Neighbourhoods

'I need your help'

I wrote a few weeks ago about the 'request scruple' and people's willingness or unwillingness to ask for help. Now here's Amanda's engrossing tale of neighbouring from Boston, Mass. 'I need you to help me pick up my motha,' gasps the passer-by. I can easily see this one getting taken up by the neat but cringingly-yclept good gym.

For me it brought back memories of being in Boston for the marathon and for some seminars about neighbourhood relations at MIT, in 2003.

It also made me think about occasions when I've been approached for help by people on the fringes of my neighbourhood or theirs. Usually they're wholly trusting encounters, for example when as I was passing I was asked to go into a house not far away but outside my immediate neighbouhood, to help shut a window - the owner was away and their keyholding neighbour was anxious about security. I didn't know her but maybe she recognised me as a local, as a regular pedestrian hereabouts for many years.

One encounter not long ago rather nonplussed me, when I was asked when passing a bus-stop - the guy suddenly up so close I felt his breath on my face - for a pound. I asked what for, he said so he could buy a book in the charity shop.

'Likely to do so locally'

The Hansard Society are launching their 2011 report today and the beeb have offered an early peep into research about attitudes to political engagement.

A quarter of us (26 per cent) are either 'apathetic' or 'alienated', with a further 35 per cent either having 'no urge to get involved' or 'not very interested in more involvement'. About 14 per cent of us are 'strongly' engaged and described in this research as interested in doing more, which probably confirms Citizenship survey and other data.

The most interesting group is categorised by Ipsos MORI as 'willing localists' - 'not actively involved but willing and likely to do so locally' (emphasis added).

The category headings sent me back to research carried out by the Henley Centre a few years ago, which suggested that more than two thirds of us are either 'community bystanders' or 'passive participators'.

The Henley Centre researchers, Michelle Harrison and Michelle Singer, categorised 16 per cent of us as 'community conscious' - which may offer an interesting comparison with the 'willing localists' in the new Hansard data.

We need to understand differences in interpretation between general prosocial engagement on the one hand, and involvement that is related to the political process, on the other. This requirement applies most of all to the political theorists who seek a cure-all innovation. Harrison and Singer describe the 'community conscious' as relatively affluent, and note:

'they feel time pressure but are not low on energy. They have a very strong belief in the values of community overall, and in a sense of community where they live. This group is disproportionately female... They organise and volunteer, and are more likely to attend church or a place of worship. They are not, however, “political”: our qualitative research did not suggest that they are any more likely to engage in local politics than their less “community focused” neighbours.'

This resonates strongly with the sense that Hugh Flouch and I got from our Online neighbourhood networks study last year, that local online networks are providing a means by which this category of people can more easily and productively get involved. And the Hansard data also seems to hint at some limits to the extent to which that involvement can be politicised.

The need is to detach the community and the civic from the political. Universal politically-driven coercive messages won't work, but stimulating the local communications ecology in the civic context could be promising. This is because, as I've said often enough, there need to be conversations about all sorts of things going on at local level before we see lasting change in some of these statsitics.

 

Neighbourly relations: events

Rethinking Cities and PLAYLINK are hosting an event on 6 April on 'making neighbourhoods more neighbourly'. It's in two parts: a Walkshop from 3.00pm - 5.00pm Meeting at Denmark Hill Station and a Talk the Walk from 5.00pm - 7.30pm at the Clore Studio at the South London Gallery London SE5 8UH.

The theme is 'making neighbourhoods more neighbourly': informal social neighbourliness, a sense of ease across generations, are qualities too infrequently associated with inner city or suburban neighbourhoods.  Why should this be so?  We believe that the local outdoors can and should allow for fun and the easy inter-play between generations.  Why is this not happening as often as we think it should? If we can imagine – and wish for - a playable and walkable neighbourhood, what needs to be done to make this a reality?

More.

And here’s the blurb about a more academic event in St Andrews -

'The Social Dynamics of Neighbourhood’ Postgraduate and Early Career Symposium

23rd May 2011

Centre for Housing Research, University of St Andrews

'There is a belief that local neighbourhoods impact the lives of those that live within them; a relationship extensively explored in the literature on neighbourhood effects. However, there is increasing acknowledgment that the behaviour of residents also changes the character of their neighbourhoods and it is on this second proposition that this symposium takes its focus. The rhetoric of the UK government’s ‘Big Society’ aims to move the control of the neighbourhood increasingly into the hands of local communities and it is therefore ever more important to understand how social change can alter this local arena. Aspects of this social change have been explored throughout the social sciences for many years through discussions of social capital, social inclusion and community cohesion amongst other topics, but the re-examination of topics such as these at the local scale is vital in the current policy climate.'

