Neighbourhoods

Neighbours' tree

A local asset - my Neighbours tree, transformed the past couple of weeks. Slides 2 and 4 are just five days apart.

Update: I've added another image to this sequence. And I understand that if you're using Firefox you may have trouble viewing it - apologies.

Lack of cohesion: a problem of the political class?

On the Joe Public blog, Dave Clements argues that claims about 'the death of community' are

"more an expression of the political class's own sense of dislocation from society than an accurate reflection of real world problems."

Participation: levels and barriers

I was talking to a group of seven or eight older people the other day, who were all active in social and civic roles in an area where most had lived for more than ten years (some more than thirty years).

There was clear consensus among the group that local people were neither more nor less likely to get involved now than they were 20 years ago. 'It's still five per cent,' was one man's way of summing it up.

People spoke about barriers to participation, and got quite worked up about the impact of CRB checks, the amount of documentation you have to read to be an active citizen, and the compensation culture:

There's far more stuff you have to read. Strategies and risk analyses. Society can be so litigious, that keeps people back a bit. People are generally wary of this compensation culture, the blame culture...

It was noted that scout groups, for example, have great difficulty recruiting volunteers, and village fetes are in decline because of the insurance costs.

So there are powerful forces working against participation, and yet these experienced folk felt that levels of involvement had not really changed. What's going on then?

Perhaps previously the barriers to participation were lower but the opportunities and calls for involvement were fewer. Was there more social and cultural participation (local societies, faith group involvement, sports clubs) and less civic participation? Or does it just seem that way now because we're trying to force civic participation and finding levels of social involvement inadequate? Presumably there were also higher levels of union and political party membership, which could more readily be mobilised into political participation.

These questions highlight the need to understand if people progress from social to political participation (which seems the more likely direction, if there is one); and if so, how and why they do so. Wouldn't it be good if there was some well-funded research going on, which might give us insights into such questions? Ooh look, that's handy, Involve have announced just such a project. Presumably they'll be talking to older people.

Development dilemma

Should living standards be compromised in the face of urgent need to provide accommodation for homeless people?

An inspector has upheld an enforcement notice aimed at blocking the conversion of two houses in Leeds into six flats, finding that noise and disturbance for neighbours and poor living conditions are not justified by the need to find temporary accommodation for homeless people.

From Planning daily.

'What you already know about financial stuff'

Today was budget day in the UK, and a historic one.

I was in a community centre running a workshop with some young mums, and as so often, I found there was someone else's recent work left on the flipchart from a previous session.

Consensus, community, and cultural capital

I’ve been gathering some thoughts for a session on empowerment and participation with some MA students at Staffordshire Uni this week, which has sent me back to Jacqui Karn’s excellent book Narratives of neglect. Fearful that I wouldn't do it justice, I failed to blog it at the time; but here are some belated thoughts based around some of my notes, covering two main themes: consensus and community; and cultural capital.

The book is an exploration of the processes of participation and governance in the regeneration of a Manchester estate. No-one I’ve mentioned it to in the participation field seems to have read it, which is a shame, because it's packed with insights.

I come at Karn’s analysis from the viewpoint that, from the time of the initial neighbourhood governance proposals, the government’s empowerment agenda was predicated on unrealistic assumptions that community could be construed to mean consensus.

Problems arise where consensus is not apparent; or, being assumed, appears to be threatened. The idea of ‘moral community’ which characterised the Blair years requires practitioners to pursue consensus at all costs. In this context, as Karn puts it, ‘community is in essence constituted as unproblematic,’ and participatory practices constitute ‘the community’ as those who participate constructively, cooperatively and reasonably within the process.

Those who do not adhere to the assumptions of what is best for the community are labelled as ungovernable and subject to demonising mechanisms that exclude them. Groups come to be categorised in terms of governability, which in turn legitimises coercion.

‘This dual, contractual emphasis on encouraging compliance with a latent community and the control of an ungovernable minority legitimises the use of state agencies’ coercive powers against the “irresponsible.”’

Consensus becomes a question of ensuring (or even guaranteeing) similarity rather than recognising and working with difference. In my view this is an important point for understanding how the engagement agenda might fuse with the cohesion agenda.

The second key theme refreshes some of my own recent thinking about the lack of attention paid to cultural capital. Karn stressed the way power was reflected in the language and knowledge that participants brought to the process she described. She found that

‘The dominance of professional language and knowledge undermined residents’ position both in the partnerships and amongst fellow residents as they so clearly lacked the capital at stake in the process to be able to exert an authoritative voice.’

Karn argues that the professionals in the context she studied tended to conceive of the community as in close contact and united. She adds that they tend ‘to present their knowledge of local problems and solutions as incontestable.’

‘The power dynamics created by this difference in the knowledge claims of participants are particularly important in establishing that the capital at stake in this field is not social capital but cultural.’

Karn, J. (2007). Narratives of neglect: community, regeneration and the governance of security. Cullompton, Willan.

 

 

Catching up with the neighours

Tramping home from the train station I came round the corner and saw one of my neighbours, propped up with a walking stick, using a foot-pump to re-inflate one of his car tyres.

