Neighbourhoods

Mosaic tree of neighbourliness

A Berlin-based artist, Britta Lipka, has started a participation project to plant a mosaic 'tree of good neighborliness' in an urban public space. Don't be put off by the rhetoric of good intentions, I don't see why lots of people should not send pieces for the mosaic if they match Britta's design. It's not so much about neighbourliness as about widespread participation in prosocial symbols in the public realm, but why not? This project uses the internet and physical objects to involve potentially numerous contributors to public art. I look forward to seeing (evidence of) the results.

 

Student housing and neighbourhoods

Concentrations of students inevitably alter the natural ecology of neighbourhoods, because they contribute to a-typically high rates of churn. In some respects the effect is doubtless beneficial and in others it won't be.

Length of residence, on its own, can be misleading as an indicator of neighbourhood quality of life. But the usual assumption is that people who are not expecting to stay for long in a neighbourhood are generally least likely to invest in relations with their neighbours. The higher the proportion of these 'under-investors,' the more likely that there is a negative effect on neighbourhood quality of life.

If you're a student in this situation, you can over-compensate for the comparatively small capital investment you are making in the locality in all sorts of ways - helping with shopping, baby-sitting, odd-jobs etc for neighbours, and generally being considerate of course. But you have to do so proactively, or live with the perception that you are not 'pulling your weight'. Universities tend to take seriously their relations with their towns and cities, but I'm not aware that they do much to encourage students to consider neighbourhood social relations.

So is it best to let the market dictate, or should councils have policies to minimise the extent to which students in houses in multiple occupation (HMOs) are concentrated in any given area?

Oxford City Council has announced a threshold of 20 per cent of houses in any 100 metre stretch of residential street, for all new houses for student tenants. (They do not have the power to reduce the existing percentage in a street if it's already higher than that). I can't see it catching on, but it will be interesting if it does.

For a theory of the neighbourhood based on economic principles of transaction costs and property rights, see a paper called 'The nature of the neighbourhood' by Chris Webster in Urban studies, December 2003 (subscription).

Webster notes in passing that:

'Owner-occupiers and long-term tenants have an economic incentive to deploy private resources in investments that yield collective neighbourhood benefits. Neighbourhoods characterised by short-term tenancies — such as student quarters, inner-urban high-density rental areas and some types of social housing — require institutional structures that provide incentives to act with restraint in the use of common resources and that encourage investment.'

 

National schemes to promote neighbourliness: what impact?

Some early results have been released from the evaluation of Neighbours Day Aotearoa 2011, which took place at the end of March. The survey is still open.

• Those who thought their neighbours would be "highly likely" to ask them for help increased by over 25% after Neighbours Day Aotearoa 2011.
• 57% felt more positive about their neighbours/neighbourhood.
• 74% said that they would be likely to participate with their neighbours in 2012, and a further 22.1% said they might.

Power and policy

Toby Blume on 'community rights':

"The greatest concern I have about the introduction of the community rights, is also my biggest fear about the whole Big Society agenda... that government seems to have very little concern about how they are taken up by different groups. Despite Big Society’s strong language on ‘placing power in the hands of those who lack it’, there is little evidence to suggest that government wishes to actually do anything about this. If you accept that power is unequal and some groups are less powerful than others (as ‘those who lack it’ suggests), then surely you must take steps to ensure that specific effort is directed to the less powerful. I cannot believe that anyone with a modicum of intellectual capability can assume that this inequality will be addressed simply by giving everybody (the powerful and the non-powerful) the same opportunity and letting them get on with it. That is patently absurd as ‘any fule kno’ (as Molesworth would say), as the powerful are, by definition, better equipped to take advantage."

 

 

'I didn't know I could': museums and young people looked after

Last year I worked with Rebecca Linley and Martin Dudley on an evaluation of museum-based activities with children and young people looked after, and we were surprised by and impressed with the outcomes that we found.

Our report (the MaCLA report) has now been published by Renaissance East of England, along with a summary and some case studies. The main points are these:

• The young people gained consistent benefits in terms of confidence, self-knowledge and identity; social skills; cultural capital; and learning.
• These outcomes can be attained reliably and sustainably, and can probably be accessed for considerably less than £30 per young person per hour.

These are young people who either experience exclusion or are at risk of being excluded from many social and economic opportunities and benefits. The work is empowering because it targets young people’s options for empowering themselves.

The observations and interviews were instructive in helping us appreciate some of the nuances of inclusion. In one instance a fairly withdrawn young man was ‘drawn in’ by the others in the group in sessions he attended. They arranged to meet up independently and invited him along. His carer told us that he did not mention it at the time and so he did not go. Her interpretation was that

‘inclusion has never happened to him before.’

