Neighbourhoods

Informal volunteering down five per cent

The latest Citizenship Survey headlines for the first quarter of 2009 cover empowerment and participation, community cohesion, and racial and religious harassment and labour market discrimination.

Julian Dobson has reviewed them and made some helpful points as always about the political context. I just have one point to add about some of the data that particularly intersts me, concerning 'informal volunteering':

In April-June 2009, 57 per cent of adults volunteered informally at least once in the 12 months prior to interview.

The report doesn't mention trends here, so I went back to the figures for the whole of 2008-09, and found that in that year 62 per cent of adults volunteered informally at least once in the previous 12 months.

A five per cent decline is sharp and significant. Can it be attributed just to the effects of the recession? If so, will levels recover after economic recovery? Sorry to keep bannging on about this, but there's a scary informal care crisis looming with an ageing population, and reduced public spending ain't gonna help. There will be a growing shortfall of family carers and an imperative to promote care and support at neighbourhood level - ask David Brindle. He wrote a year ago:

Difficult questions about family and community responsibilities are being ducked and the issues risk being overshadowed by a focus on personalisation of services.

This statistic is a tiny marker of a major social problem.

Joining up street campaigns

The Civic Society Initiative has announced a Street Pride campaign for next year, 'to help rid our streets of unnecessary clutter and create streets we can be proud of'.

'The campaign will include a toolkit for civic societies to involve their members and others in identifying and urging action against unnecessary street clutter and a number of campaign workshops around the country. We will focus on poor pavements and unnecessary signs, posts, bollards and guardrails. The results will feed into a national database and support a high profile campaign for national action.'

No mention there of the chief cause of clutter, cars. All power to their elbows, though: except, aren't there already a few elbows grinding on these and related issues? I could find no mention of the Street Pride campaign on the Living Streets site for instance, nor at Sustrans, but I hope there's been some dialogue. And reading this leader in yesterday's Times I was reminded of the origins and achievements of the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England.

It would be good to be reassured that some joining up is being done.

Picnic and 'community'

Victorian picnics were often feats of military-style organisation and endurance. They established the picnic as a grand social event rather like the 18th century ball, made possible by the servants, at which the manoeuvres of social interests (marriage and money) were played out.

But being Victorian English, eccentricity had its place, depicted by Dickens and Surtees among others. Francis Kilvert in his diary for 1870 records one example:

‘We had tea all across the road, completely obstructing the thoroughfare…’

I'm writing an essay about picnic and community, following the Wellcome event back in June. As far as I can discover, the large-scale picnic was never a strategic instrument to stimulate trade from the global tourism industry (although Dorothy Wordsworth probably came very close). But this is is the twenty-first century, and big cities can turn to 'community' as a device to attract attention, strategically, within that global market.

In Sydney they closed the harbour bridge for a picnic - turf laid especially, entertainment ditto, breakfast all across the road. In the Beeb's coverage, one of the first words you hear from a participant is 'community':

'It's a sense of community. Everyone's here having a good time.'

A politician appears. Sydney needs the boost, we're told. So picnic is a device for 'community' which in turn is a device for economic prosperity. Hence the spectacularisation. And you thought you were just packin' a snack.

A cafe for people with learning difficulties

Sarah Coward has learning difficulties. Her mother Suzanne realised she could use direct payment money to set up a cafe in Sutton Coldfield, offering a place for people with learning difficulties to hang out, socialise and feel enabled to do things which they wouldn’t often get the opportunity to do.

This story comes from a new selection of grassroots stories (with high quality photos) over on Podnosh. Here's the podcast.

Previously, on the socialisation of people with learning difficulties: Juxtaprose 4

For a robust and open democracy

The other day I gave a presentation and ran a mini-workshop on social justice and community development for the Policy Forum at CILIP (formerly the Library Association). One illustration of community development I referred to was the recent television series about the 'Unsung Town', which describes some of the process of using singing to stimulate connections, collective involvement and a sense of achievement in South Oxhey, an area I know well.

