Neighbourhoods

Valuing common ground

The English tradition of common land is a physical representation of collective interest that defies exclusive and privatising practices.

'People may not know what a common is, but they have some sense of its survival through history, perhaps that the land once belonged to the people, and they want to keep it that way.'

This comes from new guidance for assessing the community value of common land, prepared by Kate Ashbrook and Nicola Hodgson for The Open Spaces Society.

It's full of fascinating insight and some individual reflections like this:

'Zoar Common is the link between my home and the high moorland and is welcoming, familiar, territory where I‟m most likely to meet near neighbours coming and going, exchanging a few friendly words and keeping in touch with local matters.'

The guidance is intended

to identify mechanisms to recognise and take account of local community interests on commons, hence complementing established criteria used in assessing national importance of land for interests such as nature con-servation and landscape. The intention is not that community interests should be graded or weighed and balanced against national interests, but rather that they should be given proper recognition and attention when considering man-agement on a common, seeking to integrate local and national aspirations within management frameworks. Specifically, the purpose of the commission was to provide information to enable the user or practitioner to:

i be aware of issues relating to the community interests of common land,
ii assess the importance of common land to local neighbourhoods,
iii engage with communities and understand their perspectives,
iv incorporate community concerns in any scheme examining the future and management of commons.

Via Planning bulletin.

'When you have a dog you know everyone'

"I live in a block of flats and I'm on the second floor and all my neighbours are fine, we all know each other. When you have a dog you know everyone - before I had a dog I didn't know anyone. We've got half the world in my street but we're all fine, we all get on."

From a selection of comments on knowing thy neighbour, collected by the Tottenham, Wood Green and Edmonton journal in north London.

The Big Nudge: can it accommodate awkwardness?

Yesterday I shuffled from a meeting with someone working on Big Society, to an event about how to get citizens involved in public policy. This latter was the launch of findings from the 'Rediscovering the civic' project run by the universities of Southampton and Manchester, known as 'nudge-nudge, think-think' because of the experiments exploring the effect of policies which 'nudge' people into prosocial behaviour, and those which encourage people to think through the issues in the hope of prosocial consequences.

Inevitably, set in the heart of Whitehall with an array of learned speakers, the debate was at a high level of generality while acknowledging the significance of the political moment. Combined with the preceding meeting, it's helped to clarify for me quite where Big Soc fits and what it might mean.

First, the suspicion that the thinking behind Big Society has been based on a shallow appreciation of the realities of the community sector have been confirmed. That can be remedied, perhaps is being remedied (well, they invited me along for a chat!).

Second, we are all starting to see more clearly where it has come from, historically. Take these two quotes, via former Blair advisers, which are going the rounds:

(i) Matthew Taylor referring I believe to a Norwegian journalist who pointed out that Labour's failure was a failure of public mobilisation, having campaigns like child poverty that should have been public campaigns which they turned into technocratic exercises. Can't argue with that. (You can? Go on then).

(ii) Attributed to David Halpern, something like this - 'we're not trying to do more with less. We're trying to do more with more, and that comes from the social fabric'. I've heard this discussion elsewhere, when people say the Big Soc is just what we were trying to do before... Yes, at local level it can certainly look like that. But wouldn't it have helped if new Labour managerialism, and all the arrogance of previous administrations (not that much different), had been supportive instead of so often obstructive and (to pick up a point made by Sue Goss yesterday) infantilising? To put it another way, did previous administrations culturally stifle public involvement? To me these are little insights which can help measure the change to a new context.

Third, insights from Phillip Blond of ResPublica, revealing the centrality of nudge to Big Society. He said that nudge is a modern way of referring to tradition or tacit knowledge, which has become derided and devalued in recent decades.

'Tradition is already a pre-selection of how we should live. Nudge is about group behaviour.'

For Blond, it seems that the Big Society is about restoring the public value of tradition, of accepted shared forms of collective life. Neither De Tocqueville nor Putnam got mentioned, which I suspect is a good thing: whatever is being invented here, it's more than US-style bowling together, because of the political niceties.

Still, association is key in Blond's view:

'There's almost no context in which association is not part of the determinative answer. And yet we do not have the conceptual architecture to make association desirable, to help it happen.'

Don't we? He spoke about making this happen around the issues that people care about 'in their communities', proceeding to an immaculate if not quite intentional definition of community development, without mentioning 'community development'.

But, fourthly, Michael Saward challenged Blond's 'unitarian' interpretation of good citizenship as uncontroversial and universally accepted. That may be unfair, I can't say, but it gets back to a central problem for the Big Society which Saward himself had raised at the outset of yesterday's discussion:

'Will awkward citizens be welcome in the Big Society?'

