area for learning to use the public realm.

To be honest I'd thought the state of libraries in most schools was probably so dire I wouldn't dare look. Then this caught my eye the other day - an invitation to purchase a certain breakfast cereal from a multinational with a dubious reputation, in order to help stock school libraries.

Julian Dobson offers another example, with divorce lawyers contributing to floral displays in Leeds city square.

Visualising homeless people

Here's another image, from my phone, of Heath Bunting's visualisation of the characteristics of homeless people. Ooh look, there's a world outside.

In possession of a declaration of local connection

As of last night, on the wall in the Crisis Skylight project cafe in Newcastle you can see this visualisation of characteristics of homeless people, devised by the artist Heath Bunting.

It's part of the Status Project,where Bunting has found a way of mapping the relation between the individual and institutional status systems.

I gasped when I saw it: it's art emerging from words, relationships and social justice - all things that preoccupy me. Be prepared to spend some time discovering and reflecting. Try this one -

A1009 electorally registered

Sustainable development includes local facilities

Yesterday to Newcastle, for a seminar on the SOLUTIONS project a significant five-year research programe on 'sustainable land use and transport in outer neighbourhoods'. Findings are starting to come together and I'll try and summarise them here by the time of the final conference in May.

Meanwhile, just wanted to reflect a small part of the discussion which was about how new residential developments happen and what policy can do about them. It seems that problems often arise when, for public funding reasons, transport systems get withdrawn from developments which have been designed and approved around these very systems.

And the problems get compounded when developments are approved without attention being paid to local amenities. Yes, it's still going on, leading Nick Falk of Urbed to remark on the critical importance of appropriate facilities. Nick suggested that 'we will come to regret the massive schools we've built.'

Cue a reading of the Guardian's housing supplement the other day, and an article by Annie Kelly about the East Road development in Hackney, north east London:

When East Road opened in 2008 with rents of around £100 a week, the waiting list was 1,000-strong, proving it is the sort of design-led affordable housing project London needs more of. Along with their keys, tenants picked up automatic rights to enjoy the onsite gym, internet cafe, sauna, launderette and roof terrace.

We need more thinking like that, to redefine the meaning of having a home you don't own in a neighbourhood where you have a sense of ownership.

Observing urban drivers in their natural habitat: no.2

I popped out to the bank, less than half a mile, walked back down one of the side roads, noticed someone sitting in their car reading a newspaper, with the engine running.

A few minutes at home - fielded a phone call, changed shoes, off out again to the train station, chose the same route. There she is still, sat there reading with the engine running. Now I'm at the window. Excuse me, your engine is running. She's closed, no reaction. I'm talking clearly at the glass: I came past ten minutes ago and it was running then. We only have the one planet. Faint response, finger to the head. I heard the motorsound replaced by a reluctant sort of silence behind me as I shuffled on.

Previously:
Observing urban drivers in their natural habitat

What do you mean, 'local'?

Over on the Local democracy blog Dave Briggs asks, how close is local?

I'd say most people regard 'local' as geographically within reach, and obviously that differs individually, which is fine. If terminology is fuzzy it doesn't necessarily mean it's invalid. We need definitions for administrative areas (wards, cantons, parishes) but not to explain individually-variable experiences of the socially-charged space nearest to the home.

And maybe it helps to think about what local is not. For instance, it's not the same as nearness, and that's reinforced in this image (courtesy of Indy Johar, 00 architects), which reminds us how transport efficiencies influence our sense of distance.

So why after generations and centuries of people gathering together in villages, towns and cities, are we suddenly struggling with the fact that terms like neighbourhood and locality aren't rigidly defined? What has happened for instance that causes Dave quite reasonably to suggest that

'it will be increasingly important to research how people’s notions of their own ‘local’ will determine levels of interest'?

Well here's a wild guess: our behaviours within societies have become just a bit too fluid and mobile to make our identification with place readily apparent to each other. It's not that people were not mobile in the past - the middle ages for instance saw significant levels of complex mobility - but that when we are settled in a given place, we're still not always 'there' or always associated with it. We occupy our neighbourhoods less than ever and interact less with those around us, partly because we no longer have to of course. Hold the grimey lens of hyper-diversity in front of all that and the character of 'localness' becomes even less clear.

This stuff crops up everywhere now. Last night I took part in a discussion at a Talk the Walk networking meeting where participants explored some of the reasons why people find some public spaces offputting or threatening. And immediately, voices were rehearsing technical solutions - urban design, essentially. I've no wish to denigrate the role of design to help address such needs, but somehow discussion of social and cultural issues always seems to get squeezed out. How come we find it so hard to accept that problems in the use of public space are (at least in part) social problems?

Some places can appear 'anti-social' (in the broadest sense) not just because of design problems but also because of the way people behave when they have few and/or inadequate connections with those around them. How does it happen that a loan male walking in the park in broad daylight is perceived as threatening? Design solutions alone will not make much difference in helping the woman who sees things that way begin to reclaim the space - for which she'll need a range of local social connections.