We know that what happenened there is community development because a committee for the choir has been formed and last week appears to have taken an independent political decision: it was offered a £1,000 grant by a county councillor and declined it:

“We’ve worked really hard as a group to be inclusive of everybody and promote an ethnically diverse choir. We don’t feel the BNP shares those values so, as a group, we decided to turn the money down.”

It's an example of the leaky lamplight of community development falling for a moment on big shadowy issues of social justice. For a new and probably inexperienced group it may well have been a challenge and they dealt with it, and will be the stronger.

All round the country today there will have been people in homes, workplaces, colleges, online and elsewhere, discussing the appearance of the leader of the British National Party on BBC television last night.

That discussion will be based around the man's tawdry opinions of other members of the species, and people will be airing thoughts on spikey political issues of racism, homophobia and blunt prejudice, which politics generally discourages them from exploring. So perhaps that's a good thing. Sound points about the representativeness of the audience from Philip Norton here.

The event has reminded us that we have a version of public service broadcasting which is intimately related to open democracy (even if it doesn't always do it very well).

It's been surprising the number of commentators who seem ready to overlook the inconvenience of the formal elected status of BNP representatives (including in South Oxhey). This is only good insofar as it highlights how unsatisfactory the electoral system is to more and more people. I suppose it also illustrates how we still struggle with the tension between the right to freedom of speech - for a party with a given level of representation, in public debate - and the right to be protected from racism and homophobia.

We still get confusions, like the hapless example of Yale University Press, who decided to cut the images when publishing Jytte Klausen's book on those Danish cartoons. But hey, what are centuries of debate and insight into the nature of democracy and freedom of speech to a committee at a university press? (Among the various explorations, see eg here).

Many years ago I wrote an essay on 'Freedom of access to information' (published in this volume: can't find electronic version) in which I made a point about how freedom of speech does not necessarily trump other freedoms or rights, such as the right to be protected from racist material. Or as Klausen herself puts it in an interview for Islam Online,

'Free speech does not give license to say racist things about other people or to incite violence.'

But. What interests me about discussion around last night's Question Time appearance is that so much of it still implies that one right demonstrably always trumps the other. I'm not implying that the example of Yale is directly comparable - I'm not saying that those who sought to stop the broadcast were comparable to the YUP committee. But democracy is surely going to be better when the source of dispute is there for all to see and the views expressed for all to hear, and when we feel empowered by the system to develop and discuss our own views.

For myself, I'm far less comfortable with the idea that the BBC might have denied voice to elected representatives, distasteful as their views may be, than I am with the prospect of lots of people hearing the threadbare BNP views widely broadcast and vigorously challenged, with the likelihood that more people will think more deeply about them. The latter is a much-needed if faint sign of democratic robustness.

Downsides of local sites

Some of us are working to persuade local and central government of the merits of local sites and we're keen to get in front of some of the problems and downsides that might emerge, such as capture by specific interest groups, misleading or dangerous information, domination by doom-mongers etc. It's already too easy for council officers to justify non-involvement and decline to offer even the most modest support.

Here's one clear take on the way it can go, from an article about Sheffield Forum, written by John Peterson and published hard copy in Now Then Sheffield, a free magazine for the city. (Thanks Martin). (The Now Then blog is here):

'Conjecture uttered as fact seems to find its way onto the pages of SF with remarkable frequency with the potential to unfairly affect businesses, property prices in areas being denigrated and all kinds of social relations. On this point there are also a huge number of postings regarding issues of race and multiculturalism. Many of these take a highly negative view and are dressed up in that much-loved Yorkshire idiom of 'plain speaking'. Some are obviously active campaigns for far right groups such as the BNP, others are genuinely held (if sometimes ill-thought-out) opinions of forum users.'