I've raised this question here in a different way myself: what does BS mean for the local activist who is moved to confront social injustice, not just for the cakestall mafia? When street reps in Shipley talk to me about the tensions between being a 'good citizen' (reporting disorder, keeping an eye out for drug drops, liaising with agencies etc) and campaigning to become empowered and overcome inequalities (activism in the local political arena), it feels like Big Society is not ready to provide the frameworks for that activism, to accommodate awkwardness.

Yesterday's material helps me visualise Big Society as one big nudge towards prosocial action, and I have no problem with that. But if and when Big Society does recognise the need to engage at the level of social justice, it will need to do so in a way that does not feel to local activists like assimilation or an attempt to neutralise whatever frustration, anger, resentment, bitterness they may be feeling.

A ball and glass and neighbour story

Jerry, happily six and eleven twelfths years old, had been playing football in the garden, but Rooneyed one over the fence and heard that glass sound, that sound when glass is no longer quite what it was. To his and her credit Jerry ran to his mother with his concerns. She encouraged him to be brave and go and knock at the door, apologise and find out the damage. He did so, and learned that his neighbours had been putting out empty wine bottles, as you do, at the moment of his miss-kick, and perhaps one slipped from a grasp or it was just vigorous clinking.

That Mead quote

I see that the famous Margaret Mead quote was trotted out in the House of Lords the other day:

'Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.' (5.29pm: Lord Wei)

I have no problem with the first sentence, it is memorable and adequate. The second sentence is manifest nonsense (perhaps you heard about the BP oil fiasco, for example?) so why do people always feel compelled to reproduce it? There's a danger it could come across as phoney glorification of the achievements of ordinary people.

Village fate

The village of Grassington, previously tipped for the prize, has now been 'chosen' for the tv programme in which twelve outsiders

“move into a house in a beautiful rural village and the residents decide who they think is the right person to become a permanent member of their community and win the house”.

Villagers have dwelt on their fate. Will it all end in tears?

Mr Isaacs, who is the studio’s creative director, said his team was looking for a handful of strong local characters who would act as mentors to introduce people to the village.

He said he would like to get as many people as possible involved in voting people off the show, but had yet to “nail down” how it would work.

“We’ll always be available to engage people before, during and after production. We want our relationship to continue,” he said. “We do care about your community, but we also want to make exciting, grabby television.”

That's 'grabby' spelled with an 'a', I checked.

I can see there are understandable views on either side of the debate, but what's striking is where the power lies. Presumably residents did not proactively invite the tv company in, at least not collectively. Now that they have apparently accepted their nomination, I imagine residents are going to find themselves with less and less influence over what happens.

Shock news: neighbourliness might or might not be in decline

There are two surveys of neighbourliness around at the moment, one I already trailed, carried out by YouGov for Co-Operatives UK, the other carried out by Fresh Minds for Gumtree.

It's great to have some data to get to grips with all of a sudden. I'll prepare a more detailed review as there is likely to be an event anounced soon, so just a few thoughts right now. I'm using the Co-Ops report written by Ed Mayo, I can't find the questions that were asked or any other data; and a preliminary summary of the Gumtree research, no final version being available yet. I'm grateful to Gumtree for permission to quote from this document.

The big headline from the Co-Ops study is that people in the UK are 'less than half' as neighbourly in 2010 as they were in 1982 when a set of interviews were carried out by MORI. As I mentioned the other day, their 'Good Neighbour Index' is based on 'the total number of people helped by their neighbours divided by the number whose neighbours have given them problems', so the statistic comes as no surprise.

You'd want to take account (the report doesn't) of the possibility that in 2010 people might more frequently and readily get some forms of help, like emotional and financial support, from remote others (beyond the neighbourhood) than they did in 1982. You could also speculate that there are more and better opportunities to report nuisance behaviour to authorities now than in the past, which encourages people to describe certain forms of behaviour as giving them problems. At the very least you'd reflect on the fact that the 2010 survey was carried out online and the 1982 survey wasn't. And maybe take account of significant changes in average household size.

Points like these are more by way of explanation for the statistic than challenging it directly: but they do raise the question of whether the model of neighbourliness represented by the Co-Ops index is capable of accommodating shifts in the social role of neighbouring. The study presents a chummy model of neighbouring which is essentially about helping each other out.

Many people prefer a model of neighbouring which is based on an ongoing respect for privacy coupled with mutual recognition, so that help can be mobilised in case of need. If you were measuring neighbourliness for that model, you'd ask different questions and expect to come up with a different answer.

