Neighbourhoods

A simple guide to Qualitative Easing

The BBC's Robert Peston, the man who makes the financial news sound like a Roald Dahl story, believes that the macro-economic policy of quantitative easing is not working.

As a service to readers, this blog now offers an easy guide to the little-known alternative micro-social policy of qualitative easing.

Qualitative easing is the government's strategy of floating-off prosocial behaviour by reducing the rate of interest that services actually take in people, thereby 'artificially' increasing the amount of mutual support in the market.

With the index of mutual support having dropped for three successive quarters, and government guilt levels thought to be at an all-time low, the minister for social capital had to move quickly to bolster the reciprocity sector if the social economy was not to go into melt-down.

What does that mean for the ordinary tax-payer? [Pestonian smirk: 'I have a brilliantly-clear answer to this question, dummy, which is why I raise it rhetorically now. So listen meekly...'] Let's assume that a local neighbourhood absorbs X hours of unpaid work per week, augmented by Y hours of local service delivery.

Now, some residents are retired people who had uninterrupted careers followed by enormous pensions, and have established a market in which narrow world views can be traded in for high status. They have no need for Y since they have expensive health insurance. They are now Daily Mail readers who are preoccupied mainly with liquid assets and having two 4 x 4s in the driveway. They provide advice to the government. Lots of it.

The precise value of X is vulnerable to the proportion of lone elderly people in tower blocks, which is decreasing at a rate of thirty-six feet per second per second (a four feet increase over the established laws of physics); plus there's a 35% added-single-mother-syndrome-effect, equivalent to the square on the other side of the estate, so of course a typical Neighbourhood Mutual Support and Internal Care Demand Ratio is volatile at the best of times. Although X and Y have an influence on each other, Y decreases according to quite different economic laws, mainly to do with spending money on things like nuclear submarines, and making payments to people with gambling addiction problems who happen to work for banks.

This means that if, say, a single mother or a lone older person goes to market with a basket of long term needs including food, shelter, and support, their chances of being qualitatively eased out of it completely have been increased by a factor of between today and tomorrow.

In the past, residents would have bought assets from the government in the form of promises, in return for votes. With the complete collapse of this primitive economy, it's not yet clear what effect the increased pressure on unpaid care will have. But what makes qualitative easing so clever is the way it leaves prosocial behaviour to look after itself.

33% believe people would not pull together to improve neighbourhood

The Citizenship Survey generates a lot of useful data that is helpfully repackaged by CLG. A topic report on community cohesion and social networks, from the 2007-08 survey, has been published today. It covers views of the immediate neighbourhood, views of the local area, and fear of crime and anti-social behaviour. The main headline is that 82 per cent agreed that their local area was a place where people from different backgrounds get on well together.

Another finding claims that

'Most people (68%) agreed that people in their neighbourhood would pull together to improve it.'

That doesn't sound too high to me, so I checked the tables, which confirm that 33% 'tend to disagree' or 'definitely disagree'. There's an interesting 14 per cent discrepency with the headline cohesion figure, presumably mostly comprising people who think that those from different backgrounds get on well together in their neighbourhood as things are, but wouldn't be bothered to act collectively to bring about change.

Other findings -

• Pakistani (85%), Indian (80%) and Black Caribbean (79%) people were more likely than White (75%) people to feel a strong sense of belonging to the neighbourhood.

• Meanwhile, Chinese (50%) people were less likely than White (75%) people to strongly belong.

• Meaningful interaction with people from different backgrounds was highest among those aged 16 to 24 years (93%) and lowest amongst those aged 75 or over (52%).

• People with no religion (86%) were more likely than those with a religion (78%) to have regular meaningful interactions with people from different backgrounds.

In the section about 'social networks', as far as I can see all the questions are about friends, which suggests a rather limited interpretation of social networks. I know you gotta start somewhere, but the risk with these kinds of authoritative statistics is that people start quoting them all over the place as gospel. 'Friendship networks' might have been a better heading.

Civic society survey

The Civic Trust closed back in April but its vital role in defending local built environments has necessarily been reasserted - the Civic Society Initiative has been busy over the summer and just announced a survey of civic activity by local community groups.

Deadline for responses is 30 September 2009. There are also a few f2f events around the country.

Maybe neighbourhood blogs reflect neighbourhood demographics?

A week back the ever-alert Nick Booth linked to this article claiming that 'Neighborhood blogs drive participation in city planning'. (Thanks to Hugh for nudging me onto it).

