Neighbourhoods

Home is where you can park your car

Royal Mail published some findings from an online (UK) survey into home moving habits recently, including these headlines:

• More than a quarter of people (27 per cent) said that car parking was most important if they had to move home, while just 17 per cent said being close to family was the top priority.
• Fifty per cent rate being near green space as one of the most important considerations for a new area.
• Seven per cent stated that they would not wish to move their pets to an unfamiliar neighbourhood. (Well blah, how's yer hamster gonna get a rounded education, appreciate diversity and experience different cultures?)

Neighbourliness designed-in

Spiegel Online has an article, 'The challenge of making HafenCity feel neighborly', about a large new city centre development for 12,000 residents in Hamburg.

It's a very protracted initiative with an emphasis on social mix, and on residents and other stakeholders having an input into the ongoing project. The sociologist involved in the development, Marcus Menzl, says:

'You cannot build a neighborly feeling. But I think that architecture can help certain processes and hinder others.'

The pic is from their photo gallery.

Older people in poverty

This is a note I prepared recently on neighbourhood support for older people in poverty, for a friend working in a think-tank who asked for my views. I had forgotten it, rediscovered it, and thought I would share it.

Apart from the obvious problems associated with declining health and mobility, many older people have difficulty adjusting to changes in their social and built environment. I see these issues in three groups.

• In addition to a general sense of discrimination against them, older people often feel economically discarded and left without a role, disempowered by the ethos of consumption, their values outdated and their memories not valued;
• They are often bewildered and challenged by the speed of change, for example in terms of the built environment in their neighbourhood, or in the cultural diversity around them;
• They will almost inevitably experience network erosion – the loss of personal contacts – as they age.

For older people in poverty, it is far harder to get protection from these forces. Inevitably they will struggle to compensate for the loss of members of their social network if they lack the resources (not just money and mobility, but also cultural capital and confidence) to engage new non-local contacts.

Furthermore, these are compound problems: being disempowered and experiencing exclusion makes it harder to deal with change in your environment; struggling to come to terms with change in your environment makes it harder to compensate for the loss of contacts; and so on. These accumulating effects cause profound social damage.

Policy tends to get no nearer to this cycle than through piecemeal support for formal schemes of carers and buddies. Worse, we try to resolve the difficulties by displacement, drawing older people out of their homes and into sheltered care, rather than addressing the issues that would enable more of them to age in place.

How can policy gain purchase on these issues? We need comprehensive cultural awareness in order to bring about change. We need policies that genuinely confront and reduce poverty. We need a media campaign that refreshes generalised respect for the fact of age. We need to promote localism – a policy emphasis on local solutions to social problems and the valuing of blended local cultures. We need to insist consistently on an intergenerational element in local initiatives. And we need policy to recognise and allow space for informal and semi-formal solutions, encouraging recognition of neighbours and stimulating interaction at neighbourhood level.

In this respect it is interesting to note how local online networks seem to be releasing a latent demand for informal opportunities for neighbourhood support, among people who are disinclined to participate in formal organisations. The potential for social media to help support neighbouring, especially for older people in low-income areas, merits early investigation.

Neighbours these days: not recognised, not interested?

Legal and General's Next door strangers survey report got some press coverage earlier this week (eg) and more to come I gather.

It's gloomy but what I like about this one is the recognition of recognition. It goes further than assessing socialisation with neighbours and knowing their names, claiming that 70% of respondents 'wouldn't recognise their neighbours if they passed them in the street'.

This echoes a point in the literature about the fractured nature of contemporary neighbouring compared with the sense of collective neighbouring experienced (and evidenced) in close-knit neighbourhoods in the past. The necessity neighbouring of close-knit neighbourhoods disguised major disadvantages which we would not wish to see return in the looming effects of the recession. Most of those self-defined communities were gradually eroded by relative economic wealth and by diversity (the latter reflected in the Legal and General study) so the need for 'manifest neighbouring' has diminished. But that does not mean that recognition is any less important, indeed one could argue that it's more important, and I think this study highlights it in a smart way:

'On average, Brits would only be able to pick one in three of their neighbours out of a line up.'

