Neighbourhoods

Big soc, good soc?

I took part in a debate, ‘Is the big society the good society?’ yesterday at the Battle of Ideas, alongside Councillor Steve Reed and Jim Panton.

 
Here’s a tidied up summary of what I said.

I see big society as a brand, which wraps together some general motherhood-and-apple-pie progressive ideas about the citizen and state with which few of us would disagree. I don’t imply that it’s empty or necessarily misleading or corrupt. I think it’s a smart piece of idea-management and I’m curious as to how Labour party thinkers are feeling, since they had most of the components – including smaller state, according to one persuasive view yesterday - but failed to put them together into a package.

The key effect of the branding process is to have got people talking about broad cultural change in a positive way. There’s a great deal to be said for that, although the debate has probably not been as extensive beyond Westminster as those within shouting distance might like to believe.

I offered some quick points by way of critique, beginning by referring to the point quoted by Will Davies that we live in a society ‘in which massive gains are privatised and massive losses are socialised’. The financial crisis illustrates why this is so stupid. Big society doesn't even address it.

Much of what is described in big society rhetoric implies consensus within localities by use of the C word. It’s as if the country is parcelled into neatly delimited neighbourhoods, populated by like-minded people who are ready to reach agreement on what needs to be done, and who have the time and energy to get on and do it. It’s not healthy that we have politicians who are so ready to elide the realities of life at local level that they see ‘communities’ as unified structures, there to be consulted and acted upon. It’s patronising to people to expect or require them all to think and act alike. (I’m indebted here to Jeremy Brent).

I like the idea that big society is not about trying to do more with less, it’s about doing more with more – the extra energy resulting from galvanising civic involvement. That’s powerful and it's what community development does.

So will this new civic energy be evenly distributed? No. Some localities will continue to experience a shortfall. Do we have the strategies for dealing with that unevenness? Not as far as I’m aware. Is it even recognised at policy level? Not as far as I’m aware.

Again, within localities, the distribution of civic power and the new influence over resources will be uneven. Because communities are not cohesive units constructed for the convenience of politicians, sense of community in a given place tends to be dominated by some groups to the exclusion of others – adults denying space and audience to young people being the classic example. That phenomenon is likely to be accentuated under big society.

I offered a few thoughts about the proposed army of 5,000 community organisers - the leading of the five thousand as I call it. I suggested a few days ago that the notion of community organising under big society is going to be pretty much value-free. That bothers me a little. The values that underpin community development aren't just chantable mantras: you have to live and breathe them or you will be found out, I promise you.

Big society presents new permissions in citizens’ relations with local government. It seems to give residents explicit permission to bash council officers for not doing what they want them to do; but it also gives officers permission to say, ‘well ok if that’s what you want, go do it yourself’.

My view (expressed previously) is that ‘rolling back the state’ polarises those for whom it will be alright and those for whom it won’t be. Those who experience exclusion start with no options. I think it is false to imply that by making the state smaller you will automatically reveal a big society.

Everyone will have examples of community sector initiatives under threat. I offered an example of a local resource centre I know which has a reputation for the work it does far beyond the town it serves. They receive a grant of £8k from the council, and like a lot of such grant recipients they get bullied in subtle or overt ways by their council. Because they’re smart with SROI, they can show that they generate £86k of services. I’d take that, wouldn’t you? They are now being faced with a 50% or 100% cut in their grant.

So what I want to ask is this: how are people expected to react as they see their own community sector initiatives, developed over years of unrecognised and unrewarded effort, with lessons absorbed, experience shared and efficiencies gained - initiatives which apparently are consistent with big society principles - being wiped out by public sector funding cuts?

I fear we are going to see a stark division between those localities where new civic energy is going to emerge, and those where people are exhausted and energy is depleted. No prizes for guessing the class divide that represents.

 

Neighbouring is pretty much what it used to be

I was in London today, talking to two groups of people about neighbouring, trying to surface stories and engage interest. This afternoon I spent a good while talking to an older lady who has lived in the same house since 1957. Her memories of traders, customers and places where she had worked behind the counter or as a cleaner were vivid. Neighbourliness was simply based around her connections as a mother through her children and daily errands.

It was clear that there were plenty of people who she knew enough about to dislike and distrust thoroughly. Nowadays the assumption is that if residents 'know' a high proportion of others in their neighbourhood then everybody is probably getting on well together. This received wisdom is weakened by this lady's account: she was still spitting distaste for quite a few folk not seen for forty years and was ready to detail precisely why.

She felt neighbouring now was no different really, except that for her personally she knew fewer people, she couldn't keep track of the coming and going. When I asked what she thought it had been like for older people forty years ago, were they at risk of being isolated or did neighbours look out for them? she said they all had 'home helps' and meals on wheels, that's what was different. So maybe the state was bigger then, proportionately.