The stick was the more unexpected sight. Turns out he'd recently had a cartilage operation. I took a few minutes at the foot-pump (must have made some difference) while we casually swapped news.

Could it be that cars offer more for neighbourhood relations when they malfunction than when they run smoothly? I understand it's a slow puncture, so with careful management it could provide numerous valued encounters over the years.

School grounds: ambiguously-public spaces

I was ejected from school grounds the other day, hasn't happened to me for years.

I had a favourite little training patch (non-athletes look away now), a straight path with a good surface measuring about 500 metres, well away from traffic, and from time to time I would do a set of timed reps up and down at a modest speed. Only ever at weekends of course, or during school holidays, when there was no-one around.

The grounds were always open, and I've never seen a sign telling me I shouldn't or couldn't go in and use the path. I happen to think there are such things as community assets, and if not causing any damage (except to myself perhaps) it seems reasonable to take advantage of them.

Well someone came and politely told me I couldn't, which led me to realise how access to such assets has been eroded, apparently arbitrarily, over the years. A couple of other local schools, with grass running tracks marked out in summer, which is always useful, have long since been fenced and gated, so of course the spaces are largely unusued for a lot of the time. Fortunately my kids' old school, although without a proper track, remains sensibly accessible and I can plod about there whenever the place is empty. For how much longer, I don't know.

These are ambiguously-public spaces, and we seem to have surrendered them incrementally through unchallenged local policies.

Here's another nice period of change you've gotten me into

We're all chewing over the kind of social and political change we're getting into. In a letter in Wednesday's Guardian, Jonathan Pugh suggested that 2009 could be a watershed year with the realisation that 'policies for collective social improvement can only be achieved collectively.'

That same day, Will Davies wrily posted on the new Labour approach to nitty-gritty social policy:

'New Labour has the political psychology of an infant that has yet to work out the difference between 'world' and 'self'. It removes its hands from its eyes, and believes it has just produced everything it sees.'

Will went on to ponder, a tad pessimistically perhaps, the political establishment's assimilation of the 'anti-economic':

'The final frontier of neo-liberalism ... is crossed once resolutely anti-economic modes of organisation and decision-making, which neo-liberals have historically been least convinced by, become embraced by those with the calculator.'

And while all this intellectual prowess was exercising itself in public, I was talking to a couple of dutch researchers in a London cafe about the way in which collective behaviour is now once again permissible, thanks largely to climate change and environmentalism - a trend detectable well before the recession and in my view not necessarily weakened by it.

Oh, and here's Indy Johar in a video interview, contemplating (3 or 4 minutes in) 'the rise of public man':

'The idea of validation through consumption will be challenged. Validation through civic participation will be more significant.'

That'll be the future then: to be continued.

Lifetime neighbourhoods in recession: what about people?

A couple weeks ago I was at a debate organised by the International Longevity Centre (ILC-UK) on the lifetime neighbourhoods agenda in the current economic climate. ILC have published a collection of essays to reassert the importance of this agenda, which is based on what in my view was one of the best government policy papers of recent years, written by Ed Harding.

The debate covered all the hardware stuff thoroughly - all the issues around building, planning, mixed use, transport connections and so on. Discussants understandably put a lot of effort into emphasising the need to keep a focus on quality environments. The mantra of 'the flight to quality' was served up for the converted to repeat, to strengthen our determination not to let present underfunding give rise to shoddy construction and uninhabitable townscapes in the future. Quite right too.

But we badly needed a perspective on local social relations to make these prospects of lifetime neighbourhoods seem worth realising. Understanding how to make mixed use neighbourhoods function in an ageing and diversifying society is already challenging us desperately. We don't invest properly in intergenerational work or community development, while continuing to plan new settlements apparently without thought for local amenities Will lifetime neighbourhoods be another agenda which gets stripped down simply to those things the accountants know how to measure? - bricks, heating, journeys...?

Well, maybe not. Absent on the day but present in the published volume, up pops JRF's John Low with a solid essay which I strongly recommend. He reminds us that there are good reasons to expect that deprived neighbourhoods will decline faster than more affluent ones and that 'housing solutions alone will not solve the multiple problems that beset our worst neighbourhoods'.

Of course financial cuts are threatened all over the public, voluntary and community sectors. But here, with my emphasis added, are three 'rays of hope' offered by John Low:

• Community empowerment has risen steadily up the agenda of all political parties, including a plethora of initiatives from the current administration in England. Especially in local authorities that have taken this seriously, good practice is reasonably well embedded and may prove harder to cut. Also, as suggested above, localised and affordable neighbourhood management approaches seem very much the best bet for ‘recession proofing’ deprived areas; and such initiatives need underpinning with good community work.

• Over the last 10-15 years independent voluntary and community sector bodies have increased their national profile and collective voice. This too may help to act as a brake on cuts. We should also not forget that many development trusts, churches, other faith groups, councils for voluntary service and schools are playing key roles in supporting neighbourhoods. Everything possible should be done in the present climate to sustain their work.

