Neighbourhoods

Would you choose neighbourhood or housing?

So at yesterday's Compass conf I was on a panel about neighbourhoods and 'the good society', and there was an interesting question from the floor: can you have a 'good neighbourhood' with poor housing? It didn't fall to me to try and answer, but the consensus seemed to be 'no'.

Our mythology of course says 'yes'. But that could be because it confuses collective resilience with what it might be reasonable to call 'good neighbourhood'. I think for example of the experience of women from the tenements of Edinburgh and Glasgow retold in a super book called She was aye workin' - challenging

the idea that 'We may have been poor, but we were very comfortable and cosy' - it's just not true. Their life was hell. It was a constant daily grind against dirt and disease.

That reminds us is that a functioning neighbourhood is not just a set of cohesive relations where people support one another out of necessity against the odds. That kind of 'community' may seem laudable to those who know no better but it should not be wished or imposed on anyone, and it's a brutish society that is prepared to do so.

In my few words to the seminar I had tried to suggest that the idea of 'community' - far from being the magic solution to a long list of social problems which governments would like to see resolved by someone else at no cost - is a minority interest. Most people are most concerned about house and family, with 'community' a distant third (Lyn Richards' excellent but seldom-cited study Nobody's home brings this out forcefully).

So my own reflection on the question - can you have a 'good neighbourhood' with poor housing? - is to ask, if you could only have one, which would you choose?

 

Rebuilding the Smurf Society

Here I sit trying to think what I might say at today’s Compass seminar on ‘building the good society’, only to get distracted by this BBC headline:

Do Smurfs provide a model for a good society?

I have never knowingly watched the Smurfs, but apparently they

lived without money, using their individual skills for the common good, without individual reward, to ensure their community thrives.

So that seems to answer the question in the headline, and suggests that today’s delegates might ask themselves if they’re inhabiting a fictional cartoon world. Ah, you know where this is going don’t you? -

You can even see echoes of the British government's Big Society idea, part of which encourages individuals to form community groups and engage in social action, particularly through volunteering, says Prof Ellis Cashmore, a sociologist from Staffordshire University.

"There are similarities between David Cameron's idea of the Big Society and what we see embodied in Smurf society.

"Cameron [is asking people to get] organised with their local community, have organic collectivity and work for each other, like we used to before industrialisation came along and fragmented society."

The last bit needs a bit of qualification of course. Historians do still argue that neighbourliness declined at the end of the middle ages, but it was a debt-based society with a great deal of mobility, and the home was a public, not a private place, which must have made a difference.

But it’s the phrase ‘Smurf Society’ that catches the eye. I’m floundering in a surfeit of universalised kinds of ‘Society,’ but if I have to choose one, this could be it.

The neutering of community development?

It’s fair to say that a vacuum was created by the recent abrupt ending of government funding to the likes of Community Development Foundation, Community Development Exchange, and Urban Forum. From slightly to one side (the usual angle) it appears as if the Big Lottery Fund’s People Powered Change programme is swelling within that vacuum.

People Powered Change is the over-arching theme for Big’s investments in England. It encompasses a range of approaches to support and develop community action. The banner signals an intention to stimulate and facilitate local efforts to improve the quality of life in neighbourhoods, using information and various tools to multiply the benefits of community-based initiatives.

Of course, the government’s hands-off approach is unsurprising. But at a PPC event on Monday I was struck by the picture of Jim Diers and Cormac Russell from Nurture Development, at the door of No.10 Downing Street. I have no doubt that their presentation would have been inspiring and thought-provoking. Jim spoke at an event I co-organised with Shared Intelligence last year: we already know how powerfully he conveys the value and impact of community action.

As I wrote in a piece for the Guardian’s voluntary sector network, Cormac and Jim promote asset based community development (ABCD). This was heavily reinforced at the PPC meeting and it seems to fit sweetly with Big’s approach. So the question is not just whether it is enough for PPC to dominate the vacuum left by the weakening of key funded community development agencies (and to be fair I'm sure Big would welcome more agencies with clout alongside them, in that space); we should also take note that the dominant ethos is a particular brand of CD.