At one point the report refers to the notion of 'immediate recognition' which I also like. Of course, as often with reports like this, we aren't told the wording of the questions so it's sometimes hard to interpret the findings. But as I've suggested before, we can still draw conclusions from even the most 'methodologically-carefree' of studies. To be fair, generally it's not the methodology but the writing-up that is a bit carefree. Here's an example:

'Our findings indicate that people feel less responsibility for looking out for suspicious activity in their street...'

Note the word 'less'. Less than when or less than who? Implicitly I think I'm supposed to hear 'less than they used to be'. As so often, the language contributes to the narrative of decline, without justifying it. We simply don't know if neighbourliness has declined, although it's what we'd expect, but we're surrounding ourselves with assumptions which make it harder to see either other benefits or how the role of neighbouring may have changed.

There's one other striking finding that I'd like to dwell on:

'More than a third (35%) of us don’t believe that we should have any responsibility for the safety or security of our neighbourhoods.'

Someone should tell David Cameron and the orchestral conductors of Big Society: if some of the co-producers haven't turned up, others are gonna have to play louder and longer. This is a good example of where we could do with more from the data: if 35% said 'no' to whatever the question was, what proportion said yes and what proportion said 'don't know' or declined to answer? Just 16% of 'don't knows' might suggest, for instance, that less than half of us are prepared to co-produce the safety of our own local environments. That would be surprising and not be good news at the best of times: these are not the best of times.

Legal and General are an insurance company and they have their products to sell, which is fine. They are under no obligation to package the data in any way that doesn't suit them. But with reports like this I'm entitled to wish that just a little more resource might be put into the interpretation and presentation of the results, and some way found of making the data available: that would be a real service beyond the commercial sphere.

Press release is here.

 

Previously:

Five per cent have no contact with neighbours.

Shock news: neighbourliness might or might not be in decline.

 

 

A tale about exclusion

Here's a story that reached me the other day about a young boy at a family centre. He turned up one morning and when asked how he was, said that he felt a bit strange.

So they took him to one side and gently asked questions to see what the problem was. Children with difficult backgrounds, it's right to be attentive and you might be looking for certain signs. Nope, there didn't seem to be anything untoward, he just felt strange and couldn't explain.

It turned out to be happiness. The lad had no vocabulary for the sensation and no recognisable previous experience to refer to, so how was he to know what it was?

Tragedy festers in neighbourhoods

Here's a reminder that our neighbours aren't all shining with bonhomie, goodwill and sugar-coated tweeness. There's a lot of crud that people have to deal with. Diane Dyson has this really remarkable post about some of the tragic lives she knows about in her neighbourhood.

Bob McKee

CILIP has today announced the death of their Chief Executive Bob McKee.

This was a jovial man who believed passionately in the power of public libraries to contribute to social change. He also had a clear understanding of community development. He could surprise you with the speed of his insight and the breadth of his knowledge, always worn lightly and with a readiness to engage with all kinds of people. I knew him from his days in Solihull when he had responsibility for community development among other things; and though we did not catch up often, I always felt the warmth of common values.

Bob was due to retire in October, so this loss will be felt all the more keenly by his family. Someone else I feel I could call an old friend, Annie Mauger, is due to take on the role of Chief Executive. The baton may now feel like a great weight to lift in these sad circumstances, but Annie has considerable strength from her own values and will carry it in her own way.

We’re not all in this together

I’ve been thinking about Big Society as a cluster of three overlapping themes: smaller state, localism, and co-production.

For me localism means the celebration of local assets and a concern for local solutions to local problems. It should not mean abandoning local people to regional or national problems – such as a shortage of affordable housing for example.