Sport for the Haves

Today Nesta launched the Neighbourhood Challenge to try to highlight ways of stimulating local social action.

“Community organisations across England are invited to apply to the 18-month programme. NESTA will select ten organisations and provide them with funding to trial an approach to community organising that reflects their own vision for what will work best in their area.

We will provide the practical tools and high-quality training needed for participating organisations to help people in their communities create local campaigns, innovative community projects and new social enterprises that address their passions and priorities. We will also provide micro-finance to support the development of local projects and establish local challenge prizes to incentivise community-led innovation.”

Deadline for expressions of interest is 22 November.

Some good will come of this. But the first thing that struck me at the launch is how desperately tasteless it was to be in a plush central London location with a free breakfast among a large number of affluent be-suited people talking in very general ways about 'communities' that are characterised by high levels of apathy and low aspirations; and offering residents of those distant neighbourhoods a chance, by competition, to improve their lot.

Statistically their chances of winning through in that competition are likely to be very small. They are expected to put in a bit of effort, symbolically making pleas to the powers that be, and then in all probability just knuckle down to things as they were before; or get picked off by the developers. What sport this must seem to the Haves - get the peasants to do a wee dance in their quaint custom, then show a little favouritism to a handful.

Perhaps I'm being slightly unfair, but it was all so reminiscent of the ghastly mistakes the Labour administration made in its early years with challenges and competitions - dressing the excluded in costumes and getting them to jump through hoops. As if a process of lottery is a legitimate way of reducing deadly disparities in the quality of life.

I hope the Neighbourhood Challenge will result in at least ten decent projects and lots of shared learning: I don't see why it shouldn't. While that's going on I just want to offer a few thoughts here about some of the assumptions that underpinned the speeches I heard this morning.

First, the C word was used throughout, by a succession of speakers, apparently as a synonym for neighbourhoods. What this tells us is that they hold vague assumptions about consensus and cohesion in localities, based on slight experience or poor understanding.

Secondly, much was taken for granted about how straightforward is the role of community organiser. This was revealing: it's beginning to become clear that the notion of community organising under Big Society is going to be pretty much value-free. They won't wait around for people to discuss and refine the values and principles that might guide their work, nor refer back to the previous efforts of the community development field. We want 5,000 community organisers please, using this simple template, male and female, by autumn next year, just get on with it.

Thirdly, the rhetoric of power remains seductive and uncritical. The forthcoming localism bill will bring radical new 'powers', we're told, but as soon as people start to talk about this they refer to devices like petitions, possibly the most blunt and unhygienic item in the toolbox of democracy. Surely by now, we should be able to talk about how power gets transferred and exercised at local level - and how it feels - in a more nuanced way.

Fourthly, there was much carefree talk about the power of local online, and the perceived 'need' to focus this on the problematisation of local issues. But local online is still a very imperfect democratic environment. The approach espoused was to encourage people to use online to articulate their concerns about local issues. A hall for loud voices. I humbly suggest that it would be more sensible to encourage the development of lots of digital conversations at local level about all sorts of things, from which the real concerns of a wider variety of residents would emerge.

My last point is about the nature of the localities in question, the 'communities' from which expressions of interest are sought. Behind the Neighbourhood Challenge there is talk of targeting areas defined as 'low in social capital'. Public sector funding cuts are going to have an atomising effect: how far is social exclusion, and the effects of social justice, going to be identifiable in these terms? Are those who suffer network poverty likely to be clustered into ghettoes? In some ways it might be better if they were, but my suspicion is that the toxic effect of the recession will be more distributed, far harder to track, far less amenable to our fancy mapping technologies.

 

 

A different take on holding a neighbour's keys

Pouring rain as I made my way back from the train station. Five minutes from home I saw a near neighbour approaching, just dashing into the post office. He paused, held out his car keys: 'you can sit in my car if you like, it's just round the corner, I won't be a minute.'

Big - but not society

Does Small State seem any clearer after the Spending Review?

This article by Anushka Asthana and Toby Helm, in yesterday's Observer has sharpened the focus on one particular point, which is that a key political sleight has been to get working class people to condemn the workless poor. With the notion of hoi polloi solidarity now exploded (not with a bang but a whimper), the Haves can sit down and tuck in without fear of interruption from the rabble at their gates.

In truth this process has surely been gathering for decades, thanks in no small part to the decimation of trade unionism and the influence of a shameless press; but what the economic crisis has done is to give it a perverse logical justification. The authors note:

'polls suggested substantial support for the assault on benefits. Focus groups had told the chancellor they wanted welfare not cut but shredded.'