The city of Seattle has been encouraging residents to fill out a survey to provide their feedback on the growth plan for each of their neighborhoods. How sensible. And it turns out that those neighbourhoods with a high level of responses 'already have a really strong blog presence in the neighborhood'.

“There’s a lot of people already engaged in neighborhood issues through the blogs, and I think that’s what’s driven a lot of people to respond.”

A reasonable assumption - so let's all jump to the conclusion that having a local online presence results in increased civic participation. Lots of us would like to believe it.

But wouldn't it help to step back and think about the degree to which populations predisposed to offline civic participation (this is often closely associated with educational attainment) were getting active in neighbourhood online networks? Could it be that those more likely to be active in civic affairs are more likely to be active in neighbourhood blogs?

To put it another way, isn't it just possible that people in the areas where a higher proportion are less affluent, less connected and less accustomed to having influence, might have neither the time and motivation to establish neighbourhood blogs nor the collective confidence or readiness to engage with civic structures? Just curious.

Good legislation makes good neighbours?

Planning Resource announces a Scottish government consultation about hedge disputes, in an article by Matt Scotland (who else?).

The consultation follows the efforts of a campaign group called Scothedge, which offers this report on a recent (July 2009) survey of its members.

Question 1. Approach to the Hedge Owner.
All respondents have asked the hedge owner to sort the problem.

Question 2. Response from the Hedge Owner

• Helpful            5%

• Unhelpful        55%

• Hostile            38%

Comment. The helpful responses came from cases where the problem was overcome by the arrival of new neighbours. 55% of respondents could take their cases no further because the hedge/tree owner would not do anything. A serious 38% were hostile to any approach, resorting to verbal and even physical abuse sometimes requiring police intervention. This is the Antisocial Behaviour dimension and it occurs because it can.

Question 9.  Do you still speak to your neighbour?
40% of respondents remain able to speak to their neighbours whilst in dispute. 60% find speaking to their neighbours both unproductive and unpleasant. Understandably they withdraw from making any further attempt.

The report blames the absence of appropriate legislation in Scotland, claiming that 'there is no vehicle for “arms length” resolution which would dilute the personality and vested interests of the protagonists.'

The expectation is that if there is legislation, it will have a fairly direct impact on neighbourly relations, in that a hostile response by a neighbour to a representation about a tree or hedge could quickly be referred to a council with all parties aware of the available powers. Would legislation eradicate much of the hostility and contribute to improved neighbourly relations?

The classic source here is a book called Order without law, by Robert Ellickson. Ellickson explored the preference among rural neighbours for informal procedures and customs rather than legal measures to govern minor irritations such as cattle-trespass or boundary-fence disputes. I suspect this points to subtle differences in urban areas where local norms and informal interactions are not well-established but other compensating social relations are readily available.

How close is St John now?

Stefan Gatward of Tunbridge Wells got fed up with the street name where he lived being wrongly displayed as 'St Johns Close', and went out with brush and paint to instate the lost apostrophe. One of his neighbours remonstrated with him, objecting that post would no longer be delivered. And since it seems the neighbourhood is chock-full of retired military, there could be a protracted campaign underway. What fun.

This story was on the Beeb at about 0720 this morning but took some hours to reach t'interweb, here for example, or in the Mail here, and Telegraph here.

To help explain the sweet irony for readers beyond these barmy shires - the town of Tunbridge Wells is commonly referred to as the home of the archetypal middle-England reactionary, with the phrase 'Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells' widely used as an ironic sign-off. If nothing else, we English have had a lot of practice at self-parody.

Communicating with other dogwalkers

This graceful note was pinned to the gate of a field much-used by local dogwalkers.

Young, missing out, or just missing

Matthew Ryder is a 'national role model' for Reach, a government-supported scheme aimed at raising the aspirations and attainment of black boys and young men. In yesterday's Observer, under the headline 'The pursuit of riches at any cost is killing young black men', he attacks the prevailing 'get rich or die trying" culture. Ryder makes a clear connection between

'the teenagers I encounter and the likes of [disgraced banker] Fred Goodwin. Wider society, government included, has frequently championed the sort of role models whose ruthless pursuit of money at any social cost has set a dysfunctional template. It is an extreme ideology that spills from the City's boardrooms to south London's housing estates. That teenager will always believe that the pursuit of money is the key to happiness, if society constantly reaffirms that to be the case.'

Today Children and Young People Now reports Jon Coles, director general of schools for the Department for Children, Schools and Families, on research into Neets (young people not in education, employment or training) who had left the education system 10 years ago:

"They found one profoundly shocking thing, of their long-term Neets who had been out of the system for a long time," said Coles. Fifteen per cent of those young people had died within 10 years of leaving the education system.