• Finally, although institutions are often criticised as having poor memories, the serious social disorders that broke out in the 80’s and 90’s in a number of very deprived areas will not have been forgotten. Nobody will want a repeat of these, and his fear could act as a strong disincentive to paring down services and funds, in such neighbourhoods, to the very bone: and as an encouragement, on the contrary, to retaining a range of low level but effective services in these areas.

After the car

I'm really looking forward to this. Publication 8 May; form an orderly queue.

More here at CeMoRe, or here on the Wiley site.

A different plot every week

The Selworthy Apollo cinema has 12 seats, shows a short feature before the film and provides refreshments during the interval. It's located in a shed in the garden of a Birmingham pensioner. Unfortunately the BBC story doesn't tell us anything about the visitors - where they come from, how well they know one another or how they came to be there.

 

Object

This is my mother's breadboard. Thirteen inches by nine. There's a burn mark on one corner. The surface scuffed with an unintelligible geometry of honest scars, the full alphabet of blademarks in the service of bread. Even the underside is scored.

Towards the centre it's worn down almost half an inch lower than the edges. The rake of the everyday. What can have happened there?

In her last years, the hands at this board were gnarled and knotted. How explain that they once have shared Chopin and Schubert, to satisfy some other hunger? Shaking now they might let fall a slice where not intended, like a choked chord. Her feeble eyes would deceive her to start too thick at the moment of incision then taper to a wretched scatter of crumbs. No reference there to previous expertise, to the effortless grace of home.

It was my past too. I'd come in from the street trailing others, all with the boisterous claim of hunger. The buttered chunks piled on this board, devoured, we'd scram back to some traceless game, occupying only the present.

Beckett wrote somewhere that the role of objects is to restore silence.

Why don't we do it in the road? (Updated)

If you talk to Streets Alive's Chris Gittins about organising a street party, and maybe you should, one of the things he'll suggest is that the organisers' meetings be held in the street rather than in people's houses.

'A good place to hold meetings is in the street as it is more welcoming and you can catch people as they go by.'

Just a few neighbours for half an hour or so sitting on a wall working out who's going to do what.

This came up in a conversation today and sparked someone to tell me that where they live, in south London, ward councillors have meetings in the street. If you can do it, a brilliant way of making democracy visible, and minimising the fussy trappings of power.

Someone tell me this happens where they live too.

Postscript

Thanks to Chris Corrigan for this pic of the 'hedgenda' he mentions in his comment. Pic by openspace facilitator Michael Herman.

Privacy and the home

Google Street View continues to expose the fact that we haven't done our thinking about the changing nature of privacy. On Wednesday, residents in the village of Broughton, near Milton Keynes (described by the Mail, which doesn't like to burden its readers with accuracy, as being in Cambridgeshire) blocked the passage of a Google Street View car and persuaded the driver to turn around. Ah the playful rebelliousness of middle England. The Times has them as a 'village mob'.

There's an account here that is altogether more placid.

In the Beeb's report, one of the protesters said:

"If they were simply going to view the street as a street scene rather than drive almost into people's drives and take pictures of the houses - I think that's a different issue."

Almost into people's drives? That would be like what we call 'going past' then, would it?

The Mail managed somehow, don't ask me, to raise the possibility that 'it's an invitation for burglars to strike':

"I don't mind estate agents taking pictures but this shows people how to get in and how to get out."

Getting out as well as getting in? I didn't realise there was so much detail.

But don't we need to get beyond the petty mindedness of the property-obsessed, to reflect on how the house-as-home remains central to our understanding of notions of privacy, even while that privacy has been reshaped by other forces around e.g. data, citizenship and broadcast media?

The excitable defensiveness of wealthy home-owners is not enough to convince me that I have a fundamental, irrevocable human right to stop people looking in my windows. As I recall, Witold Rybczynski's book Home is a good start for understanding how very recent the idea of the private home is in human history. The privacy part of it may already be in decline - not because the notion of 'home' has changed necessarily, but because the notion of privacy is changing.

There are other confusions, such as discussing Street View with reference to the high number of CCTV cameras we have in this country (about 20% of the world's total, I heard recently). But as one comment here notes,

There is a big difference between cctv and streetview for example, number of violent crimes caught on street view isn't quite as high. It's privacy invasion for the sake of privacy invasion.

But that's my point - what do we mean, 'privacy invasion'? Where's the public debate that gets us away from knee-jerk insistence on a vague sense of interference and the self-righteous defence of property?

I can't say I'm particularly bothered about Street View, and the notion of there being people who might describe themselves as 'Street View Enthusiasts' is just depressing. But it's more depressing to have people getting pompously worked up about keeping others away from where they live. If having lots of stuff gets you so fussed about losing it, maybe don't have so much stuff.

And if I find myself feeling that the sight of a car with a camera on it is sinister, I hope I'll have the grace first of all to examine why I feel like that, before squalling for the police.

Anyway, I liked this little comment on the Mail's adjectivally-super-charged coverage:

"I'm outraged! I just saw clear pictures of my street and the houses with kids playing on the road and their little faces not blanked out.

Mind you, they are in black and white and taken in the early 1900s!"