And they quote the chief exec of one homeless charity:

'People have looked down on those out of work for a long time. So when you ask them what to cut – police? They say no. Schools? No. NHS? No. The armed services? No – but welfare, who is going to lobby for that?'

And so it comes down to povertyism, the fact that for some reason many people despise those who are poor, seek excuses for their negative attitude towards them, and support policies that punish people for being in poverty. Some of our media and some of our politicians do the rest, with distasteful zeal.

The brand managers are working away at Big Society. Big it may be, but it doesn't look like it will be representative of an inclusive society.

Chair

I could have written a story around this image, but then I think I would not have wanted to publish the image. So why not make up your own?

 

An environment designed for car drivers

From the 'Designing Streets for People' list, a statistical note by Alasdair Massie referring to a crossing that he uses regularly:

If approaching “as traffic” on the road you generally have a green light – 87% of the time in fact. If you are unfortunate enough to hit a red, then you have at worst a 16 second wait before you can proceed. As with pretty much every junction / crossing except for large signalised roundabouts, you clear the crossing in one go.

If on the other hand, you approach the same crossing as a pedestrian, you almost ALWAYS meet a red light. At most, if there are people pressing the call button continuously, only 5% of the phase shows green to pedestrians. You then have to WAIT. Assuming that nobody has pressed the button before you, then that wait will be 40 seconds if there is traffic (which there is for most of the day). You then get 6 seconds of green time. Then, having got to the sheep pen in the middle of the road and struggled your way through the phalanx of people coming the other way, you have to go through the whole process again, admittedly with a shorter wait.

Battle of Ideas

Two weeks to the Battle of Ideas, and if you are or could be around in London that weekend, it's time to checkout the themes.

All being well I'll get along to 'Going nowhere? Staying local in a global village' (with John Adams among others), exploring whether or not there's 'a contradiction between localism and our global aspirations'. If I can't get into that I'll be in the (unfortunately simultaneous) debate about 'Ageing and medicine: quality versus quantity?' (which asks 'Are we in danger of assuming quality of life is purely a corporeal thing?'). After which I'll be speaking, hopefully for no more than a few minutes, at a debate about Big Society.

Other sessions of interest:

• Trust in an age of cynicism
• The empty square: the public engaged or imagined?
• Whose social justice is it anyway?

Rural areas: small state, big needs

The other day the Commission for Rural Communities published a report on 'the economic conditions for organisations contributing to the Big Society in rural England'. It tries to say nice things about Big Society, although the previous day the government had announced that the CRC is being abolished anyway. Can't have been easy finalising the text with that news looming.

The report makes clear that conditions in some marginalised rural localities are not expected to get any better in the foreseeable. Respondents in the study on which it is based said that, among other things, they would like

The government to understand that the Big Society, although cost efficient, is not cost free and that some communities do not have the capacity to get involved. Ongoing and long term funding as well as professional support is still needed to carry on delivering their services and taking on additional responsibilities.

Here's a sample comment from within the report illustrating how economices of scale could impact (from Remploy, another state-funded agency, whose future is apparently still 'under consideration'):

'As contracts are cancelled and niche programmes disappear the economics of high volume delivery do not lend themselves to specific delivery within the rural communities... Rural communities are deemed the areas of acceptable attrition as the funding cuts bite and providers are asked to deliver more volume outcomes for less.'

A historical moment for community development?

So today it has been announced that Community Development Foundation 'will cease to operate as a public body as of 31st March 2011.' It will continue as a charity. There have doubtless been numerous discussions of the news in a context that acknowledges, first, that CDF had become primarily an agency for disbursing government funds, and their market collapsed; and secondly that in focusing on that role the organisation quickly lost its claim in many people's eyes to be an expert CD agency.

I received the news electronically while sat in a Big Lottery meeting about community organising - ironically, in groupwork discussing communication issues in relation to community organising. I was only able to attend a couple of hours of the meeting but some thoughts struck me then about the nature of this historical moment for CD.

The moment is partly defined by being a few days away from a hugely influential government spending review; partly by the rhetoric of Big Society and its call for millions of people to plunge joyfully into enticing, tranquil pools of community action - hopefully not discovering that there are vicious political eddies and currents, and corrosive contamination beneath the surface, god forbid; and partly by the unfinished business of the empowerment of local groups in determining what happens on their patch.

Today Big Lottery brought together some expertise and experience with a view to informing their future funding programmes. I found three related things to bother me.