Neighbourliness: decline and constraints

To a community centre in north London, as the guest of West Euston Time Bank Intergenerational Poetry Project, no less, for a talk about neighbourliness. Everybody has something to say about the subject and there was plenty of discussion.

People thought there has been a decline in neighbourliness, but when we talked about possible causes no-one mentioned cars. One explanation offered was that in an inner-city neighbourhood not so many people have them. For apartment-dwellers, factors like building design, local trade and parks were felt to be more influential in promoting or constraining sociability. Nobody mentioned television as a possible cause of decline either.

There was plenty of talk about being reluctant to open the door to people. For instance someone said when she's home all day, there would be at least ten commercial callers, with or without leaflets, trying to sell or con her something. There's no point in her neighbours just knocking to see how she is or to borrow something, cos she ain't gonna answer. Such levels of pressure are invasive and cause people to adjust their conditons of privacy, thereby impacting on neighbourliness.

Several people mentioned falling over in the street, and someone always comes and helps you, although it was suggested that a man who fell without a stick might be treated circumspectly. It does depend on there being pedestrians around though: people in cars don't tend to stop.

By this time our discussion had broadened naturally into general local sociability and civility - 'neighbouring plus', you might call it. The group felt that use of mobile phones had a definite negative effect, and that cultural diversity presented problems, particularly around use of English.

But someone referred with delight to the practice of spending time gardening out front (though it doesn't apply to most apartment-dwellers), because people stop and talk to you as they pass. Which reminded me of this mention of growing potatoes in the front garden.

Access to local statutory information

Over on the Planning blog, Domenic Donatantonio is discussing evidence that people do not check the statutory notices in local newspapers. Gosh. Should authorities be obliged to publish? Yes, but where?

DCLG believes councils could save £35,000 a year through reducing their statutory advertising commitments.

And newspapers do not help their case by often burying notices deep in the latter pages of a publication. Though not a resource to everyone, increased internet accessibility will give residents quicker perusal of an application in their neighbourhood.

Empowerment, evaluation and the C word again

When I worked at Community Development Foundation I tried for years and failed miserably to stop my colleagues and others abusing the C word, or using it uncritically at best. Now my old buddy Gabriel Chanan has written for the South West Foundation a characteristically clear guide to empowerment and evaluation in which he recognises that it's not just authorities and professionals at national level who do this:

Community activists and workers, who do understand the internal dynamics of local people’s relationships, are often equally guilty of fudging the use of the word community. They are inclined to designate the small numbers of people and community groups they work with as ‘the community’, because these are the people closest to them, and to ignore the question of how to establish whether the views and experiences of these small clusters of people do or don’t reflect the views and experiences of the numerical majority.

With some notable exceptions, most evaluations and project descriptions in this field start off by describing problems affecting a whole locality and end up by describing the actions of a small group, without ever checking back to see what difference this made to the whole locality, or indeed if the project’s existence was even known to most residents. The active group or project is described as ‘the community’, and its career is then taken as automatically indicative of the state of the whole locality.

This is good stuff not least because more people will take notice of a Gabriel text than of me mumbling on about it. The document explores how the national indicators might get reconciled with local experience,

- using both government indicators and project-based methods together;
- linking the official indicators to small-scale local experience
- extracting lessons from evaluation to improve practice.

Checkout Gabriel's parallel paper on making the business case for community empowerment.

Previously:
The C word has a companion
Not the last word on the C word

Whatever you do, I’ll know about it

Proboscis have done some lovely stuff in their Sutton Grapevine project, capturing stories and giving people the opportunity to explore and illuminate issues for themselves.

I liked this one - you live in a village, so watch what you do... I'll know about it.

Juxtaprose 4

'Lack of social networks among people with intellectual disabilities is perhaps a form of exclusion far more important than scattered cases of direct community opposition.' (1).

'Children played with their brothers, sisters, cousins and friends and with other children in their neighbourhood. The majority of children in the group with learning difficulties stated that they played with their parents or siblings. Only a small number of these children claimed that they played with friends or neighbours. This may suggest that children with learning difficulties encounter some social barriers in their play experiences, as the group we spoke to seemed to spend less of their time playing with peers...' (2).

Clubs and informal play

Kids go to organised sessions, kids play out together or hang out, kids stay home. What kind of mix works best? It's not easy trying to understand the social impact of perceived imbalances in a risk-averse, car-oriented, achievement-driven society, but given the power of those forces you'd expect the emphasis to be more on structure and less on informality.