Things that anyone responsible for a local site may fear, I suspect, without always knowing quite what is needed to keep them from happening. We need to be bringing these and other negative aspects (actual or perceived) to the surface, and examining them, the better to understand how to pre-empt or eradicate them. All eyes turn to Talk About Local to play an important leading role (no pressure guys).

 

Having a structure for civic involvement matters

The Civic Trust was precisely the kind of organisation of which it might have been said, if it didn't exist they'd have to reinvent it. And so they have. The Trust closed in April this year leaving local civic societies in a haze of uncertainty. The Civic Society Initiative has just published the report on their consultation which I mentioned in the summer.

Among the main findings:

• Civic societies want to be less reactive, work more in partnership and be more campaigning in their outlook.
• There is a refreshing openness within civic societies about their shortcomings and their mixed reputation – ageing, negative and out of touch but also locally knowledgeable, actively concerned about the future and wanting to connect more with their community.
• The movement lacks confidence in itself and others can appear to value it more than civic societies themselves.
• Civic societies seek a unifying mission and purpose for the movement. This is likely to be based around issues of place, pride, identity and community.

The analysis reveals a wish to move from being:

• Separate voices to being a collective movement
• Hierarchical to being more networked
• Dependent to being more independent (especially financially)
• Organised top-down to being more federal.

Three main roles have been identified for the national body:

• Providing information, support and advice to civic societies
• Facilitating civic societies to network and cluster together
• Being a national lead and voice for the movement which provides inspiration and direction; lobbies and campaigns on its behalf; and raises its profile and influence.

The organisation is now seeking feedback on the report by Friday 20 November.

Neighbours Day NZ

Saturday was Neighbours Day in New Zealand, a new initiative set up by general care charity LifeWise. I hope they evaluate it.

The publicity points to an undated magazine article by Sarah Lang in the Sunday-Star Times. She quotes Paul Perry of Massey University:

While neighbourliness might be a stress to maintain, it can be more of a stress to do without. Dr Perry observes: “Help, if needed, is harder to get. The old ‘eyes-on-the-street’ idea probably has some real value so security in the home, or at least the sense of it, may be diminished. The irony is that many people rue the decline of neighbourliness and seek a greater sense of community, yet take individual actions that work against these things.”

Hope and fear jigsaw

I'm a bit late catching up with this but glad I've done so. Artist Michael Pinsky generated a 70m² jigsaw based on local aerial maps of 150 localities, onto which people had inscribed their hopes and fears for the future of their neighbourhood. It was pieced together at CABE's recent 10th anniversary event in London.

Working men’s clubs and housing estates

Birkbeck Urban Studies Group Seminars

Tuesday 3 November, 1300-1400, Birkbeck College, University of London, Malet St.

‘Working men’s clubs, housing estates and community since 1945’

 

'Be more private with yourself'

On PassiveAggressive notes, two tales that tell of neighbours communicating when they'd rather not have to.

More on the representativeness of committees

From an Oz blog, North Coast Voices:

'a certain Neighbourhood Watch committee is tentatively considering allowing a person found guilty of criminal offences to join as a volunteer member.'

There is a case for the chair knowing what the offences were, but it's not hard to see benefits for the individual and the committee. However, the post is cynically dismissive. If you follow the link to Neighbourhood Watch Committee NSW, this is the very first statement you come across:

'Committees should reflect the demographics of individual communities.'

No irony intended.

Of exactitude in democracy

It is said that the traveller George Lewis bought a bundle of papers in Kashgar relating to the work of 11th century Uyghur scholars. Among the records of families and distinguished tradesmen of the settled tribes there is an account of a system of governance devised by the people of the Tarim Basin sometime before the sixth century BCE. In that region, the practice of democracy had attained such perfection that the membership of the committee for a single province numbered the population of an entire city, and the committee for the region itself numbered an entire province. In the course of time, these extensive arrangements were found somehow wanting, and so the Guild of Democraters devised a system whereby the committee was required to be of the same scale as the population, and coincided with it point for point. Less sympathetic to the science of democracy, later generations came to judge this system cumbersome, and discarded it unsentimentally. Occasionally in discreet meetings in the houses of scholars along the Silk Road, rumours circulate of the survival of pages from the records of those meetings, but no fragment has subsequently been discovered in the libraries of the world.