So what? Quite rightly, ABCD places great emphasis on the strengths, skills and resources - the assets - that exist at local level. But to do so, it seems to have to imply that established community development works from a deficit model – over-emphasising the negatives like crime, poor housing, poor health and anti-social behaviour, especially forces external to the neighbourhood. There is a strong sense that, for instance, community action should not be complaining about environmental injustice or the local fallout from a trashed economy and depleted public services. Echoes of ‘moaning minnies’?

I would argue, first, that all decent community development is asset based, not deficit based; and secondly, that there are real dangers in appearing to dismiss those who challenge external negative influences, especially at a time when we do not have strong, influential agencies promoting other CD values like equalities and genuine empowerment. I wrote:

'Good community development practice doesn't over-emphasise disadvantage and injustice; but it isn't seduced into ignoring it, and it also has the robust courage to challenge the causes. In lieu of experienced agencies promoting these values, let's hope they get reflected in the People Powered Change programme.'

I welcome the positive implications of these guys crossing the threshold of No.10 and potentially influencing thinking in there, cos that is needed. But for all the symbolism, it’s not so much a massive moment for social policy as a good time to do some thinking about the way genuine CD - let's call it 'total community development' - could be very effectively hushed.

It’s just possible that government would like to see lots of community action where people do not recognise that some of their problems are externally-determined and are the consequence of unequal and unfair policies. This is how that could come about.

 

The 'good society'?

A quick heads-up, I've been asked to speak on a panel at the Compass conference in London this saturday, on the curious theme of 'How do we build the Good Society in our own neighbourhood?'

If that logo on the left is meant to echo the one on the right, is it witty, inspirational, tasteless, or shallow, would you say?

 

Juxtaprose 6

 

‘Rep’ing’ (representing/ defending) a turf has become increasingly common and a significant proportion of reported killings have been linked to ‘postcode wars’. Gary Hewett, of Community Action Team in East London, told the Working Group that ‘so many young people are afraid of travelling across the borough because there’s so many different territories’, and this has been echoed throughout the Working Group’s hearings. For some inner city young people gang-impacted areas are becoming no-go areas. One 17 year old male from London said: ‘There’s certain places in South London where 100 per cent you can say if you’re not from there you’ll get stabbed.’ Dying to belong, CSJ, 2009.

Perhaps most interesting about the cartography of the nobility is the tendency for members of noble factions to map the city according to lines of hatred, an emotional mapping that complements the moral cartography implicit in the vicinity. When members of the two noble factions testified in court about the emotional context of their violent exchanges, they painted an image of the city and its neighbourhoods as polarized by hatred. In their testimony, the defendants in the trial that followed on the heels of the great battle of 1351 created a mental geography that carefully partitioned the city into territories controlled by the Vivaut and the Jerusalem and by their allies. From testimony given at the inquest, it is clear that the invading Jerusalem were thought to have offended the residential space of the Vivaut. Daniel Lord Smail, Imaginary cartographies, 1999.

Previously juxtaprosed.

Neighbouring in low income neighbourhoods

The Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research at Sheffield Hallam University has published the final report of their study of low income neighbourhoods.

It’s an important body of work, mainly qualitative and thus sitting most obviously alongside Anne Power’s City survivors as a source of stories and quotes.

At the same time, JRF have published a paper prepared by some of the researchers and based on the same study, which looks at current social policies and assesses their potential impact on residents living in the neighbourhoods studied. The paper explores some of the underlying assumptions in the new policy agenda. (Summary here).

It’s a smart move, let’s hope this latter paper has some impact. The key message seems to be this:

There was little evidence in the research of any fault line between ‘cohesive’ and ‘broken’ communities, of places somehow set apart from ‘the rest of us’. Place still matters and, as a rule, neighbourhood mattered most to people where both the economic legacy and future prospects for their community were least favourable.

The authors stress the role of social housing -

neighbourhoods with a higher proportion of social housing often provided households with an island of stability in an ocean of turbulence (not least in the jobs market).

They go on to ask,

what happens to those communities that are facing structural economic weakness but where countervailing systems of mutual support and resilience have also become attenuated over time – those at the end of the economic line – if the opportunities for economic growth lie elsewhere?

