Neighbourhoods

Street reps: an everday story of trust and power

The other day I was running some workshops with street reps in Shipley with my daughter, three years since the first set of workshops I ran with them.

On the surface, the initiative has gone well, with a good sprinkling of residents taking up the role and ready to talk about it. And their contribution seems to have had an impact. For example, the proportion of people in East Shipley who say that rubbish and litter lying around is a problem has decreased from 50% to 36% in three years. Anecdotally, the drugs presence has diminished significantly as people have at last felt supported in raising concerns.

But there is disquiet. This is a predominantly white low income area, part of which comes within the 2% most deprived in the country. One report notes that a lot of people feel that all the ‘big’ regeneration money goes into areas of central Bradford dominated by black and minority ethnic groups, and that ‘white Shipley’ misses out. Well, I don't know the central areas of the city, but there's no evidence of any kind of regeneration money going into the two neighbourhoods of Shipley where I've been working. So it doesn't feel wrong to sympathise if these people feel a sense of marginalisation and abandonment.

What do we expect from the community cohesion indicator? The percentage of residents who believe that people from different backgrounds get on well together declined a disconcerting 10% (from 66% to 56%) between 2007 and 2009. The national average is 76%. So it was not totally unsurprising, if unnerving, to overhear one of the street reps delighting in the prospect that a BNP candidate is likely to get voted in to a local ward. This could be a nasty, dingy corner of local politics.

The second group we spoke to insisted that their role is not political, by which they mean, it's not characterised by party politics. But it's profoundly, inescapably political: these are unpaid volunteers living among people whose neighbourhood they 'represent' - often anonymously because of fears of reprisals - without democratic process or accountability but with the essential task of standing at the interface of citizen-as-subject and state-as-provider.

Every call they make to environment or housing services, every conversation they are having with the police support officer, perhaps every time they step outside and have a word with a neighbour, they're trying to reassert the citizen's influence over what happens, and juggling the fizzing firesticks of responsibility, responsiveness, interference, surveillance, vigilantism, identity, collective interest and so on. They do this from a base of controlled influence and minimal power.

We'll be going back for several more sessions, but (partly because they've not had much press for a long time) I'm already concerned that the street reps movement may not be in blooming good health.

I see it as an important experiment, as much about new forms of engaged democracy as about making services locally responsive; as much about co-delivery as about efficiency. But it's apparent that, as with Neighbourhood Watch before it, the whole initiative can be weakened by lack of trust.

Neighbourhood Watch empowers its representatives, but is based unavoidably on a foundation of distrust. Street reps take their place on a basis of pro-social action, but (sometimes for very good reasons) may have neither the power nor the necessary level of generalised trust to have the influence that justifies the effort.

Maybe too little has been tried. The potential of neighbourhood websites is certainly one area that cries out to be developed alongside support for street reps. We're not done yet.

Micro-formalisation of neighbourhood relations

Here's a neighbour at the door, come in my dear, asking me to fill in name and telephone number as someone to contact in case of need. The form is for local Age Concern drop-in sessions, which sound brilliant - all the sensitive flexibility we expect from local AC activities, and she's raring to go.

Presumably someone will now take my contact details and key them into a database, digitally fixing that relationship of 'neighbour-who-can-be-contacted-in-case-of-need' into a format that can be referred to, passed-on, printed out. I don't have a problem with that. But I wonder if we can expect more of this sort of micro-formalising of essentially informal relations, as the need is recognised to establish a stable platform for informal local support?

What the process does is to first encourage me to put myself at the very foot of a curve of responsibility, and then to record the fact that I have done so. In the unlikely event of some kind of mishap, and the next of kin not being available, they can telephone me. Fine, and if I have twenty similar claims tomorrow I would sign them all.

But neighbourliness works because it is not formalised, and many people recognise that with the sharpest intuition. We will soon be living in interesting times.

Empowerment is a good thing, so what am I not happy about?

You can't get away from empowerment. There are conferences and workshops and training going on all over the place. I'm not signed-up to many lists, but my mailbox is peppered with invitations and blurb about empowering citizens / communities / residents, in relation to housing / health / safety / environment / education / motherhood / apple pie.