Housing freeze

Apparently there are some 20,000 abandoned houses in Detroit. Architect Matthew Radine and photographer Greg Holm offer their take on this and the freeze in the housing market: they plan to spray one of the uninhabitable properties with water in subzero temperatures, gradually building up layers of ice over the course of several days or weeks during the winter as part of an architectural installation. And then?

'In the Spring we will be working with Detroit based neighborhood organizations to deconstruct the house and clear the property, and then donating the property to one of many urban farming groups in Detroit.'

They are funding the property acquisition, and the piece, micro-finance style, here.

Is it unfair, no I think it's a complement, to mention Christo and the idea of 'revelation through concealment.' More here, including images by Greg Holm.

Searching for community

Searching for community: representation, power and action on an urban estate

by Jeremy Brent

Published by The Policy Press, 2009. ISBN: 978 1 84742 323 8. 304 pp.  £19.99 (paperback) (£14.99 online)

Review by Alison Gilchrist

I read Jeremy Brent’s thought-provoking and insightful book with growing regret that I had not taken the opportunity to have more conversations with him during the time when we were both living and working in Bristol, as well as studying part-time for our PhDs by pursuing very similar lines of inquiry. Jeremy uses his substantial experience as a youth worker on an estate in Bristol to reflect on the nature of community and the role of the practitioner as an ‘inside-outsider’ working to support community aspirations and deal with troubles as they arise. From our different perspectives we came to very similar conclusions: that communities are elusive, complex and riven with divisions and differences, which makes  the job of the practitioner difficult, rewarding and full of dilemmas. In Jeremy’s case, his role in running a youth centre focused on the energy, creativity and rebelliousness of young people, and he clearly responded with great empathy and awareness of the wider social and economic context.

He is critical of romantic, homogeneous notions of community, and talks knowledgeably about the complex dynamics of community politics and passions. Like me, he is interested in the networks of relationships that form the ecology of local life and at one point he writes: “the more connections, the more exciting the territory” (p145). Even at its most challenging, Jeremy clearly relished his long-term ‘inside-outsider’ role, illustrating this through a bricolage of anecdote and diary notes, that describe critical episodes and accounts of his work to support different community initiatives. 

The book is based on his PhD thesis and as such can be heavy-going in places, with a surfeit of academic terms and theory mainly drawn from post-modernist philosophers. Nevertheless he uses these ideas effectively to analyse his experience. He is thus able to contest and compare images of the estate, to explore the dispersed nature of power, and to consider his own mixed feelings and motivations.

The book makes a strong argument, backed up by powerful evidence, for ‘traditional’ community-based youth work, asserting quite rightly in my view, that “targets are not necessary for outcomes” (p266). I particularly valued his description of the youth and community worker as a ‘kink in the chain of command’ between those who fund and manage the work, and his explanation of the role of ‘coaxer’ in encouraging the young people to expand their horizons and overcome the derogatory reputations they gave grown up with. He writes convincingly about the strain of working in situations where divergent needs and values pull in different directions. Jeremy’s identity and accountability as a youth worker shifts subtly depending on circumstances, but his commitment to the young people and the people of Southmead is clear throughout. His untimely death in 2006 has been a loss to us all.

Searching for community is a valuable addition to the literature on ‘community’. It successfully combines grounded experience with academic, reflective analysis. I strongly recommend it to all students and practitioners of youth and community work.

 

Alison Gilchrist is the author of The well-connected community: a networking approach to community development.

We didn’t know what it would look like, but this is it

Talk About Local unconference 3 October 2009

I got involved in social uses of technology in 1986 when I joined the Community Computing Network (which at the time was chaired by none other than Bill Thompson). In the late 80s and through the 90s there were numerous forums and meetings and discussions and documents about ‘this stuff’ – the convergence of computers and telecommunications – and what it might mean for unprivileged folk.