These were initiatives designed exclusively for children or young people who are looked after. They were based in museums (although several initiatives involved extra-mural visits), and involved some kind of activity (usually both group and individual activity) such as drama, design, craft etc. The activities varied in number of sessions and duration, from a single to fifteen sessions and from 90 minutes to five and a half hours. The age range was 7-17 years.

We argue that the activities are low risk and inexpensive; not addressing the young people’s needs is high risk and expensive.

 

Ain't misbehaivin

I came across this curious piece of scrap the other day in a nearby neighbourhood.

It repeats the phrase 'I must not misbehave in lesson', handwritten twenty-two times. The spelling experiments but soon settles on 'misbehaiv'.

These days I'm quite detached from direct experience of what happens in schools, and it was a bit of a shock to realise that teachers still do this kind of thing. We thought it was pretty primitive back in the sixties and seventies.

 

 

Influence and local social networks

About ten years ago in community development and policy circles there were lots of conversations about using social network analysis to get at understandings of 'community' and thereby contribute to policy. To their credit, folk at the RSA just got on and did it, and have now published the second report of their Connected communities project.

This one is called Power lines and looks at social exclusion in terms of isolation from networks of influence and power. The report suggests that

'people feel a greater sense of empowerment if they have a larger and more varied number of local connections and relationships.'

Social networks reflect the ways power plays out, so that influence accumulates from influential connections, and exclusion accumulates from weakness of social ties.

Hence the authors' recommendation that local public bodies should assess their funding for community groups on the contribution that groups make 'to building stronger, more diverse social networks.'

'In particular, initiatives should seek to connect those who are currently isolated or at risk, with others.'

The hard bit is working out how. There's plenty to build on, and firm justification. Asif Afridi, in a review for JRF published in March, suggests three main ways in which social networks can address poverty:

• They can enable the sharing of resources (time, expertise, support) and information (job opportunities, benefits advice, influence).
• They can provide mutual support and opportunities to learn or develop skills (support to start a business, for example).
• They can create strength in numbers and enable collective action or voluntary effort (improving a local area, for example, or social campaigning, or ensuring a voice in local affairs).

Understandably, the report does not dwell on what it means to have or not have a sense of influence and empowerment. But it provokes questions for me, which I'm not sure have been answered in previous work either in this project or for instance by MORI (Searching for the impact of empowerment) or in the important National Empowerment Partnership paper (which I discussed about a year ago)...

To begin with, who wants to have influence? What do we know about the sort of people for whom it does or doesn't matter to be able to influence policy?

And then I suppose I'd like to know, is wanting to have influence associated with believing you have influence? Are there survey data that tell us who says they want to have influence; and a comparable data set that tells us who thinks they have influence? Looking at that would be a start, after which we should maybe see if we can find out who actually exerts influence.

Finally, two quick reminders. Using social network analysis to help understand meanings of 'community' is not new. For instance, it's been used in the debate about the idealisation of late medieval English villages as harmonious close-knit communities. People were found to have manifold external connections, which tells us a little about our assumptions of levels of cohesion in the past - and maybe hints at unrealistic expectations in the present.

And it's worth remembering that Geoff Mulgan was writing about network poverty in relation to digital technologies as long ago as 1990, possibly earlier. Notwithstanding the pioneering work of people like Barry Wellman and Keith Hampton, and the important contribution that the Connected communities project is making, we maybe should have got further by now.

 

What are councils for?

Why do taxpayers invest in services like education which don't help people to understand why taxpayers should invest in services?

Uncritical and uninformed condemnation of the notion of state services funded through taxation is so embedded in our society and heavily reinforced by our media, it comes as a surprise to find even a public sector broadcaster taking steps to redress the balance.

The beeb went to a street in Preston, withdrew council services for six weeks and reimbursed people with their council tax. The programme involved quite a lot of interference, juggling with the logic of relations between different public services, economies of scale, the need for expertise and adherence to the law, and so forth. The result, The street that cut everything, can be seen here for a few more days.

I will pass over the trampled ethics of powerfully invasive forces, like television and all its accoutrements, provoking disagreements between neighbours.

One of the more easy-going of the televised residents observed,'you don't realise how dark it is, do you, when you turn the lights out'. The turning-off of street lights was an eye-opener, you might say. And it helps to keep the metaphors simple. On the whole, what happened was that people came to realise the point of paying for, and the complexity of, public services, some more readily than others. The woman who says at the outset, with regard to her council tax, 'I just can't see any value for money' completely revises her opinion at the end.

Behind that, there were curiosities, like the single mother insisting 'I'm not used to relying on anybody' without acknowledging that the state support she receives might just count.

With creaky logic, although the council 'doesn't exist', the programme makers require residents to invest in other council services by volunteering their time. So we see two neighbours cleaning city centre public toilets with the poignant observation,

"If you wanna use 'em you should be prepared to clean 'em."