Every year the National Children's Bureau publishes research for Playday (which is tomorrow) and the latest looks at 'making time'. Their survey found that nearly half of adults (47%), think children should go to fewer extra-curricular activities. The focus groups with children and young people offer insights into the recognised value of organised activities, and the extent to which they absorb time from informal play.

'It seemed that some of these children perceived clubs as something they ‘ought to do’, regardless of what they felt like doing with their spare time. Informal play alone or with peers was viewed as having less of a purpose than these organised activities, other than for their own enjoyment.'

'A significant number of children in the study lacked any control over which activities they attended and when they went to them, sometimes eliminating the sense of fun. All of the children favoured a mixture of informal play and organised activities, but for many children there seemed to be an imbalance and children’s time for play was often taken over with structured events.'

The report also contains observations on the reactions of adults to the informal presence of young people outdoors:

'Meeting together, for example on the streets, near shops or in parks, often led to complaints and harassment from adults, including neighbours and local community members. Amongst all of the older children interviewed, those from Sudan were the only group to discuss their experiences of being reported to the police when they met with their friends on the streets and in the parks. Most of the older children thought this was because of their age rather than their ethnicity, although one child reported encountering racism.'

'If we are going on the street, going to the park, sitting there, a lot of people, they will ring the police for no reason and the police would come up to us and say, “Go away” when we haven’t done anything. That happens all the time.’

Playday research page.

Because it’s freedom: children’s views on their time to play.
Haki Kapasi and Josie Gleave, London: NCB, 2009.

Local area data

The data from the national indicator set provides useful material for prioritising and monitoring progress on quality of life issues, as the Place survey headlines show.

But the geographical scale is set at the highest tier, so the Commission for Rural Communities has set up an interesting initiative to help make the reporting of quality of life outcomes more local. They say that around two-thirds of the data used by the national indicator set is available at a more local level, typically for districts but sometimes for neighbourhoods.

More here.

Friends and screens

Just in case there's a quiet period newswise, journalists know how to get religious leaders to say provocative things to kick off debates. So the catholic archbishop of Westminster makes comments about friendship and about social networking sites, risking a martyrdom of jokes from atheists about having imaginary friends, and from the connected about confessions and screens.

Zapping via Google (mum, look at me) I find some of his words joyfully misinterpreted, and various commentators following the problematic tendency to generalise very broadly about young people when the issues are quite subtle, fluid and important. But still, it's not too impressive if a prominent religious figure has only just detected a 'rise in individualism'. Does news not travel quickly in Westminster?

Nonetheless I'm interested in, and I welcome, the way the archbish touched upon some themes that have bothered me lately in talking to young people: the idea of loyalty, the question of 'transient' relationships (not sure about his phrase 'impoverished friendships'), and the part played in this by the dominance of consumption as a way of life.

Not all young people struggle with notions of loyalty - to brands, media, friends, football teams or whatever - but I wouldn't be surprised if there is an issue here that we should be exploring. Many youngsters don't see much loyalty around them - their families change, their teachers change, their environments change, their expectations get changed for them. Society doesn't seem to expect any of us to stick with anything.

I too have wondered out loud recently about shallow relationships - I'm not really qualified to call this one either, and I certainly wouldn't pin it to social media; but I don't want to be ignoring the issue when I've found that it resonated with teachers I've spoken to.

And if we look back at a few decades of hyper-consumption, spectacularisation of culture and systematic deconstruction of what is 'public', would we really be surprised to find a thread running through and connecting these trends?

It's not right to dump the blame or responsibility for any of these on young people. It would have been helpful if the archbeak had recognised the contribution of his and my generation, and of politicians and the media, to the erosion of loyalty, the cheapening of relationships and the wretched diminution of the public realm.

More importantly perhaps, instead of pontificating (is that the right word?) about bullying uses of Bebo he might better have used his ability to get an audience, by calling for a forum in which young people themselves reflect upon the extent to which the communications media they use is related to the fact that some feel excluded, become depressed, and commit suicide.

I think it would also help more if we spend some time understanding whether there is some kind of widening divide between those young people who have had the chance to explore their own potential and social relations, and those who haven't. And it may be worth referring back to a piece JRF published a while ago which rightly stressed both how local, place-based social networks affect aspirations and behaviour; and the need for young people to be aware of and access opportunities beyond their immediate neighbourhood. This does not justify continued investment in either a 'backseat generation,' screen-dominated upbringings or school catchment policies that work against the value of local connections.

Oh and finally could people please stop talking about online systems as if they exist in a vacuum?

Previously: Kids these days

Criminalising kids: questions about risk and respect.