Fifteen years ago we wouldn't have believed it could happen, ten years ago we might have aspired towards it. Now empowerment is fashionable. I think there's an industry self-generating a lot of activity and I'm suspicious.

This is not to denigrate the work of many who are delivering from experience lots of sound learning points to people who appear to need them; nor specific policy events which in themselves may be wholly valid. But a culture accumulates; and there is a precedent.

Round about 2003, the field of social inclusion and new technology became counter-productively transformed when government started putting up huge chunks of funding without much thought about what was needed in local situations, thus attracting many who were willing to spend it for them without the burden of values or the inconvenience of insights into the nature of exclusion. I've been outspoken about that before, once or twice.

Part of the difficulty is that many London-based suits don't speak to people who have the dirt of estate life under their fingernails, unless for a photoshoot and through an interpreter. They meet together in London events to problematise the issue as 'out there', thus ensuring that they do not see themselves as part of it.

One of the consequences is that any action to be taken becomes the subject of organisational management (control) rather than local networked response.

There's also an increased risk of professionalisation, leading to the situation where some designated people can 'do empowerment' and the rest of us can't, which makes no sense.

Perhaps I'm getting too cranky in my old age, but I can't help suspecting that the processes that I identified the other day, which assimilate, appropriate language, insist on consensus and manage dissent, could in due course absorb the theme of empowerment itself. Now there's a perverse irony. What words would we feel able use for empowerment if its meaning were confiscated?

Village facilities: putting it all together

I like the sound of this... Thanks again to Regen and Renewal, for this account of a new development on the Suffolk coast which combines sheltered housing for older people, a public library, cafe, parish council meeting rooms, social rented flats and homes for sale.

From the Regen and Renewal project review:

The communal areas here are central to the building. I could see that the residents used them to come together to have a chat. It's great that the cafe leads into the library, and these areas can also be sectioned off, which makes them more versatile. The break-out areas are full of natural light. The scheme successfully blends the need for older people to maintain independence in their own home with the need to avoid insularity. They can have privacy but they can also talk to people in the library or the cafe, which means these areas become hubs for the community. There are a number of opportunities for residents to communicate with the outside world.

It'll all end in tears

The London Olympics, a grotesque folly if ever there was one, is throwing up more regeneration issues than it should. Regen and Renewal reports a study by the London Assembly’s Economic Development, Culture, Sport and Tourism Committee (aka life the universe and everything) with concerns that deprived local residents could miss out on the legacy of the Olympic site. Now there's a  surprise.

The report highlights a string of no-brainers for the legacy. Like this for example -

the sports facilities in the park should be made available for community use

and, wait for it,

new homes built on the park must be suitable for, and available to, local people - not just wealthy people moving on to the park.

I know we're dealing with people in suits here, but why does it require a study from a separate and doubtless expensive committee to come up with these not-exactly-revolutionary suggestions? I guess the problem is that the regeneration industry is so preoccupied with the physical world it is trying to dominate, and people are a real nuisance.

Just a thought to be added to my recent blurted critique of regeneration.

The future of regeneration and the politics of power

Over on Living with rats, Julian Dobson has started and reflected some convened-group thinking about the future of regeneration (here and here).

The debate will be featured in New Start magazine in due course. I think the focus on the relation between economic development and environmental sustainability is spot on. And there's a very welcome jab at the refusal of institutional thinking to recognise its own demise:

'There's a difference between [an] organic, assisted process and the directed, programme-driven forms of regeneration we've seen in the last three decades. The role of institutions should become one of nurturing and supporting what already exists and enabling it to grow, not one of constantly imposing grand strategies and plans.'

Indeed: the main thing stopping the network society from flourishing as it takes the place of the organisation society is, gosh who'd have thought it, people in organisations. The snapshot of this is councils blocking their staff from using social media.

The New Start debate brought out an emphasis on ethics and values, but that seems not to have been linked to the politics of power, as expressed through models of governance at local level.

If we speak about a future for regeneration, we need to explain what is so problematic about attitudes to governance under recent and current regeneration regimes. We can't just elide it or imply that it can be smoothed over. This is a recurring theme on this blog and I won't revisit all the arguments, but I want to get at the issues from the point of view of local groups. (I use three main sources: references at the end).