How does it happen that the group of kids rippling their muscles on the street corner are seen as intimidating? (Partly because they are, I know). Design solutions alone will not set up the kinds of open, non-threatening and unstructured activities that allow them to test and discover role and respect in society.

Dave Briggs is right of course, it now matters for us to understand individual notions of 'local'. And those notions are socially-constructed. Ideally they should be shaped as much by informal interactions as by formal measures. The more we outsource our local social responsibilities, the less that happens. The task is to work out how the homeopathic chemistry of informal social relations can restore health to the metabolism of community.

Previously:
Informal influences on local social capital

On superficial neigthbourhood relations

Frail elderly snow-woman

   

This is Mildred. She's in the shade and fading slowly. Compare.

BeLocal workshop game

The other day I ran a game at a BeLocal workshop on 'Building and engaging local communities using digital technologies,' organised by Simon Grice.

The intention was to use fiction to create a local context and bring a touch of reality to the fresh excitement of 'freeing up information' for the citizen. 

Time to refer to the recent Power of Information Taskforce Report (beta) report which recommends that UK central government should create the capability for others to re-use and innovate with 'official' datasets. They quote the Prime Minister:

‘Public information does not belong to government, it belongs to the public on whose behalf government is conducted'

- but of course we need to go further. Most people aren't going to be too interested in whether or not information 'belongs' to them, if it doesn't help them or is not pertinent. If we can create information services, personalised or not, that advance the engagement and empowerment of people who experience disadvantage and exclusion, then making them relevant to others is not likely to be too problematic.

And invariably, as Simon noted during the workshop, discussions among information professionals tend to drift away from 'community' to reflect a precoccupation with the systems.

So the objective of the game was to devise an information system, but it had to be based on a neighbourhood context - invented and described by participants; and on the day-to-day lives of individuals - also invented and described by participants.

In the end I over-prescribed some of the conditions but each of the three groups rose to the increasing challenges of complex neighbourhood environments and awkward personal circumstances for their character. The outcomes, when they came to describe their proposed systems, were inventive and sincere: given some of the IT 'solutions' in which local authorities have invested serious money, you might think they had a ready market.

The potential value of the game was summed up for me in the narrative developed by one of the groups about their character - a 51-year old gay formerly married self employed tradesman with no computer skills, who became the driving force for a locally-grown information service that addressed exaggerated and stifling perceptions of the fear of crime.

Lots of new services are going to emerge in the post-Taskforce context and in the slipstream of the Timely Information Initiative, and it may start to feel like a bewildering frantic dash. Reflecting creatively on the environment in which people need and seek information is surely essential for getting this right.

Much of the content of the BeLocal workshop has been captured here by Carl Haggerty.

Community breaks out

Thanks to Ben Taylor of Sector Projects for these thoughts on the social impact of heavy weather (and the pic):

...as the buses were suspended; as well as panic-buying in the supermarket and lots of people working in the coffee shop on the corner of Queenstown Road and Lavender Hill, I thought you'd be pleased to hear reports that community was breaking out in my part of London yesterday alongside the breakdown of infrastructure.

I've seldom ever seen kids playing in our (dead-end, mostly pedestrian) estate, people were helping up little old ladies who slipped and buying them a cup of tea, and I spoke to three of my neighbours which was quite a shock for the system. OK, maybe it wasn't all street parties and sharing of resources, but it just underlines the fact that in extremis, we all tend to revert somewhat to community ideals!

Under snow

Some time ago a frontline public library worker said to me, it's like working in mental health.

What she meant was that libraries are an important refuge for people with mental health difficulties, who may have nowhere else to go for much of the day; and a lot of what library staff do now is providing a facility which helps them. It's an under-appreciated role. Libraries are also an important daily checkpoint for many refugees and asylum seekers.

So I applaud the fact that on a day of capital-stopping weather, on which schools were shut without hesitation, at least in my area the libraries were kept open.

Other notes from the day:

Checking up on the NDNs. She offered me table salt for my path.

Apparently the local store opened up as usual, but a small gang gathered to hurl snowballs through the doors at the groceries so they shut for a while.

Some complete plonker driving on packed icy snow, one hand with a mobile phone to his ear, yacking away. As a pedestrian, it's not the conditions, it's prats like that you have to worry about.

Admiring the weak light making the boughs seem green on a hidden path I use, gasping at the clear readiness of landscape.

On my way back from my run I noted a snow-woman, scruffy but still somehow poised and elegant. A minute later cries caused me to turn, to realise she'd been brutishly knocked over by a couple of unthinking lads, embarrassed at their own laughter. Well at least they were outdoors.

Other schoolkids who have not really known snow, rolling down hill together, learning something about innocent collective discovery that will outlast all childhood.

Recalling the winter of '63, slides right across the village pond, birds frozen to wires and frozen milk forcing the caps off bottles that stuck to the step.