Confirmed plenary speaker:

Ade Kearns, Professor of Urban Studies, University of Glasgow and Principal Investigator on the GoWell Programme

Attendance is FREE and both lunch and tea/coffee will be provided

Offers of workshop papers are invited (title plus an abstract of 200 words) and should be sent to: Alice Oldfield (aeo4 (at) st-andrews.ac.uk)

Centre for Housing Research, University of St Andrews The Observatory, Buchanan Gardens, St Andrews, KY16 9LZ

OFFERS OF PAPERS SHOULD BE SUBMITTED BY FRIDAY APRIL 22nd 2011

 

Reflections on bonhomie snake-oil and social pharmaceuticals

Disasters like hurricane Katrina or the recent earthquake in Japan understandably give rise to examples of neighbourliness and generalised discussion on the nature of community. I posted some points on post-Katrina social capital here.

Here's an example of an article considering sense of community, following the Christchurch earthquake. The author, Emma Woods, writes:

The resiliency of areas not only depended on how extensive the damage was, but also on what resources were available and how well these were pooled. A friend in one of the most damaged areas of Christchurch told me how one of her neighbours had a generator, several had barbecues and all shared the food that had been in their freezers. Everyone had something they needed and something they could share.

The stories that emerge in this genre are not dissimilar to historic forms of 'necessity neighbouring' which became institutionalised, for instance in the mythology of British urban communities in the first half of the twentieth century. People share and collaborate and support one another partly because it is in their interests to do so, as well as out of a sense of common humanity. It seems to me that only a theoretical psychologist would feel compelled to separate these two motivations rigidly. If humans were able completely to separate altruism from long-term self-interest (of self, family, species...) then I suspect we would not have evolved as social animals.

People rightly recognise enormous value in the social phenomenon of community when it emerges to play its part after a disaster, and it's not unusual to hear regrets voiced about how our societies have 'lost' the values that are starkly evidenced when adversity strikes. What is meant, I think, is 'wouldn't it be nice if we could have the community bit without the adversity?' Unfortunately the question  tends to be asked with so little reflection on people's motivations to connect with each other, that it becomes meaningless. It might be better to understand the metabolism of community and study the micro-conditions under which the flourishing of highly-visible communal support emerges.
 
Sense of community during times of large-scale crisis serves to fuel the interest already committed by policy makers who have been searching for strategic devices to stimulate routine neighbourliness. Yup, we're talking social chemical engineering, you just need a prescription-oriented culture and the elixir that captures the market.

Schemes like the Big Lunch or l'incroyable pique-nique or European Neighbours' Day - or even the Big Lottery's recently-announced People Powered Change programme (see David Wilcox's report here) - all appear to be macro-level attempts to stem the supposed decline in social capital and sell us all some universal-cure bonhomie snake-oil. This industry sector appears to be growing rapidly. The Prime Minister has a term for it, wait, no, i've forgotten it again.

Apart from asking where the money goes and where it might go if it didn't, it might help if we could be reassured that what is being injected into the social system is genuinely pro-social and not antibiotic (ie a substance that destroys micro-organisms). If you work at micro-organic level, it's easier to see, and necessary to care, whether (a) it is appropriate to talk in diagnostic terms, (b) any prescription is called-for, and if so (c) it is working. Personally I distrust this social pharmaceutical industry strongly.

Localism and equalities: dark age ahead

Over recent months I've been party to a few conversations about threats to the equalities and rights agenda posed by public service cuts and the coalition government's apparent enthusiasm for throwing out safeguards.

An example came up just the other day, with Children's Minister Tim Loughton quoted as saying that 'it is a "nonsense" that some carers have to get permission for everyday activities such as haircuts or sleepovers'. Yes but no. In many circumstances it's highly desirable that the parents of a child in care are encouraged to retain responsibility for precisely these kinds of decisions. As a foster carer there are definitely cases in which that is what I would want to happen, in the interests of the child, however awkward it may seem.

Only bureaucrats benefit from excessive regulation, but when you start looking at why some safeguards are in place there are usually minority interests at stake. It's depressing to have a minister of government showing such a nuance-free disregard for the rights and needs of parents.

I got onto this because I've been reflecting on the latest paper from the International Longevity Centre, on localism and neighbourhoods. Authors Dylan Kneale and David Sinclair argue that

'The Localism Bill should include greater safeguards to ensure that the rights of marginalised or minority populations to access a full range of amenities and services locally are protected.'