The first problem is the appropriation of language. The Third Way (let's dignify it with capital letters) has applied itself to transforming the meaning of 'community' into something we're all supposed to recognise, something unfailingly harmonious and positive which will deliver the state's objectives without ongoing state commitment. It relegates conflict to an issue of public management. Jeremy Brent put it like this:

'Time and again "the community" is referred to as an existing and unified structure, there to be consulted and relied on... Local communities are seen as both identifiable and good, with the certainty of their existence posing no problem, and as places where perpetrators of crime do not live. They have a unified and collective mind that identifies "needs" (a word commonly used in connection with community) that a benevolent authority (of course) can and does meet.' (Brent 2009, p245)

Unfortunately it would be hard to deny that the community development field has been complicit in this, or at best docile.

The second element concerns the policy determination of 'community as consensus'. Richard Sennett warned us about this decades ago when he wrote of 'destructive gemeinschaft' and pointed to the distaste for disorder. I reviewed Jackie Karn's Narratives of neglect a few months back:

'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.'

The third aspect is managerialism, which detaches and sanitises local experience, appropriating it for out-of-reach policy objectives, with assumed consent. 'Community' has been reinvented in corporate liberal regimes, according to Ann Ingamells, as a mechanism of governance:

'it is no threat to neoliberalism if residents in specific localities push for more of a voice and better conditions. Such demands will be managed by (non-elected) professionals (public sector, housing corporations) whose performance is tied to managerial benchmarks and who... will use a variety of means to ‘manage’ such claims, including tight control of information, agendas and meetings, as well as some tightly administered concessions.' (Ingamells 2007, p243)

One might respond that 'twas ever thus; or that there have been many examples in the past decade of inclusive, just and collaborative community involvement initiatives, which I would not want to deny. But what I'm trying to understand is a significant underlying shift in the way power is converted to energy at local level. For the moment, it looks as if power remains where it was but somehow causes energy in neighbourhoods. The entropy is not yet apparent. Or perhaps there is no 'community' equivalent to the second law of thermodynamics.

Where does this leave us? A new government may come in, relishing the new economic realities to justify a debilitating malnourishment of the public sector. The extent to which public agencies can now help people to address collectively the social injustices they might identify is just as constrained, I suggest, by the subtle and nuanced disempowerment through professionalised regeneration and the systematic neutering of conflict and adversity.

In this thin light, Ingamells calls for 'a new repertoire of community development strategies and techniques' and a shared analysis of how it is that we are currently governed. Picking up where she leaves off, I'm wondering how local groups respond to this context, when it is so hard to recapture the language that is used. Here, we are at the same time within and beyond conscientisation: this is about the logic of counter-counter-insurgency.

Brent, J. (2009). Searching for community: representation, power and action on an urban estate. Bristol, Policy Press.

Ingamells, A. (2007). 'Community development and community renewal: tracing the workings of power.' Community development journal 42(2): 237-250.

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

Social policy and empowerment

Yesterday to an event launching new policy work by the centre-right Centre for Social Justice. Their new policy areas are elder care, youth justice, mental health, community cohesion, sport, and social return on investment; and given their realistic chances of influencing forthcoming policy, it's good to see these themes being researched and debated openly.

I'm particularly pleased that some effort is to go into understanding and promoting informal support for older people, and I'll be pottering along to talk to the CSJ in due course. Meanwhile, as someone with a fair bit of experience of think-tank events on the political left, a couple of thoughts that struck me.

First, there was an odd tendency to treat old ideas as new. There's nothing necessarily wrong with refreshing old ideas - it may be better than the current preoccupation with innovation-at-all-costs. One example was the suggestion that it's socially beneficial for young people to participate in sport; but when this view was put across by Iain Duncan Smith as if it were his intellectual property it was greeted by some of those present like a radical revelation.

Similarly the arguments for social return on investment were unveiled as if no-one had ever heard of it before, leaving me pondering with irony the amount of thinking and effort that went into this area (using different terminology) in the late eighties and nineties under a Tory government (I recall in particular their 'Invest to Save' budget, although it was hard to crack into with social arguments: I tried). And it's a bit discourteous not to acknowledge the strong tradition of work at the New Economics Foundation.