First, one speaker, explaining her part as an externally-funded, imported 'community champion', said that her role included challenging 'the negative attitudes of doubters and spoilers'. Meaning, I fear, this: if someone externally appointed comes into your neighbourhood and drives a programme of action with high expectations that you will go along with it, and you choose to raise concerns about the process, then your response is unwelcome and you are likely to be labelled as a doubter or spoiler at best and ungovernable at worst. The process will ride over you AND it will still be called community development. (I may have wrongly interpreted this specific case but it's hardly unheard-of). The easy dismissal of counter views can be very disempowering.

Secondly, I'm bothered about the coercion of people in the community development process. The morality of coercion is not trivial and must be acknlowledged. One of the best community workers I ever met admitted yes, we do coerce people. Because life is short, and you make a judgement about what would be in their best interests, and there isn't always time to wait for them and work with them to appreciate the options...

There is a flurry of urgent interest in community organising to compensate for an economy that has failed its public sector; and we risk losing our appreciation of the nuances of how and on what terms people decide to get involved. We risk finding ourselves in a value-free zone of community action which discourages contestation of issues.

And finally - very briefly cos I feel like a broken record on this - persistent repetition of the C word does not mean that a bunch of people who happen to live in the same area necessarily constitute a 'community', nor should the unreflective use of that word be allowed to imply consensus without challenge. Enough on that.

Government is encouraging community development but has stopped funding what was previously its expert CD agency. The meaning of this moment may turn out to be that community development must come of age, by insisting on its values, being honest about the difficult nuances required when encouraging local people to participate, and not denying the realities of conflict and disagreement.

 

Diversity and representation on local websites

I've had a few conversations and thoughts lately (beginning with the London Neighbourhoods Online [LDN10] event last month) about diversity and representation on local websites. I just wanted to capture them for the time being.

The founders I've spoken to about this have set their sites up with a vague sense of social purpose but no explicit intention to promote community cohesion. The sites don’t set out to be or claim to be democratically representative or culturally representative or accountable.

Those we've looked at in our London study are clearly dominated by people who are relatively affluent, educated and empowered. These are the people who put energy into helping the site grow, contributing and generating social capital (vaguely defined) and civic involvement to sometimes enviable levels.

Around them and among them live clusters of less affluent people, renters rather than owners perhaps, people from minority groups and with English as a second language, perhaps people who may not have home internet access but who use telecoms shops in the high street to call family in other countries and access websites in their own language.

Meanwhile, let's acknowledge that participation on some of these neighbourhood sites can call for a high level of confidence and assertiveness, which may be closely related to levels of literacy. These are text-based environments and the currents are fast-flowing.

Some of our respondents expressed bald criticism of the lack of representativeness, while others suggested that perhaps the sites could make more effort to be inclusive. For example, one wrote:

‘Seems to be for white middle aged people, basically.’

And others:

’I would imagine the website doesnt attract a contribution from a full range of social demographic backgrounds to reflect the actual community as a whole’

‘doesn't seem to represent the diversity of the local community, particularly ethnically and in terms of social class.’

This is more about cultural capital than social capital. Most of the cultures in question have strong family-based networks re-inforced locally. The easy and insensitive English way of detaching ourselves from our elders, leaving them to live out their years in isolation or in homes, is going to seem strange at best to people from Bengali, Turkish or Kurdish cultures for instance. They also network around their foodstores, their cafes and hairdressers, cultural centres and places of worship. So it could be argued that these groups have less need for a structured form of neighbourhood network. This assumption may be misguided. And if it is accurate, there is still a danger in it, which I'll come to.

The logic of the technology allows local ethnic minority groups to set up their own space within or alongside the dominant site. At least one of the sites has tried to encourage this, and it's hardly surprising that so far it has not happened.

We should also recognise that pseudonymity on local forums permits a hidden diversity. We were given a striking example of this at LDN10. On the internet, no-one knows you're a black single-mother who drives a bus. However, that gives no visibility to diverse perspectives.

The point that bothers me is this. Neighbourhood websites are set to increase and to have greater influence. Our survey of council officers and elected members shows recognition within councils that they see online forums as ideal for identifying issues of concern to residents. Local politics gets discussed by those elderly Cypriot men in their local cafe, and it gets discussed on local online forums; but in terms of potential influence over what happens, there's no comparison.

There will come a time when there is a pronounced tension between the legitimate but unsystematic influence of local sites on the one hand, and their lack of representation of diversity on the other. It's worth trying to get in front of that I think.

 

Neighborly Conversations Against Mosquitoes

It makes sense - mosquitoes breed in standing water and don't travel far, so for those affected, a little neighbourly collaboration can make all the difference. Not a problem round our way, but it seems to be working in Arizona. Suggestions include 'holding block parties to talk about mosquitoes' (who could resist?) and

'When your neighbors go on vacation, offer to police their yards. You might offer to clean your elderly neighbor's rain gutters as well.'