We talked about the potential for self-publishing but we weren’t sure of what. We thought this stuff could empower local people but we weren’t sure how. We thought it would promote horizontal communication and mean we were less vulnerable to vertical communication, but we weren’t sure what that would look like. Much of the time I was straggling along behind David Wilcox as we sought some kind of clarity that wasn't spoiled by political reality.

There were nay-sayers. I remember one well-known individual in the community development field protesting that the technology was divisive because ‘no-one is communicating when they’re at a computer’. The inability to see beyond next week was scary. Ludicrous proclamations about the death of the local, or the disastrous consequences for face-to-face interaction, seemed to stifle some people’s ability to reflect.

And things went askew on the way. In particular, too many smart people moved in and created the digital divide industry, determined to make money out of something politically fashionable. Their behaviour was and remains distasteful. The same sort of thing now seems to be happening under the heading of ‘digital engagement’. And there are efforts to introduce things like ‘digital champions’ and ‘digital heroes’, to invent new hierarchies while the rest of us are busy carting off the old ones.

Believe it or not, some of us felt that the global would not invalidate the local. We felt that there is a complementarity, not a disconnection, of offline and online; and wherever you live is a good place to start appreciating that. It turns out we were right. And this was confirmed today at a memorable meeting about hyperlocal sites, organised under the aegis of Talk About Local.

Lots of folk running or supporting local sites from around the country got together in reassuringly unfashionable Stoke on Trent, to discuss whatever they wanted to discuss, about what they are inventing and developing. They talked about relations with councils, how to deal with negative comments on their sites, how to encourage fellow-residents to become citizen-journalists, and so on.

Back in the 80s and 90s, we didn’t know what it would look like, but this is it. It may need some new language, but the values are all there - inclusion, empowerment, local people taking responsibility for their own communication environment. And those values are not worn self-consciously like badges, they’re simply ‘what we do’.

As my mate Martin Dudley of Bish.net put it, the risk with these events is that you get a stream of cyberbabble from the tech addicts, and a load of righteous blather which translates as ‘these poor people, we must help them connect’. He and I have both sat in plenty of meetings which oscillated between these themes. But today we were outside London, and it was a Saturday, which probably partly explains why we were spared.

I suppose that, as with inclusion and engagement, there’s a risk that the suits will swill into this field and contaminate it, but this time something – expertise – is already owned and held by local people. And yes, there’s a question about ‘who’s not here?’ (It was a uniformly white and predominantly middle class gathering). But these are early days.

Huge credit is due to William Perrin and his TAL colleagues for opening this topic up in just the right way at the right time.

*Update: David has uploaded a video of me saying some of this stuff. Among the other clips, observations from Tom Steinberg about the future of local sites as news sites.

Previously:

Against the digital divide industry: of champions and charters

Social inclusion and digital inclusion through community centres

Social exclusion, social capital, and local online centres

Neighbourhood networks workshop

It's clear that neighbourhood online networks will increase in their reach, influence and value. How should people in local government respond?

Yesterday I was working with Hugh Flouch of Harringay Online and Martin Dudley who helped set up and run Bish.net for many years. London Councils had asked us to run a workshop for their Capital Ambition programme to surface the issues and start getting at the kinds of question that will need to be answered if local officers and elected members are to work out how they engage with local online networks.

Hugh and Martin gave very informative presentations about their respective sites. These were preceded by a wide-ranging introduction from Hugh, who has stitched together some absorbing material - including for example, new data showing that referral from social network sites to government sites is increasing - amounting to a compelling case for local authorities to pay close attention to local networks.

Sandwiched between discussion sessions, there was time for a workshop game that I had devised to explore what happens when issues of perceived importance to local people erupt on a fictional online network. Three groups each worked on an example of a real issue taken from the archive of an existing local site - to do with a local disturbance, a park that needs smartening up, or conflicts over school fundraising.