Secondly, there was a discomforting sense of moral prescription and crusade - for example in 'saving' young people from a life of crime - without a moment's reflection on the case for empowering those involved. An early question from the floor raised just this point, and went unanswered, as if the language were not quite understood. It seems a realistic ambition for me to see if I can get an appreciation of empowerment and interdependence embedded in the work on care of older people. Wish me luck.

Co-production is coming of age

There's a tidy little cluster of examples of neighbourhood-based co-production just posted (anonymously, why?) on the NANM blog, claiming that people do just ‘get it’. So is the idea coming of age?

Co-production or co-delivery of public services and benefit gets a mention in most of my presentations and I agree, most people do get it. Most of us don't expect our medics to produce our health for us, we don't expect teachers to have sole responsibility for educating our children, and the police are not the only people who produce safety on our streets.

A lot of this thinking goes back to the late 1980s or early 90s, raising questions about how long it takes for the penny to drop in the official-bureaucratic mentality. I'm reminded of a meeting with a county police authority a couple of years ago, in which I made the above points and found myself faced with blank incomprehension, suggesting that few of them had reflected on the social context of their own practice.

Co-production needs to be seen as a form of collective behaviour and its ultimate expression is sustainable lifestyles. We can see people's responses to the pressures of climate change ('we must do our bit') as the unlikely source of a post-Thatcherite resurgence in credibility for collective approaches. A little encouragement from our most influential media wouldn't go amiss.

Another angle on this is the 'crowding-out' effect, the view that in the second half of the last century the welfare state overwhelmed citizens' readiness to help themselves or one another - hence the line that co-production is 'the biggest revolution in the shape of public services since Beveridge' (NESTA press release on their recent report).

There's a strong (but I believe unproven) argument to suggest that in some areas of social support, and with some demographics, accusations of crowding-out may be valid. Which leaves us with the forces of economic recession, reducing expectations and the necessity of localism. It's sometimes tough growing up.

The spirit level

Here's a fun short animation to help persuade you to get a copy of The spirit level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, which is now available in paperback.

I note that the hardback version is subtitled 'Why more equal societies almost always do better' and the paperback is subtitled 'Why equality is better for everyone'. I infer that people who view society at the macro level are thought more likely to be hardback buyers, and those of us who see things at the individual level, er, maybe don't.

I seem to recall that Ray Oldenburg's The great good place also had its subtitle rephrased between editions. I infer that publishers like to keep librarians on their toes.

Via the Equality Trust.

Eyesore gardens: vermin inside and a bin in the hall

Just caught up with this article by Allegra Stratton on 'eyesore front gardens' in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, in last week's Guardian Society.

These are 1930s estates and

the houses are largely rented, through which short-term tenants flow in and out, chucking away the previous tenants' soft furnishings. The area is now remarkable for its inside-out properties: two or three mattresses, three-piece suites and rolls of carpets in front gardens, while wildlife takes over indoors – with rats, pigeons nesting in the eaves, and moss thriving on carpets. "If the mattresses outside aren't enough," says the leader of the local council, Liam Smith, "then look for the pigeons sitting on the roof. It means vermin living up there."

The council tries to work proactively with residents to clear up, but if they fail to, the team shows up with a rubbish truck and oversees the clear-up of the garden, charging the landlord for the work. The effect will be to help establish a sense of order and overcome feelings of lack of efficacy in the nieghbourhood.

Apparently the council has rarely had to take legal action so far, and they support the initiative with a mobile "tool library", from which, on the presentation of a library membership card, residents can hire shovels, clippers or hoes to attack their front garden themselves.

And I like this little story brought to the surface by the visit of local MP Jon Cruddas:

Standing in the fog, watching a concrete yard being cleared of junk, Cruddas is approached by the son of an 80-year-old constituent who lives in a house along the road. "You won't remember, but you got her her first wheelie bin," he tells Cruddas. "Hers was the first in the street and she was worried sick it was going to get nicked." Did she chain it up? "Nah, she kept it in the hall."