From the community development perspective, the emphasis on localism and co-production are overdue and more than welcome. The only theme that’s problematic is the first one, ‘smaller state’. To outsiders, CD sometimes shifts in a slippery way between an emphasis on self-help or mutual aid on the one hand, and insistence on state services to support those most in need on the other; so maybe it’s not surprising that there has not been a coherent response. Of course, it isn’t a question of shifting: both are needed.

Unfortunately, ‘rolling back the state’ polarises those for whom it will be alright and those for whom it won’t be. People who experience exclusion start with no options. In recent weeks the Rollers Back have shown that their understanding of this may be in need of rolling forwards.

And the danger for the folk behind BS is in implying that by making the state smaller you will automatically reveal a big society that was there all along. In many places that surely is the case: but not everywhere, and the least they can do is show some human recognition that that is the case. Some people – far more I suspect than our policymakers seem ready to believe - still lack a Small Society and will be the more vulnerable without organised support.

Last week a social worker told me that in his office the staffing level was 50% before cuts and their pay has been frozen.

In the context of savage cuts to public sector spending it’s politically convenient to imply that ‘we’re all in this together’. That’s just devious. We’re not all in this together. Some are poncing about with Pimms on the upper deck while some are clinging desperately to the sides, and many detached are screaming from the rising waters. Responsible politicians would acknowledge that, then do something about it.

Play space for children

Following Wednesday's government announcement about the destructive withdrawal of funding for community playground schemes across England, here's a letter in today's Guardian by Liz Kessler, (in turn responding to George Monbiot's article about common space, play and trees on housing estates):

Many of these estates are surrounded by large areas of bleak open space, all too often dominated by cars. By redesigning these spaces, planting them with trees and flowers, providing allotments, minimising the impact of vehicles, and integrating opportunities for play, they can indeed be transformed. I recently worked on such an estate and when the re-landscaping was completed an elderly resident said: "It's like a cork bursting out of a bottle. I had no idea there were so many children cooped up in these flats."

Cuts begin to bite: Big Society nowhere to be seen

Here's how it starts.

Back in May the Chief Secretary to the Treasury David Laws said, according to BBC News, that

'every new spending commitment and pilot project signed off by Labour ministers since the turn of the year would be individually reviewed in a bid to find savings.'

Last week I learned of one painful casualty of this clawing back, a community development project in Watford.

Watford's Council for Voluntary Service had developed the proposal, including  for a community assembly, partly with a view to making the Local Strategic Partnership accountable and representative. The stated objective was:

'to ensure that everyone in Watford has access to a community group to represent their needs and interests, and that these groups have a way of influencing local decisions.'

An enthusiastic community development worker was in place whose role included promoting community engagement and volunteering, and supporting new community groups. Eleven weeks into building the necessary relationships, the claws reached him.

The news somewhat overshadowed a meeting of the Watford community development network yesterday. It happens that the agenda for the meeting included discussion of Big Society, a well-known government initiative promoting principles of localism and co-production, with much-publicised intentions of generating precisely the sort of effects and outcomes that the community assembly was designed and funded to bring.

Polly Toynbee pointed out last week that 'as services shrivel and die it will be easier than usual to summon up indignation.' And the authors of the Big Society idea helpfully directed our attention to Alinsky-style acitivism at the outset. I'm not so confident of any kind of uprising of protest just yet, but give it time.

The Ragwort Risk

I'm not making this up. Agriculture Minister Jim Paice suggests that the way in which, as a society, we deal with the problem of ragwort - a problem which I know is not trivial - exemplifies big society.

This is immensely reassuring, I can't tell you how relieved I am. In the past, we might naively have just worked together to deal with stuff like this. Now we have a label for it, how cool is that?

From now on, whenever you do anything collectively, with friends, family, neighbours or colleagues or associates or complete strangers, be sure to register it as 'Big Society' action, won't you, there's a good citizen.

Big Society: foretelling the end of confrontational governing?

I’m modestly pleased at the recent succession of posts which do not refer to Big Society. But I guess my thinking just went underground for a bit. This is the first of two or three posts in which, belatedly, I’ll start to offer a critique from the community development perspective.