The Gumtree report is determinedly upbeat, with  more of an emphasis on attitudes to neighbourhood than on behaviour within it. The main headline is eyebrow-raisingly counter-intuitive:

27% of people with a long commute to work every day know 11 or more of their neighbours, whereas the majority of those who commute less know only 0-3 neighbours.

As with the Co-Ops and so many studies, what is meant by 'knowing' a neighbour appears to be 'know by name', which just perpetuates the unfortunate habit of over-privileging strong ties in the understanding of local social relations. This study is also an online survey, incidentally, and some thought needs to be given as to how that affects the results.

A second headline from the Gumtree findings is that neighbourliness has increased during the past 18 months. The researchers say that:

Even though we couldn’t detect a clear correlation between the recession and neighbourliness, people across the nation did indicate having tried to be friendlier and more neighbourly in the last 18 months.

I need to go deeper into some of this material but for the moment there are three areas to reflect on:

 

• The Co-Ops research raises for me what might be a critical issue of 'crossing the threshold'. It seems that people are far less likely to go into one another's homes. The americans call it 'refrigerator rights'. In the 1982 study to which the Co-Ops survey is compared, 26 per cent of respondents said they never called round next door. The proportion of responses in 2010 is 43 per cent. The decline could be related to changes in average household size, because smaller households create fewer reasons for mutual friendly invasion. Having an online sample is likely to cause distortion. There are various other possible factors of course, including the kinds of thing which lead people to keep their doors locked and not answer anyone. We need to keep an eye on this one.
• Nuisance neighbours: has there really been a rise? The Co-Ops research suggests a doubling and the world of anecdote supports that. The past couple of days I've been in Shipley, attending a housing and environment committee meeting, hovered a few hours in the community centre, followed by a street reps meeting, and there's no shortage of stories about difficult neighbours. We need to explore these findings: is it worse in general, worse in terms of severity of offence, or not much different? I heard a story yesterday about a deranged individual throwing a tv out of a flat three floors up; but I heard of exactly the same in Ruislip, west London, in about 1976.
• The lending of keys. I'm a great believer in this as an indicator of trust at the most local level, and it's helpful that both these surveys asked about it. Unfortunately they don't clearly distinguish holding a neighbour's key from having one's key held by another, but here's a little comparison:

Keys held by neighbour

Manchester neighbourliness review (2004): 26% (49% for those aged 65-74 yrs)
Co-Ops survey (2010): 27%
Gumtree (2010): 45%

I've no idea how the discrepency can be explained, but it is perhaps a little warning about drawing conclusions from a single set of data.

Finally, the Gumtree report finds that people want to be more involved locally but often are unsure how to take the first step. The classic example is when they miss the chance to introduce themselves to new neighbours, and find years later that they still haven't because a comparably straightforward opportunity does not arise. The report raises important questions about what devices - like street parties or online networks - might be appropriate to help people form connections. The data we are sifting through in the Networked Neighbourhoods study should help here: watch this space (or this one).

 

The bedrock of the garden fence to fall back on

The Sunday Times published a piece this morning about a major survey conducted for Co-Operatives UK. It offers a few unsatisfying titbits about material which is not yet published and not covered by anyone else as far as I can see. Not a word on the Co-Ops site.

So what have we got to go on?

• The number of people willing to keep an eye on the elderly or disabled in their neighbourhood has risen.
• Neighbourliness has declined significantly over nearly 30 years.
• The number of people who say they suffer from loneliness has more than doubled (presumably over the same 30 year period).
• The average number of neighbours known to respondents has fallen sharply. In 1982, nearly half believed they knew by name at least 11 neighbours and a quarter knew 20 or more. Now, even the most neighbourly Britons — those in Scotland — know an average of only 8.4 neighbours.

Apparently the report judges neighbourliness 'by measuring the number of people helped by their neighbours divided by the number whose neighbours have caused them problems.' So you could have a positive, a zero, or a negative score. I've been thinking about what that means since I read it at 0700 this morning. I suppose it treats neighbouring in proactive and not passive terms, but you gotta start somewhere. It will be interesting to find out. 'Knowing by name' is a poxy proxy for neighbouring, but it sounds like they may have used the same wording in a previous survey for comparison, so would be valid to some extent.

Oh and then there's this little gem, quoting Co-Ops UK secretary-general Ed Mayo:

'There is not that bedrock of the garden fence to fall back on.'

I doubt if Ed would have said this, more likely it's been mangled by a PR writer for him, and I thank them.

Pavement chalking: this time seen in a positive light

Neighbor Chalk is an international public art project that encourages people to create sidewalk chalk art in front of their homes and around their neighborhood to create a welcoming environment for their neighbors and passers by.