We gave each group a set of 25 character cards representing local residents, councillors and officers. Some of the characters came with short descriptions, others were open to interpretation or development by the participants. On the back of each card was an indication of the individual's level of online involvement: absent, lurker, cautious contributor, occasional assertive, or active contributor.

The task for each group was to develop the story of the issue as it evolved (blew out of proportion, became entangled in other issues, became the cause of open slander or the subject of Machiavellian machinations etc). They were asked to describe what happened in the locality - on-list, off-list and offline - as a consequence of the original post and any subsequent comments. Groups did this using a flip chart sheet, post-its, cards, drawings and their fertile imaginations. I dropped in a news flash about a related mini-crisis to spice things up where necessary.

Exercises like this are always accompanied by a flickering frisson of risk, but this one went very smoothly as all participants had an understanding of how these digital conversations go in the real world, and they grabbed the opportunity to be inventive. I was impressed by the number of clear generalisable points that emerged during the feedback as each group told their story.

For instance, watching an issue erupt or slowly develop, how do council representatives judge whether debate will tail off or reach a critical point at which they have to respond? And is this an appropriate attitude anyway in the new networked democracy? Numerous questions like this were raised and we'll start sifting through the material very soon.

Previously:
Conversational democracy and neighbourhood online networks

Online networks and neighbourhood action

Maybe neighbourhood blogs reflect neighbourhood demographics?

'Digital engagement'

BeLocal workshop game

It's the human ecology stupid

Local 2.0 workshop

What’s missing is communication, not information

Book reviews on the neighbourhoods blog

In an experimental arrangement with Policy Press, we'll be publishing reviews of the following titles here over the next few months:

 

Searching for community: representation, power and action on an urban estate
by Jeremy Brent
Reviewed by Alison Gilchrist

Subversive citizens: power, agency and resistance in public services
by Marian Barnes and David Prior
Reviewed by Liz Richardson

Ageing in urban neighbourhoods: place attachment and social exclusion
by Allison E. Smith
Reviewed by Kevin Harris

Participatory practice: community-based action for transformative change
by Margaret Ledwith and Jane Springett
Reviewed by Katy Vigurs

Respect soundbite (updated)

The other day the Evening Standard asked me for some words on the subject of respect, in the light of the Pilkington case and the prime minister's reassertion of some kind of policy on anti-social behaviour.

I've no idea what was published but having put scarce brainpower into the exercise, I thought I'd leave the words here.

The government has done a great deal to improve the living environments of many people on low incomes, and that should be applauded. But the relentless association of anti-social behaviour with ‘problem estates’ is distasteful. It’s not hard to point to incivilities and ASB among the privileged and professional classes.

The Pilkington case seems to be about local enforcement of existing measures, so people are right to be suspicious that it is being used to prompt policy.

I suspect that the neighbours of the Pilkingtons may feel they might have provided support and perhaps intervened, if they were more connected to one another and believed that official support was there to call on. So why do so many people not feel that they can call on their neighbours in time of need?

We hear all the assertions about parenting contracts and Drinking Banning Orders and interventions at the family level, but in many neighbourhoods there is very little interaction among residents. We occupy our cars more and our neighbourhoods less. Children can’t play in the street within site of neighbours who know them and know their parents. We are losing our local shops and our pavements are covered in cars.

The Respect agenda was based on shaming, but we know that doesn’t work. Residents need to feel empowered to take action collectively, confident that official powers will back them up. Schemes are needed – seeded at local level - that promote informal contact and interaction between all residents in an area.

Footnote - catching up with yesterday's Thought for the day on R4 (Presenter: Rhidian Brook, Subject: 'We have a responsibility to our neighbours') reminded me that about a year ago I wrote to the programme suggesting that neighbourliness might be an important theme and would they like an offering? I didn't mention religion, and I didn't get a reply.