I find it helps seeing Big Society in the context of traditional attitudes towards governance, which are characterised by dichotomous ‘I/You’ confrontational thinking. This kind of thought does not overlap readily with collective or co-operative (or ‘We’) thinking, but in Big Society they seem to have been teamed up together. What will happen?

‘I/You’ thinking is associated with explicit command relationships, given to careful control of information (secrecy) and minimising empowerment. It is associated with a masculine style of management (widely practised by women as well as men, of course) – largely humourless, limiting negotiation, ever-ready to celebrate what it calls ‘strong leadership’. It says, ‘I am in charge and telling you what to do. By all means do your little bit of collective thinking amongst yourselves, but that won’t change the circumstances of who is in charge’. It is characterised by the stifling of growth, certainty of decision-making, and a refusal to admit mistakes or weaknesses.

The public and community sectors are saddled with a lot of people like this, many of them currently relishing the chance to show how ‘strong’ they are at a time when cutbacks are necessary. Hierarchical organisation was invented for these people, they have evolved to exploit it and dominate. Confrontational thinkers are often very clever people given to doing stupid things in very assured ways. They remind me of a remark attributed I believe to Lord Melbourne, who said of somebody, a historian I think it was, ‘I wish I was as sure of anything as he is of everything’. That’s not a very nice thing to say about someone, which is why it’s so appropriate to apply to these people.

‘We’ thinking, by contrast, tries to acknowledge rather than deny the mess and asks, ‘how can we sort this together?’ It doesn’t always do this very well, is easily side-tracked or hijacked and subject to interference, depends on mutual support, openness, inclusion, uncertainty, discovery, shared learning, making mistakes, and growth in a sympathetic ecology. No wonder it’s never successfully run much for very long.

I think what happened when the Big Society idea was concocted was that Conservative thinkers realised that overt ‘I/You’ thinking is running out of steam, historically. Something called the network society is coming over the hill which is gradually bringing an end to hierarchical systems. The emphasis is going to be on governance not government; on co-operation and openness not command and control. What should we do? Let’s occupy some ‘We’ thinkers’ terrain, and control that. Just bring some of this collective mentality into the foreground a little, not too much. The rhetoric of empowerment, that’ll do nicely.

So here we are at an intermediate stage. Our leaders are still people with confrontational mindsets and they continue to encourage similar attitudes and behaviour in management situations. But they look increasingly anachronistic. They have opened the door on collaboration because they had little choice; but they will continue to try to control things through organisations, without (as Mike Chitty writes) encouraging any real self-determination.

Now we need urgently to look beyond organisations for solutions, to informal networks. There’s plenty of evidence to show the effect of network power – Avaaz, for example, co-founded by Res Publica, offers as much inspiration as we need. Perhaps I’m over-optimistic, but I can see a way in which Big Society foretells its instigators’ demise. Let’s get on with it then.

Urban orchard and plant exchange

This is good stuff, making use of an interim urban space, sharing plants, and bringing people together. It must be replicable on a smaller scale.

'The site of 100 Union Street in SE1 has been transformed into an urban orchard and community garden. Designed by Heather Ring of the Wayward Plant Registry for The Architecture Foundation and built with the help of Bankside Open Spaces Trust and an array of other helpful volunteers the garden will regenerate a disused site in Bankside and create a place for exchange between local residents and visitors to the [London Festival of Architecture]... In September the garden will be dismantled and all the trees will be given to local estates and other community gardens.'

Via Regen and renewal - article here, video here.

Participation and public service cuts

Yesterday I had the privilege of interviewing two north London ward councillors, Alan Stanton and Zena Brabazon, and we found we had a lot of interests and values in common. As I left Alan kindly gave me a copy of a book he had written on co-operative working (Invitation to self management).

Flicking through the pages on the train last night I came across and was struck by the contemporary relevance of this sentence:

'The rhetoric of participation is one part of the public services where no cuts have been made.'

The book was published in 1989, and refers to work that took place before 1986.