Neighbourhoods

Demolition face-off

I like this. Emine Saner in yesterday's Guardian explains how 67 portraits of residents come to cover the windows of flats on the Haggerston estate in Hackney, east London, due for demolition.

Previously: Door to door: a thirty minute film featuring social housing tenants at their front doors.

Designing suburbs

With localism in the autumnal political air again, and some people's thoughts turning to housebuilding targets, here's an article on 'deprivation in the suburbs' by Ben Kochan on Planning Resource. Includes comments from Nick Falk, on the need to give suburbs a distinctive character, and the HCA's Jim Bennett arguing for greater planning diversity and flexibility:

'Bridges between existing and incoming populations can be built through the provision of social facilities.'

You might be thinking, social facilities have a few other uses as well. But the idea is not to play 'Spot the Simplification,' the idea is to get people thinking about how to turn suburbs into sustainable social environments.

Grassroots social justice

Occasionally you happen upon a house like this, where the tiny frontage is used for awareness-raising, communication and the creation of opportunities to get involved - leaflets to take, notices to read, petitions to sign, plants to buy, a box for donations. One person in one space quietly driving their take on democracy and human rights.

Vote pop-up urinal!

If you live in the London Borough of Lambeth and you're on the electoral register, you can vote for a community project to be funded from each of three bands - £125,000, £75,000 and £50,000. Including the (presumably separate) computer and shower facilities at the Streatham Darby and Joan club.

There's information about each project and there are also face-to-face information events. Residents can vote online or by text.

As an occasional visitor to Lambeth meself I'd favour the £75,000 'pop-up urinal', although it hardly classes as a community project. Given that the proposed location is Waterloo, it has to stand a chance. However, it's up against a wet play area for children.

'What could the community do to help?'

Here's a good example of several things - the well-established SE1 community site in London announces a meeting tomorrow on Employability & worklessness: what could the community do to help?

The Friends & Neighbours Club in partnership with Blackfriars Settlement invites you to this discussion. Help to get a better understanding of the words employability and worklessness. Share ideas on simple and positive things that community groups could do to address them.

Knowledge, local

Two young women and a buggy. As I passed I overheard, 'I didn't know. It's the first baby I've had.' Thinks, that's an unusual way of putting it.

As a foster carer I find myself reflecting more than I might otherwise on the access that young parents have to knowledge about parenting. We tend to assume that in the murky mythical past of close-knit local communities, packed with chirpy extended families, the concentrated wisdom of handling babies and rearing children was constantly available. Indeed, it may have been unavoidable, young mothers were bombarded with it. What to do if this or that happens - someone would tell you, and you'd be ostracised if you didn't take the advice.

Now here's the modern mum saying, 'I didn't know'. What should she know, how should she know it? Has the geographical distribution of families and the perceived decline of neighbourhood networks stifled the flow of information for new parents?

Is it right in any case to think of the neighbourhood as a source of knowledge about child-rearing? Surely yes, we should be depending less on formal services shouldn't we, and more on the self-regenerating social capital of local informal networks? So we want to be able to take advice from those around us with experience to share.

Well, just to say, in recent weeks, in various conversations with local matrons with a bairn at hand, on four occasions I've been given advice or told things that were simply wrong, things that I as a fifty-something bloke knew to be wrong. Like, no, this one is not teething (at three months?? Stroll on). I must admit, my confidence in the quality of informal local information has taken a battering.

Allotted places

In the summer the Guardian mentioned that the mayor of London had launched a scheme to turn over 2,000 pieces of land in London (should that be 2,012 pieces of land?) into space for food growing by the 2012 Olympics. And the financial centre could soon host some of its first temporary allotments with giant 'grow bags' set up on building sites.

What an appropriate location. Perhaps the time of the allotment has come at last, thanks in part to the indiscretions of a few financiers. The New Local Government Network (NLGN) has published a review of the importance of allotments, pointing out that

Allotments can improve people’s quality of life, prevent exclusion, increase physical exercise, encourage a nutritious diet, support mental health, help people relax, teach new life skills, empower people, give individuals self-esteem, reconnect people with the food they eat, educate citizens about healthy food and environmental stability, tackle CO2 emissions, reduce packaging, support more sustainable waste management, conserve biodiversity, facilitate social interaction, build cohesive communities, strengthen social ties and networks, reduce crime and secure our food supplies.

The authors, Nick Hope and Victoria Ellis, recommend that 'edible landscaping' design should be actively encouraged by councils and large scale urban developments should be forced to allocate land for allotments. They also recommend that local authorities encourage community gardening, noting that it improves 'opportunities for greater social interaction and cohesion'. They explore socially responsible approaches from landowners to making land available.

The recommendations include:

• Offer discounted allotment rates to citizens with lower incomes.

• Adopt a collaborative approach so that people who can travel have access to plots in neighbouring council boroughs if supply exceeds demand in their area.