And why not? What is to stop us organising a rota so that council money is saved and we all contribute to the maintenance of such an essential public resource? Pragmatic democracy, anyone? The big society theorists may have been missing a trick. Start with the bogs. Has anyone done the arithmetic I wonder? Depending on population obviously, it might be a duty you'd have to carry out a couple of hours in a year. Not quite the same as jury service I know but the idea's there.

John Crace in the Guardian suggests the programme helps to explain why 'the big society is probably a doomed project':

'However much people might talk up their community credentials, when given the financial choice most are only really happy to pay for the services they believe they benefit from directly and not for those they might one day need or are required by the more vulnerable. So a civilised society depends on a state which removes that choice.'

That seems a little cynical to me. The programme summarised a social experiment, and we saw plenty of evidence of mutual support and the recognition that people have differing needs for support at different times of their lives. On the whole it avoided trivialising the issues, which is more than can be said for some of the big society rhetoric.

For me the irony is always that we invest through our taxes in an education system which leaves so few people equipped to reflect on these issues. Wouldn't it be a good idea if we all as citizens emerged from the education system appreciating the reasons for democratic structures used to take decisions on public services?

 

 

It’s the civic economy

OK you need to commit a few minutes to this, please, cos it really is a bit special. Yesterday saw the launch of the Compendium for the civic economy: I’m tempted to write, ‘and the rest is history’ and leave it at that.

Speaking at the launch at NESTA, Tom Bolton, from the Centre for Cities, raised the question of how you describe an economy when its distinguishing feature is its ways of working (and, I would add, its values) rather than in terms of traditional business sectors.

The compendium gets at the question, what are the economics of localism? I think it’s possibly the most important document I’ve had my hands on so far this century. It was prepared by the ever-dependable Indy Johar, Joost Beunderman and their colleagues at 00:/. 

It records and celebrates a number of examples of civic entrepreneurship, and reflects on their significance for our understanding of how people who are not part of formal public services, and not part of the traditional private sector, are making a difference to civic and social conditions, by coming up with transformational projects and involving others in carrying them through. Some of the examples are already well-documented, and justifiably so, like Incredible Edible Todmorden and Southwark Circle. There are 25 described in the book.

Now I want to quote from the second of the authors’ six key messages, on page 169, which sums up why this matters. But I can’t copy and paste it, because for some reason someone has decided to disallow content copying on the pdf – which is obviously hugely ironic given that the text extols initiatives that promote sharing and collaboration.

The heading for this second message is (and I type): ‘Civic entrepreneurship can actively contribute to increasing the resilience, prosperity and well-being of people, places and communities’.

Next, I’d like to quote from the first message (also p169), to explain the drivers for the flourishing of civic entrepreneurship:

 

 

 

(Don’t be put off: go read it).

And next I want to quote from the fourth key message, on page 170, which clarifies the new relationships that are needed to help the civic economy evolve more widely:

 

 

 

 

I tend to be a sceptic about NESTA events which often seem like empty-syllable contests, but yesterday’s launch was inspiring, full of lucid and concise insights from panel members and other participants. Here are a few points from my notes.

Indy talked a lot about ‘respect’, for example that the new civic economy requires agencies ‘to respect groups’ human capital’ and to be ‘respectful of in-kind investment’. This is an important point, and I’d add that activists and residents sometimes need to be more respectful of the efforts made by some council officers.

Sam Coniff from Livity showed how readily this movement can be reconciled with commercial entrepreneurship. He also clarified how it is partly a network society phenomenon, noting that because the technology allows people easily to start things up, they do things that are closer to their values. Don’t pass over that too quickly: it’s a very profound point about our age.

Pam Warhurst, from Incredible Edible Todmorden, argued passionately that if you give people a positive environment to work in, they can do remarkable things. Pam insisted vehemently that people with the necessary skills and energy are there, we just have to ensure the creative environment for them.

But this is an ancient community development issue: not everywhere has a Pam Warhurst and she can’t be cloned. As I’ve noted before (eg), not all neighbourhoods have confident, articulate, respected, energetic local champions. The dynamic activists don’t think they’re particularly special, but actually they can’t be found everywhere. In many areas they simply will not emerge, at least not without in-depth community development in addition to the uncomfortable institutional change that is so widely discussed. We need to acknowledge that and not pretend that this new economy is going to spring up readily all over the place.

I suspect there’s a slight danger from reading this inspiring collection of narratives that councils and other overseer agencies will look to develop templates, in order to get similar projects running in their localities. What matters I think is to ensure that the conversations about contributing and participating take place in the right language – as Indy said, ‘engaging respectfully with people’s strengths’. The local authority shift, as Tom Bolton pointed out, requires fewer bureaucrats and regulators, and more facilitators.

In conclusion, I want to mention how well this book is written, and what a reassuring pleasure that is. The design, on the other hand, is best described as unfortunate: I shouldn’t have to get a magnifying glass out just because someone thinks 8pt grey looks good on a light brown background.