They go on to call for

'a joined-up approach among bodies representing minority and marginalised groups to research and lobby for changes in the way spending cuts affect marginalised populations.'

I didn't realise that it's well over four years since the ILC published their excellent paper on lifetime neighbourhoods - no less insightful or important now.

The present document is an update to that thinking, in a less sympathetic political context where for example we no longer have CABE to defend and promote good quality design of neighbourhoods, and instead we have the bizarre and nasty government fad of bashing planners and the planning system.

Dark age ahead, as Jane Jacobs foretold.

Hurrah, the citizen voice is here

Over on Our Society, Your Square Mile founder Paul Twivy has posted a response to questions posed by Julian Dobson. He includes a couple of rather odd statements.

'Our role is as the citizen voice.'

What can this mean? Was it deliberately intended to sound so incredibly arrogant, or did it just come out wrongly? On what basis can you attract large-scale funding and head off into people's neighbourhoods proclaiming 'we're here, we're here at last, sorry you've been waiting sooooo long, and you with such needs...' (A citizen's voice: 'Well, welcome, nice to meet you. Er, who are you?' YSM: 'We're the citizen voice.' CV: 'Er, I already got one mate. Are you saying I'm not a proper citizen?')...

Wait there's more:

'YSM is about enabling people to make the changes they want to see in their area in their way and not about us imposing ideas from the outside.'

Really? So what are you doing there? Were you elected? Do you have taxpayers money to allocate to services? Were you invited in? And if so, by who?

As with big society and coalition government, we're seeing an insensitive officer-class attitude towards ordinary people in their neighbourhoods - from telling them what to do, through savagely cutting their services in ways they can't defend against, to telling them that important people have come to help them make changes. And expecting to be applauded for this peculiar form of imperialist behaviour. I'm tempted to ask, do you have a flag?

One wonders who's next for the Grand Tour for Saviours of Low-Income Neighbourhoods.

Fatal error: (include_path='.:/local/): suicide and community

A single suicide can numb a neighbourhood with guilt and confusion. Significant numbers of suicides must feel like a great inexplicable weight burdening those who have invested in and seek to sustain local social life.

We don't seem to know much about its impact on the way residents interact at local level. It must be scary when the number of suicides around you is high enough to attract media and policy attention.

Here's an article by Mary O'Hara in yesterday's Guardian about Northern Ireland's lasting pain, noting a 64 per cent increase in the past decade. And here's an article about somewhere else with an unprecedented contagion a few years ago.

I think I'd like to live in a society where people consistently show 'respect for those who are asking for help' and where the state is prepared to invest in mental health services, and to support voluntary sector responses. Here for instance on Gerry Adams's blog you will find, in addition to the telling image above, the observation:

'The people of the Colin area deserve a crisis intervention response to the surge of suicides in their community. There is a huge amount of good work being done on the ground by youth workers, young citizens, teachers, church groups and others. But they should not have to carry this burden.'

Your Square Mile? Why?

There’s been lots of fluttering lately about the Your Square Mile initiative, which has attracted bags of funding to do, er, well, to behave like a branded top-down idea, as far as anyone can tell. Cathy Aitchison, David Wilcox and other good folk who make up the Our Society network have been trying to prise out information about it. The latest is that:

The Big Lottery Fund is enabling Your Square Mile to build a digital platform – on PC’s, mobiles and public access screens – that will enable the interchange of ideas, advice, support and benefits to citizens throughout the UK.

Explanation to follow, presumably? It sounds as if there is a basic assumption that one single platform will be appropriate for the communication needs of every definable neighbourhood in the country.

There is a study to be done of the damage caused by highly persuasive people who seem to feel compelled to impose template social 'solutions' on others.

I enjoyed Julian Dobson’s thorough posing of questions the other day. It got me wondering if the Your Square Mile idea - closely associated with another national policy-favoured empty catch-phrase idea the name of which escapes me for the moment - really deserves such painstaking attention.

People are struggling to hold on to any goodwill towards the initiative, but are watching closely, probably for three related reasons – secrecy; the top-down approach and lack of values; and the fact that the project’s founder Paul Twivy has apparently attracted a great deal of money in scarce times, that might otherwise have gone into the community sector.

I liked Alan MacDonald’s reaction:

‘My first set of questions is - why does an idea depending on voluntary effort require so much paid work and, I believe, generous expenses to initiate it?  Why does an idea of the digital age communicate so badly? (My latest example is a tweet saying 'Join the debate' which led me to a web page where I couldn't leave a comment)  Why does the web and social network presence of this idea require a big grant from the Lottery when all you need for a major website, Twitter and facebook feed is fifty quid, open source, skills and will power?’

