Friday saw the launch of Gumtree's research into the 'state of neighbourhoods,' carried out by Fresh Minds and trailed here. I'm told that the data will be made available and when anything comes up I'll point to it. The NANM's Ben Lee chaired a small gathering of a fascinating mix of invitees, for a wide-ranging discussion about the implications of the findings, how they shape up alongside other knowledge, and what contribution can be made by a company like Gumtree.
To recap briefly on the context: the well-publicised recent Co-Ops research claimed a substantial decline in neighbourliness in the UK over the past 28 years. The Gumtree study seems to challenge that: 59 per cent of their respondents said that they had 'tried to be more neighbourly' in the last 18 months.
I don't think I care particularly if neighbourliness has gone up, gone down, or stayed the same, unless that means something. Logically I'd expect it to have gone down a little (if measured using some base index that would have to be a few decades old) until about 18 months ago, when we began to hear echoes of new (or rather refreshed) social values in response to climate change, the recognised shambles of Thatcherism, and the exposed hollow morality of small clusters of bankers and of members of parliament.
I'm more interested in understanding historical changes in what we expect neighbourhood relations to do for us (hence my questioning of the usefulness of an outdated base definition). For instance, increasingly more of us satisfy more of our emotional and communicative needs remotely, using technologies; and at the same time, many more of us are living in single-person households, so there are fewer causes of connection with neighbours than there might have been previously, and we need to put more thought into devices which allow appropriate encounters. This doesn't mean neighbouring has to be formalised in any sense: attempts to do that, eg through 'good neighbour' agreements, are going to have limited impact at best. So what is the role for policy?
Neighbouring matters to policy because the neighbourhood is the default environment for socialisation; it's still the locus of response to urgent need for many situations and for mobilisation against perceived local threats; and it's a natural nursery for the development of prosocial behaviour. If people don't learn and practice civil behaviour and respect in their immediate surroundings, it's that much harder to accomplish elsewhere.
But policy struggles to do more than declaim against the perceived absence of neighbourliness - meaning, negative social phenomena perceived to be in part the consequence of weak and fractured local connections. Policy neither recognises the contribution that neighbouring makes as a platform for collaborative behaviour, nor finds ways to stimulate it. The vague sense resonating in policy over the past ten years and now in Big Society, that there's something important about the local context, is still way out of focus. For example, policy does little to counter planning and transport decisions and behaviours that are anti-neighbourly; or to strengthen the localness of schools in ways that might help to provide young people with local friendships and obviate the need for backseat lifestyles.
The main message from the Gumtree study is that people want to be more neighbourly: the researchers point to a clear 'appetite for deeper connections'. There seems to be a latent interest in being prosocial, which could be turned into momentum if we can contrive the right sort of policy nudge.
Among the key points discussed at the debate on Friday were these four which I feel are well worth capturing:
- why is it often seen as unusual to take an interest in one's locality? (Is this just the historical knock-on of reinforced gender divisions, whereby parenting, housework and neighbouring were socially designated as so unimportant that only women could be expected to do them, and what men did in distance offices was far more important? Or is there something more to this, to do with physical mobility and territory, the use of cars and our reluctance to occupy our neighbourhoods?)
- how do we stimulate neighbourly support for older people to help them to age in place? (Plenty on this blog on this theme already)
- how do we make neighbourhoods more neighbourly for young people?
- the overlap between formal civic involvement (like being on a decision-making committee) and informal connectedness at neighbourhood level (people who are good at looking out for others) is often weak; so initiatives to encourage neighbouring probably need to be thought-through quite separately from programmes to stimulate volunteering (without ignoring common lessons of course).