 

 

The sound and the fury

This time last week I was wandering about a town in the south of France, prospecting for somewhere to run the next day. I crossed a likely-looking bit of scruffy, half-finished park and resilient wasteland outside a new estate.

Music grew louder. By a gap in a fence on a dusty track I came upon a lad standing astride his bike. The speakers were attached to the handlebar, impressively loud really. He wasn't peddling, then suddenly he was peddling and the music was replaced by a torrent of complaint from a woman with a leash and a dog.

My french is not adequate to have followed the detail of her argument, but I wasn't going to take issue. The boy had left an empty biscuit packet on the ground. I couldn't tell if this was a one-off or a routine scenario they went through, but I was fairly sure it was territorial. I took the litter to the bin (the stench when I lifted the lid nearly took me out) while she gave me to understand her determination to accost the young man should she track him down.

The woman's volume remained high as she set off in pursuit. I pottered on wondering unfairly about the likelihood that she cleans up after her dog.

 

 

Pétanque, seule

I had a previous example of this apparent evidence of the relentless decline of social capital, poorly photographed in the south of England.

I got this one using the wretchedly feeble camera on my Blackberry. Spotted several hundred miles further south, on the Mediterranean coast last weekend.

Public space: overseas thoughts from back home

Having referenced Hugh Schofield's thoughts recently on 'the fact French and other European societies are more socially-minded,' I spent most of the past week in southern France. I'm just unpacking and found a few loose thoughts about public space. I'm certainly not in a position to imply any conclusions about cultural differences, these are just reflections.

When I first went to France, it must have been about 1967, I remember commenting on the constant background sound of emergency sirens in urban areas. I'd make the same observation now, it's so dominant. Who knows, there may just be some connection to the extraordinary French appetite for minor road collisions: there were four within metres of me at various times over four days.

So it's a relief to observe that the French seem far less likely than the English to use their mobile phones while driving. I saw only one instance. In terms of offensive behaviour in public space, using a mobile while driving displays stark disrespect: it says unambiguously, 'my conversation is more important than your safety'. That's one reason why it's depressing to be returning to the British public realm.

Public space in England is mcuh more information-intensive. In France there are fewer advertisements and signs - in train stations for instance, which can be remarkably dull - and on the trains and buses there are far fewer announcements. If you get on an inter-city train in the UK you are bombarded with announcements, about your ticket validity, destinations and bacons burgers, along with concerted attempts to catch you out and criminalise you. When you look out the window at a station, all sorts of information competes for your attention. Perhaps it mirrors the difference in food cultures. In France, the public realm doesn't rush you.

And the more restrained approach to information provision may have subtle social consequences. If you need to know something, you ask - that is to say, you engage with others around you. Perhaps we have here an instance of Kev's Automatic Door Principle, which notes that there are distinct advantages to using technology to open doors for us: especially for people who use wheelchairs, also of course if you are overloaded with luggage; but automatic doors do not have to be held open for the lady with the stick just behind you, or for that bloke with the buggy just approaching. This is technology confiscating tiny social interactions. Information overload in the UK could be doing something similar.

Uninvited encounters on the street seem far less frequent in France. If I walk through a town in England I know I will be accosted by people thrusting pieces of paper at me, people asking me for money or opinions or time. It could be argued that this is an acceptable part of the bustle of the urban public realm. I did note however that on the one occasion last week when I was offered a leaflet in the street, the lady said 'Bonjour m'sieur' as she held it out: that reflects a fundamentally more respectful attitude to the Other's retractable right to privacy in public.

What else? Smoking and dog shit. Smoking seems still to be far more prevalent than it is in England, a phenomenon that continues to surprise me. Given that it's a great way of trashing your taste buds, how explain its popularity in a nation of people who pride themselves on taking food seriously?

It seemed to me that there is far less obesity in France. If nothing else, that helps make sure there's enough public space for everyone. But then I wasn't always looking around me because it really is necessary to keep an eye on where you walk. The ubiquitous ladies with lapdogs, they're probably the experts at negotiating the pavements.

Just as we've taken a regulatory approach to smoking in the UK, we also use the law against dog-owners who allow mess. Apparently not in France. Maybe it's just another of many apparent contradictions in the French 'vive la similarité' love-hate relationship with regulation and universal standards.

But having been away from France for some years, what struck me afresh was the sense of generalised respect in the public realm. When you go into a shop, you say bonjour, and merci au'voir when you leave. When you sit down on a train or get into a lift, likewise you acknowledge the Other. This was emphasised with perfect clarity for me on the train home, as a loud party of Brits got on at Avignon, oblivious to the way they disrupted others' space. I'm inclined to agree with Schofield, the French really are more socially-minded, and there are things we should be thinking about.