• Produce an allotment strategy to support the planning, promotion and protection of allotments, both now and in the future.

• Councils encourage public petitions from their citizens on allotments.

• If the council’s overview and scrutiny committee decides the response to a petition is not adequate or substantive, petitioners should be able to secure a debate of the full council.

Previously: Allotment folk

Meet the EMBYs

Over on Planning blog, Michael Donnelly offers the remarkable tale of a few residents in the village of Highworth, near Swindon, who attempted to capture some public land, annexing part of the village green for their gardens. There's neighbourhood action for you.

The seven homeowners on Barra Close then, unbelievably, applied for retrospective planning permission to change the land use from open space to domestic gardens.

It would be fascinating to know quite what they thought they could get away with. I can just about visualise their covert evening meetings around a couple of bottles of Chardonnay, encouraging one another in their pioneering role as EMBYs (Extending My Back Yard), the settler mentality determined to protect themselves from the possibility that, er, young people might climb trees near their homes.

It would also be interesting to understand what they thought relations with others in the village would be like after the planning committee's decision, whichever way that went. And it would be interesting to know what other residents in Barra Close think about their neighbours' attitudes.

The committee report says that several letters were received by way of protest, along with a petition signed by 167 residents - which is probably not a bad tally.

The report is enlightening, with several quoted comments suggesting that some bare-faced misrepresentation was indulged in. For example:

'There are contradictions in the support information from the applicants, they state that children are continually climbing in the trees and bushes and then state that "apart from a few children playing on the land in summer months, it is rarely used".'

The application was rejected on the grounds that

'Substantial evidence has been put forward to demonstrate that the area is well used as recreational open space and makes a significant and valuable contribution to the recreational needs of the local population.'

Local delivery

Here's a tap at the door early evening, a young lady from the local dairy trying to woo me back (I feel like I'm in a folk song, but it'll pass) to having milk delivered.

I explained that we used to have milk delivered some years ago, but two things changed that - the fact that milk in glass bottles seemed to go off much more quickly than in plastic; and of course the hugely improved ease of recycling plastic.

The lady's siren song was along these lines - we now sell at the same price as the supermarkets, we sell milk in plastic bottles, and of course we deliver to your door. And it was not lost on me that this is a relatively local business, selling milk from farms not too far from here, using the wonderful traditional environmentally-preferable milk float.

I recall the grandly named United Dairies floats from my childhood, and our milkman called Alf who served the same round for I believe it was 27 years. I recall also that, more recently, the father of one of my daughter's friends, in a fit of rage, backed his milk float into the canal. I wish I'd seen that.

The pic comes from the truly reassuring milk floats site (this is what the internet's for!).

Anyway it was refreshing to be asked. Is this part of a general movement apparent elsewhere, I wonder?

Altruistic behaviour, social connection, and inclusive communities? OK I'll try some

Tonight at the RSA in London, John Cacioppo (author, it says here, of a bestselling book on Loneliness) outlines "the vital importance of altruistic behaviour, social connection, and inclusive communities".

Live streaming, 1800 GMT.

Welcome

New neighbours just moved in, round for drinks the other night, with this story -

The delivery van unloaded and away, two of the local lads hovering around. Hi lads, y'alright? They stare, no answer, no response. Oh well. A few minutes later, a knock at the door, there they are. 'We'd just like to welcome you.'

Your street - quick survey

Sustrans DIY Streets project is due to complete this coming March 2010 and staff are trying to establish whether there is a need for an ongoing programme. So if you live in the UK you're invited to complete a quick online survey about beng involved in bringing about improvements to your street. (Pic: Sustrans)
 

 

Graffiti: can authorities do anything other than outlawing or assimilating?

I like the way public art is up for discussion these days, but democracy has never quite sussed its role in relation to public space, public art, and public value.

An article by Caroline Davies in today's Guardian tells us that

'Bristol city council is planning to let the public vote before murals on buildings, walls and fences are scrubbed clean or painted over. If citizens decide they like it, the work will remain.'

And via Bristol graffiti I learn that

'the Council will produce a new street art policy, which will seek to define and support the display of Public Art, where people tell us that murals or artworks make a positive contribution to the local environment and where the property owner has raised no objection.'

I wonder whether one-person-one-vote is quite the right model here. But what interests me most is how this sets up some curious counter-moves in the dark rat runs of democratic behaviour. How does the self-respecting tagger respond?

Obviously your credibility is out the window as soon as you're assimilated with a Yes vote. Acceptability is unacceptable, it's not a risk you'd want to take. So - it's a drag I know but you've got to mobilise all your mates and family to vote against you. Which could be more trouble than it's worth, especially when you have to take account of competitive taggers spitefully putting in votes in your favour.

So maybe you just move to another city, one where they show appropriate disregard for delinquent lack of respect.