I hope they're aware of the fact that this apparently attractive and harmless practice is held to be antisocial and even criminal in some quarters:

'If it can be washed away, it's not graffiti. But'
Pavement chalking epidemic?
Footnote on pavement chalking

The peculiar persistence of racist hatred

Many years ago I was giving a lecture at a university in Brasil, through an interpreter, and I told a fictional story involving an Irish man and assumptions of violent intent (it was an information science lecture, the point of the story was not political but about available information and the ways in which it can be interpreted). My interpreter, an academic who had spent time in the UK, prattled on a little and people laughed, until I looked over at him quizzically. He said, 'I was explaining, we have the same attitude here towards Polish people.'

I had to retrace the story to explain that I did not imply a racist slur against Irish people, which is what he had anticipated. He then backtracked with the students to retract the anti-Polish slur. And we moved on.

A few years ago I was in Kyrgyzstan with a British study group. We spent one night in the mountains camped in yurts, hosted by an Uzbek woman. We taken aback by an instance of nasty, overt racism from a small exuberant group of Kyrgyz, and our hostess was clearly shaken. Through our interpeter and our behaviour, we offered as best we could what I would describe now as a form of civilised comfort.

Now, with this news from that country I am saddened by the way racist attitudes, against people who happen to be of slightly different stock, escalates to collective wild aggression.

Hard to explain, this apparently universal phenomenon of persistent tribal hatred acted out in uncontrolled violence. Of all the sources I've read that touch on this theme, the most memorable was a curious and absorbing ethnographic study by Mattijs van de Port, trying to understand the 'eruptive character of violence' among the gypsies and the settled people of Serbia during the Balkan war.

It makes me think that those of us who try to pronounce on racism simply from a position of civilised comfort, seem to do so with pitifully inadequate appreciation of the thirst for sensation, the seduction of chaos, the persistence of the primitive, what van de Port calls 'the choice of irrationality,' the comforting adoption of the barbaric, the suspension of civilisation, 'an affinity with some pre-cultural state,' the impermanence of our own truths and values. Having worked recently on a bibliography of racial inequalities, I'm surprised at the reluctance of commentators to go deeper. But it is folly to proceed as if these forces do not need to be explored and understood.

Local citizen-based websites

Alan Stanton, a Labour councillor who contributes occasionally to Harringay Online, speaking of the attitude of politicians to local websites:

"We shouldn't try to harness it. We can be part of it, contribute to it and listen to it but shouldn't try and colonise it."

This comes from a BBC News article by Jane Wakefield this morning, which also refers to Brockley Central and East Dulwich Forum, quotes Andy Williamson from the Hansard Society, and even has a few words from Hugh Flouch and meself. All part of the growing interest.

Online communication in neighbourhoods: not just people we know

The latest Pew Internet Project report has just been published, on the topic of 'neighbors online'. It covers the role of face-to-face, telephone and digital technologies in relations between neighbours. I've posted some thoughts about it on the Networked Neighbourhoods site here, including this suggestion:

Last year's Pew Internet Survey asked a question designed to ascertain whether the internet had affected people’s understanding of the word ‘discuss’ in relation to ‘important matters’ and ‘significant ties’. (The researchers did not find that it has). If they can do that, maybe they can work on the question of whether the internet may be affecting our understanding of the word 'know' in relation to 'neighbours'. And perhaps more importantly, we can start looking at how local online resources allow us to connect with people we don't know.

A new old narrative for community regeneration

Demos have just published a paper by Max Wind-Cowie on community regeneration based on interviews in two high profile Birmingham projects, Balsall Heath and Castle Vale. The report is called Civic streets, although I didn't feel there was much focus on the civic.

There's a reassuring emphasis on local democracy, noting for instance that when local people come together, establish a plan of action and consult widely, 'they have already demonstrated collective efficacy and commitment to improving their neighbourhoods'. Birmingham City's idea for 'micro-mayors' for areas up to 5,000 people gets welcomed, as we'd expect given the Demos tradition. The projects' part in stimulating social capital is celebrated. And it's helpful also to reflect on how come, although they have good relationships with local government, people in these areas

'are not able to assume control of local services even when they are confident of their ability to do so more successfully.'

The author suggests that there is 'a new narrative for community regeneration' -

'one that frees up the space for civil society to rebuild itself and its communities, although providing the tools to help groups and communities to demonstrate their worth and success.'

That sounds like a slightly over-excited claim to justify the planting of the BS flag on all this territory they think they have captured. Before I accept it, I'd just like to consider the use of the word 'rebuild'. Don't keep telling me civil society is bust, I think that compared to some other sectors it might be in reasonably good shape.