The explanation came a few minutes later from Jeff Mowatt: 

I'll tell you Alan, as it was related to Indira Gandhi when her grandfather advised here that:

"There are two kinds of people in the world. Those that do the work and those that take the credit. Try to stay in the first group, you'll find less competition."

And finally, since comments on blogs are so easily missed, I want to reproduce these observations from Aidan Kelly on Julian Dobson’s post:

‘people can't be bought. Money can enable quick reactions but it rarely attracts the right people. Those people who are passionate about their community, don't want to be told what to do, or even paid by an external organisation to collect ideas. There is something that is almost insulting in the concept that an external, outsider should come into a community and assume ownership of the problems and issues that the community faces. These are [not] unemotive subjects they are real people.’

 

 

Is big society rhetoric becoming counter-productive?

I heard today from a practitioner working at area level in a northern town, the strong impression that residents are distrustful of big society rhetoric and negative about any association with it. Not just because they already picking up Mrs Jones’s prescription for her and help out at the school fete and report fly-tipping; but also because they think it’s demanding something for nothing.

So in this particular area at least, it would be a mistake to label anything as ‘big society’. Better to keep using familiar terms like ‘citizen action’, if that’s what you mean. In other words, big society rhetoric is counter-productive if you want to get people involved.

One of the puzzling mistakes about the presentation of big society has been the way its ethos is associated with ‘charity’ and community groups are confused with charities. This is the Surrey cake-stall-mafia view of the world, probably more naïve than dangerous. But maybe more charities are needed?

I’ve been associated with a small charity for a few years which regretfully has just had to take the decision to close down, having failed to cope with some inflexible and punitive attitudes from Companies House. This was about fines for late filing of accounts which had been accepted. If they make a mistake – and they did – the most you’ll get is a disguised apology. If you make a mistake, you are liable to a fine which for a small charity could wipe out a third of your money or more. The lesson is that even when some of us do take the charitable status route, obstacles and obdurate bureaucrats will block the path.

Mr Cameron is only likely to get the branded change he wants by constantly claiming that everything pro-social is ‘big society’. It’s just possible a large number of people will see through that.

And when the history is written, I expect we’ll see that the problem was not about whether we all want a smaller state and more local accountability and more informal care and support at neighbourhood level, cos most of us do; it was about the apparently unbreakable habit, among the elite, of top-down, patronising, disempowering command-mode attitudes towards ordinary people.

So remind me, what was the problem with multiculturalism?

I'm a month late getting to it, but am more than happy to draw attention belatedly to this tidy post about multi-culturalism by the dependable Rob Berkeley.

If like me you've been suspicious as to why people of influence have been trying to put the boot into multiculturalism, it's worth a read. Or even if you haven't. As he notes, the term simply means

'the existence and recognition of different identities in a shared political space within a framework of human rights.'

Ah, maybe that's why our leaders don't like it? Doh, it's about power, innit. Berkeley notes:

'Mr Cameron may find that policies that:

    • Remove the poor from housing in affluent areas;

    • Deter students from poorer backgrounds from entering university;

    • Create constituencies that disenfranchise the third of black and Asian people not on the electoral register;

    • Increase youth unemployment (which is already double that of white communities for Pakistani youth); or

    • Increase tension between black and Asian young people and the police

…do not help in creating meaningful or positive contact between people from different backgrounds. Similarly, a patchy commitment to human rights, whether votes for prisoners, detention of children and the suggestion last week from Policy Exchange that we withdraw from the European Convention, cannot help in establishing what core values we expect from each other and our relationship with the state.'

Welfare reform: the impact on neighbourhoods

Via Children and Young People Now, I pick up news that the excellent Child Poverty Action Group is relentlessly fighting the corner. CPAG has launched a legal challenge to the government's controversial welfare and housing benefit reforms.

No-one can really have been surprised that this government came up with measures to segregate, corral and punish the people they despise for being poor. CPAG chief exec Alison Garnham is quoted:

'It is not right that families living in certain areas, especially larger families, are punished and pushed aside while parts of Britain become enclaves for the privileged.

'Children will be forced to move away from schools, friends, neighbourhoods and family. For some this may include moving away from another parent, most often their dad.'

I hope this one doesn't fade quickly: a thorough, well-publicised challenge to expose systematic social injustice will be welcome.

Social care provided by older people is worth £34 billion

WRVS have published distinctive research into the socio-economic contribution of older people in the UK.