As far as neighbouring is concerned, two familiar points are re-confirmed: that neighbouring is not the same as friendship; and not everyone wants to invest in neighbourliness. But there is one pertinent point that is very well-made in the main research report, concerning the extent to which so many people on low-incomes are both time-poor and cash-poor.

This point needs making with research to back it up, because policy too often implies that people in poverty have time on their hands while worthier citizens are busy driving the economy and bringing up more worthy citizens. Lack of time and energy constrains people’s ability to get involved in co-production or civic action or in strengthening their social networks. Here’s one quote that illustrates the way in which this plays out in neighbourhood relations:

No I don’t want to be going round for cups of tea and that kind of thing... I think it’s important to say hello and recognise each other but… there just doesn’t seem to be enough time to socialise with the people I socialise with, family and friends as it is… and it’s just trying to find time to do the laundry and keep the house tidy as well as everything else.

And finally while I remember it, for the record, there’s one point in one of the research papers which doesn’t seem to have made it into the final report, concerning the negative effect of declined neighbourly overtures:

I tried to make friends with these neighbours but they won’t so I left it at that so basically. I don’t know anybody in this street unless somebody dies and ‘oh her name was Mary’ or something… it’s not like you would go out and knock on the neighbour’s door and say ‘hello can I borrow a cup of sugar’. I even started that when I first come over here, I cook and I would take plate of samosas or whatever to the neighbours and so I stopped and I just keep to myself….people keep to themselves, they don’t have the time… I think people are busy, they don’t want to get involved, they don’t want to bother, because I’ve got two neighbours here, they’re both the same, don’t want to know. So I gave up.

I’m reminded of a very similar sense that Toby Gale and I got from talking to refugees and asylum seekers (case study 3) for the Manchester neighbourliness review.

The silencing of the unanswered voice is probably quite prevalent, if we did but know it, and obviously damaging. How might it be countered? Thinking up lots of formal devices like street parties is only a partial solution at best, not just because not everyone is comfortable with them but also because they overplay expectations of neighbouring and try to coerce us into chumminess, whether false or not. So we have to fall back on all the old key drivers like design, occupation of streets, locality of services and amenities, limited churn, and so on. Oh, and neighbourhood online channels of course.

Let there be strong networks

Here’s another report calling for policy to bolster social networks – this one is from the International Longevity Centre UK, Can localism work for older people in urban environments? In this case the call is ‘to strengthen interpersonal, intergenerational, and multigenerational networks, particularly in urban areas.’

This accumulating acknowledgement that our dependence on institutions has left us vulnerable, as a society, is not misplaced in my view. The echo is familiar, as is the echo of the echo. Network poverty was worthy of more research attention than it got in recent wealthier times. Now that we really need some data on it, I suspect we’re going to be leaning heavily on the RSA study because I’m not sure there’s a great deal else to go on.

So what does it mean, to a policymaker, this call to help strengthen social networks? How should policy respond?

I’d start with a requirement that local policies should avoid doing damage to existing local social networks, a bit like the duty to involve. Vicki Nash suggested something similar, ‘community proofing,’ some years ago.

It would mean for instance that a new supermarket or road widening or library closure could not be approved without an intelligible analysis of its impact on local social networks, an analysis that in turn would inform public consultation. It wouldn’t take us long to develop the methodology, once we had to. I’ve suggested before, the reason we don't have the methodology to demonstrate the social value of local amenities that stimulate social networks is because no political value has been placed on human processes that are informal and organic.

Will that change, with all these calls to strengthen networks? Is there the political will to acknowledge that local social interactions have value which plays out in, and profoundly affects the costs of, other social provision?

The requirement to avoid network damage does not have to be accompanied by a given standard of social network strength, to which all neighbourhoods should be expected to aspire. Wrong approach, don’t go there.

But yes it should set us thinking about other ways of enhancing informal interaction, for example through the design of local spaces and dwellings; placing more than crudely economic value on local third places; support for local online networks; policies that discourage unnecessary car use and encourage walking; promotion of the principle of local (walkable) services and local (walkable) schools… All these will seem eminently sensible, if they don’t already, once there is government-level recognition of the essential value of informal interactions and the local social networks that they represent.