He goes on:

'We can help to open up the political and social space for community regeneration if we begin to roll the state back in those areas where it is possible, and desirable, for others to act. We must step back and enable civil society to build neighbourhoods that function well. Just because the state pays for regeneration it does not mean that the state must do regeneration.'

Fair enough, although I think that in ten years' time we may look back at a lot of painful mistakes and re-learning of the reasons why we have such things as, for example, state schools.

Then he rather lets himself down with the final phrase here:

'Community regeneration needs to occur within a framework that is supportive, enabling and engaged with communities themselves.'

Surely only a tory could imagine a form of community regeneration that did not engage with 'communities themselves'... And that highlights a slight problem for those coming late to the idea that people already do this stuff, that it involves political skirmishes and conflict and injustices and messiness, that it's something the state can enable and try to control, and by which occasionally the state can be upset. Note how the report, we are told,

'aims to explore how the ‘Big Society’ has worked in two areas... that are often claimed to be examples of its success.'

Does Big Society really have such a distinguished history? As the author acknowledges elsewhere, people in Balsall Heath and Castle Vale have been working on this stuff for 20 years. Which means they predate the Big Society by, let me see, I make that about 20 years.

I've paid short visits to both projects and truly I doubt whether, at any time since they started, the activists involved would have welcomed hearing their efforts equated with the top-down philanthropic BS approach - an approach that seeks to place co-production in an vacuum beyond contamination while denying issues of disempowerment, exclusion and social injustice that are inescapably part of the context. The suggestion seems closer to an insult than I for one would care to go.

Is this the way things are going? The subtitle of this report insists that these projects reveal 'the Big Society in action'. Sounds like a claim to me. Is anything resembling successful resident involvement, community development, community action or neighbourhood management now perceived as fair game for assimilation by the BS rhetoric? I know that at least one of the above-mentioned projects has struggled to keep itself free from the clammy co-opting claims of politicians now in power. I fear we can expect more of this.

Funding for work with older people: Wales

Are we to start seeing some incentives to develop social interaction projects with older people? The Big Lottery in Wales has just launched a funding programme for projects ‘to improve the quality of life of older people by providing access to befriending or advocacy services.’ Grants are available for between £200k and £1m, for projects that address two of the following outcomes:

• Reduced loneliness and increased wellbeing through improving social interaction
• Increased confidence and ability to meet the challenges and opportunities of ageing
• Increased understanding and use of rights and awareness and uptake of services leading to greater independence and choice for older people.

More on local pubs

One hopes that the arguments for the social value of local pubs have been accepted, but of course in a time of economic recession it's not so easy to protect them. The complexity of factors, like the availability of inexpensive drinks through supermarkets, the dominance of pubcos, restrictive covenants on sites and so on, mean some rapid joining up of planning, taxation and social policies could be needed if the decline is to be halted.

I blogged Rick Muir's ippr work on community pubs last year. Now here's a handy update article by Mark Smulian in Planning, which includes this example of an appeal:

'A proposal to change a pub in a Wiltshire village to residential use was rejected by an inspector. The applicants argued that the pub was not viable because it had lost £40,000 in the previous year. But the inspector found that the only other nearby pub mostly sold beer and lacked family facilities or potential to offer an extensive range of food.

'He concluded that the loss of the pub would be detrimental to the community and that the applicants appeared to have paid more than the business was worth based on its turnover. Letters from residents suggested that the premises had developed an unfriendly environment and the inspector accepted that the pub would be viable if it met local demands.'

Twitter: the basis for a 'real' community?

As network society freaks would expect, Barry Wellman might have an interesting, and quite direct, take on the use of twitter. As of August 2009, Barry was following 114 people and being followed by 652. Among his mutuals is Howard Rheingold and, I imagine, Keith Hampton. His twitter network is the subject of a forthcoming paper he's co-written for American behavioral scientist which notes that:

'there is a possibility that Twitter can form the basis of interlinked personal communities – and even of a sense of community. Our analysis of one person’s Twitter network shows that it is the basis for a real community, even though Twitter was not designed to support the development of online communities.'

Not exactly surprising, but absorbing, not least because it helps us think about how we populate multiple communities and networks.

Neighbours and food

I just came across this little gem:

I had an old man living next door who was a recluse and I used to help him a lot. He was very independent though, so I'd say things like: 'I've cooked too much food, could you do me a favour and take it from me?' He died and now we have a young couple, who we haven't really met. I'm now at the age where they might bring me food and I ll tell them to get lost, like he used to tell me.

More in this curious little collection.

Make yourself comfortable

This is Unst bus shelter. Via a post on the Streets list.