The report, Gold age pensioners, claims that people over 65 made a net contribution to the UK economy of £40 billion last year, even allowing for the costs of pensions, welfare and health services. 'This equates to just over £100 million per day, challenging the widely held view that older people progressively become a burden and a drain on society.'

The hidden value of older people’s volunteering is said to be worth £10 billion per year. Provision of social care by older people is worth £34 billion, predicted to grow to £52 billion by 2030.

The contributions range from leadership or high levels of membership of local clubs and societies, to informal support looking out for vulnerable neighbours and helping them stay independent for longer.

• ‘Sixty-five per cent of older people regularly help out elderly neighbours – and are the most likely of all adult age groups to do so.’

• ‘Older people are very often the driving force for local community-based organisations, with active retirees combining their expertise, skills and experience to provide the leadership, as well as a disproportionate quantum of the membership, of many local organisations, groups and societies.’

I was told about this report yesterday while I was at a drop-in session for older people (part of our Neighbourhoods Connect project in Haringey) - at more or less the same time as one of the participants was saying:

'You can come here and make people cheery; and if you can do that, it makes you cheery too'.

 

The ‘request scruple’ and the demand for neighbourliness

Our society seems to be crying out with a perceived need to stimulate neighbourliness. The assumption is that the supply of neighbourliness in many residential populations is simply inadequate for the demand: people are not neighbourly enough, it seems, and the entire social structure is in jeopardy. The hunt is on to invent ways of stimulating neighbouring. So here's the Campaign to End Loneliness starting to capture ideas for instance, and we have one or two over on the 50 Ways site also. Is this the right approach?

Back in 2009 I had the privilege of editing the English language summary of a Dutch PhD thesis submitted by my friend Lilian Linders.

The study was about ‘the significance of proximity’ and looked at the nature of informal care at neighbourhood level. What Lilian found and describes is starting to excite the social welfare field in the Netherlands, and there are good reasons to reflect on her conclusions.

The research was carried out in a low income urban area, perceived as fairly cohesive in the traditional sense, with a population of about 2,400, clamped between an industrial zone and several highways. (I was driven close by last week, as it happens). Lilian speaks of ‘informal care’ in a very broad sense, she means I think the full range of informal support provided, including informal care and some very intimate tasks carried out by known co-residents repeatedly.

‘Apart from the willingness to help a neighbour, a plethora of problems like poverty, alcoholism, incest, disease, divorce, debts, domestic violence and loneliness was found. Therefore the dividing line between givers and receivers of informal care is blurred. The model is one of mutual aid.’

She found that most support was provided one-to-one, not on a collective (‘community’) basis, but simply because people knew each other. It had everything to do with trust at a personal level.

One of the things that Lilian latched onto, with keen insight, was the reticence in requesting neighbourly support. She calls this the ‘request scruple’ – a reluctance to ask for help. This contrasts sharply with the ‘support scruple’ – the reluctance to offer support.

Neighbours prefer social distance and are surprisingly reluctant to ask for support. Nonetheless, they do help each other, on an individual one-to-one basis, in personal and sometimes demanding and intimate circumstances.

The reluctance to ask for support extends to friends, acquaintances and family members, largely because of the fear of dependency and the social ideal of autonomy.

Lilian’s key finding is that the request scruple is far more of an impediment to informal care than is a shortage in the supply.

This helps to clarify the argument that informal care is not a consequence of neighbourhood cohesion: it doesn’t necessarily follow that if you have a cohesive neighbourhood, people will care for one another in time of need. That depends on personal relationships.

One last point. Lilian draws attention to the significance of mutual support between vulnerable people. This is a tidy example of the difference between the Dutch approach and the English. Big society thinking clobbers away at notions of charity and philanthropy, thinking those of us with some kind of surplus should be supporting those without. In the Netherlands, as I have been describing in recent posts, there is serious policy impetus behind the principle of informal care and mutual support.

You can see a clear English language presentation summary of Lilian’s work here.

Speaking to the study tour group last week, Lilian's colleague Rick Kwekkeboom had some important points to add, particularly around the invisibility of informal care. She noted that informal support only becomes visible when it is over-loaded. The role for formal services is to help people to care for one another and not get overburdened.

I don't see the request scruple as a peculiarly Dutch phenomenon. In the UK we could do with an approach to social support that acknowledges these nuances of mutual support, and is less obsessed with some kind of charitable or philanthropic motivation.

Previously:

Social networks and informal support

Will you still need me, will you still feed me?

Other posts tagged 'Informal support'