All this has drawn me back to a book chapter I wrote on policy and local social relations, here, in which I noted that

‘social relationships in neighbourhoods are organic, requiring a healthy ecology that reflects informality and also requiring that most of the time formality keeps its distance.’

And in which I quoted Robert Ellikson’s observation that

‘…lawmakers who are unappreciative of the social conditions that foster informal cooperation are likely to create a world in which there is both more law and less order.’

 

 

Homeless young people: 15% rise

CYP Now reports that the number of young people aged 16 to 24 who have been accepted as homeless by councils has 'risen by 15 per cent over the past year, according to latest government figures.'

This is scary. The increase is expected to continue and it doesn't take a great deal of imagination to anticipate serious further consequences for these young people over time. The charity Centrepoint notes that 'the actual increase could be far greater' and says

'the figures show the effect [that] public sector cuts, poor job prospects and price rises are having on young people and families.'

The Guardian has a piece today on the more general homelessness figures, but otherwise they seem to have been passed over by most of our broadcast media. Why?

And I don't have a lot of confidence that this government will regard these figures as a matter of concern until it's way too late. Perhaps I'm being unfair, but would you put your trust in the eight ministers who form the Ministerial working group on preventing and tackling homelessness?

The assault on the public

When I was in France recently I was a bit shocked at the prevalence of private beaches, in a country which I had thought took liberté and égalité seriously.

Perhaps it will get as bad in the UK before long. I vaguely recall, but cannot find evidence of, an early Thatcher attempt or threat to sell stretches of the British coastline.

And I've been wondering, what will it take eventually to spark a serious debate about the nature of 'public' in this country?

The government's determined assault on what is public encompasses a scary disinterest in formal care services for vulnerable people; spiteful bullying contempt (especially from here) for local-elected bodies almost by definition; the washing of hands on policy for public libraries; the idea of selling off nature reserves; and the outrageous attempt to sell off publicly-owned woodland.

And we have a London borough apparently serious about charging children to use an adventure playground. That should get rid of the riff-raff. I daresay there are plenty of similar examples, as the Haves seek to drive home their advantage and accentuate what Geoff Mulgan described as the 'evident imbalance between private affluence and public poverty.'

The other day I was in a London square where I was told that you weren't allowed there if you were wearing overalls. Presumably if a worker is needed to fix something, he or she has to be brought in behind screens or under cover of darkness: the leisure of the wealthy should not be spoiled by the risk of catching sight of hoi-polloi. It was, presumably, pseudo-public space - privately owned, the developer having extracted from the local authority pretty much whatever they wanted in return for providing pavements and conditional access. Bless them, the London Assembly recently published a report which

'identifies a number of concerns relating to the shift in the ownership and management of public spaces from local authorities to developers, and recommends solutions.'

But last month's BBC programme about the street without services suggested to me that there is a lot to be done before people will join up the evidence of these various little skirmishes and recognise them as a war. How late is too late?

 

 

Local monitoring of public services

A BBC programme has exposed appalling maltreatment in a care home and led to arrests. It has also led to instant apologies from the public agency funded to monitor service quality and respond to complaints. The Care Quality Commission failed in precisely what it is there for; while the BBC went above and beyond the duty of a public service broadcaster, and not for the first time has done the work of another public agency.

The current model doesn't seem brilliant. Might there be a different future for the public funding of regulation? Inspection and investigation in all kinds of public services requires expertise, of course, and that is not going to change. But as citizens become more media-empowered and can readily feed into the major media providers if necessary, is there a case for more local citizen teams to play a role alongside subject experts in monitoring publicly-funded local services?

To some extent we do this already, for example in policing, but it's usually on a traditional committee-based model, attracting only a certain kind of commitment. I'm thinking of something a bit more likely to involve people from a range of backgrounds, something open and rewarding, like the Young Inspectors programme; and something that can really exploit the inexpensive transparency of local online channels. Just as we are expected as citizens to be available for jury service, should we not also expect to contribute directly to the maintenance of standards in our local services?