Neighbourhoods

Living library: take out a prejudice

Ronni Abergel, one of the originators of the 'living library' idea, is in London next week launching a new guide at this event -

Local Level is currently organising a series of public library-based Living Library events, so we were struck by the slogan 'take out a prejudice'.

It will be interesting to try and find out whether this challenging approach (developed in the context of youth work, I believe) attracts people who might otherwise not be encouraged to explore experiences that are new to them, or whether they might be put off.

Our Living Library events will take place as follows:

Norton Canes Library, Staffordshire

Sat 26 April, 1000-1200; Wed 7 May, 1000-1200 & 1330-1500, Thurs 15 May, 1700-1900.

Bradford Central Library

Wed 14 May, 1500-1900, Thurs 15 May, am, Sat 17 May, am.

Bournemouth Library

Sat 3 May, 1000-1200, Wed 7 May, 1400-1700, Mon 12 May, 1000-1300.

Sevenoaks Library, Kent 

Tues 29 April, pm, Sat 10 May, am, Wed 14th May, am.

Music and collective wellbeing

A while ago my daughter got herself a t-shirt printed with the inscription 'What if the hokey-cokey is what it's all about?' Community singing certainly does something special for some people, but why?

There was a totally absorbing programme about music and health, broadcast on R3 today, parts of which explored how 'music facilitates communication and community'.

I learned about one project, Singing for the Brain, which taps into the associative memories of those with dementia and Alzheimer's and has a demonstrable healing effect. I heard from people who have studied the ways in which music affects our brains, emotions and wellbeing, telling us that in health terms music is 'not a drug - it's the opposite', and

It only works when it's part of a relationship.

And if like me, you wondered whether the legendary longevity of many musicians was something to do with socio-economic class, here's a more likely explanation: musicians are 'self-medicating'.

Street of data

Here's an enticing, nicely-paced extended sketch on uses of technology in the high street, by Dan Hill over on City of Sound, arguing that

the patterns of data in the streets, the systems that enable and carry them, the quality of those connections, their various levels of openness or privacy, will all affect the way the street feels rather more than street furniture or road signs.

I quite like the vignettes he didn't develop, like ‘a writer denotes the ghostly presence of a 12th century market using psychogeographical markup language’ ...

This piece got me leafing back through stuff by Stephen Graham and William Mitchell, and other work that hasn't really aged but is nicely crystallised by Hill's crisp scene-setting. Enjoy.

Found, ring

I came across this simple notice at the end of a cul de sac, on a gate where a path leads across a field. A resident has gone to a bit of effort because a visitor crossing their patch has lost something potentially of value.

How 2 gras sum 1 up

'Young people on a London estate are using text messaging to report antisocial behaviour discreetly and without fear of recrimination, in an initiative which is believed to be the first of its kind.

'Young residents on the Campsbourne Estate, in Haringey, are being encouraged to use MSN, texts, email or phone to secretly report any trouble they witness or fear on the estate.'

More here - Children & young people daily bulletin.

Pssst, heard what they're saying about rumour?

Word of mouth doesn't have to take months. I was talking to a couple of residents a while ago about rumour and misinformation in an area of intense regeneration activity, and we touched on the value as well as the problematic nature of rumour. The following anecdote was offered with the conviction of truth of someone reading a log book.

A community activist was busy organising a meeting about an issue they perceived to be important, but too few people promised to come. Tactics adopted included getting on a local bus with a colleague, and using a loud whisper, convincingly foretelling a negative development which would have an unhappy effect on everyone locally. According to the story, this did the trick: the meeting was very well attended.

Public libraries and multicultural relationships

Helen Carpenter, who managed the Welcome to Your Library project, has just published a very readable report about her international study tour on the role of public libraries in multicultural relationships.

She considers the relationships in terms of:

• how public libraries connect as institutions with all relevant stakeholders
• how they plan and deliver services that reflect, support and promote diversity
• how they enable inter-cultural dialogue and encourage active citizenship in a rapidly changing environment.

Helen visisted Canada, the USA, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium, and the report offers numerous little snapshots of good practice with professional reflections. More insights on her travel blog.

Local Links - let's hear it for informal networks

Last night saw the launch of the Local Links report, following a joint Common Purpose / JRF project run by Susie Hay. The project worked in four areas of West Yorkshire, stimulating active networks with the aim of uniting people and energising them 'to make networks more productive, worthwhile and sustainable.'

The project injected a lot of energy into local networks over a relatively short period, based on the assumptions that (i) there is often insufficient connection between existing active networks in a locality, and (ii) informal ineraction can make a massive difference to people's perceptions, confidence and contribution.

It's an important project but a difficult one to describe because it examines the benefit of informal networking at local level -

'meeting other people who are active and involved in the area, knowing what they do, talking and working together and forging stronger links.'

All credit to JRF and Common Purpose for making the case for what too many funders would see as 'talk shops,' too wishy-washy to justify resources.

To me, Local Links is an important contribution to the growing pressure to assert informality and the value of conversations in local life. This is not just about saying 'conversations around community action are a good thing' (ho-hum) but saying that culturally we should place more emphasis and value on them as indicators of engagement, participation and a healthy democracy. Thanks Susie.

Report.
Evaluation report by Icarus Collective.
Findings summary.

Neighbourhood communication

Communicating with your neighbours - latest in an inexhaustible series. From the letters column of a local newspaper in Andover, MA, USA:

We would like to take this opportunity to apologize to our neighbors on and around Pasho Street for disturbing their sleep in the early morning hours on Friday, Jan. 4. We were unaware that one of our automobile horns had malfunctioned due to the extreme cold and was incessantly blaring until the Andover police made a courtesy call to our home to make us aware of the situation.

Via the Neighbors Project blog.

Refugees and libraries

The Welcome to Your Library project, which worked on connecting public libraries and refugee communities in five areas around England, has come to an end.

The evaluation is primarily oriented towards library services, although it also points to some interesting case study material. Most strikingly, it suggests that, even in this outstanding project, the libraries' contribution to community cohesion cannot be described as embedded practice. The researchers note:

• a pattern of delivery where services predominantly continue to be delivered “to” refugees rather than “with” them
• conclusions from the refugee environmental testing exercise, which reported there were no visible signs of refugees being an integrated part of the overall library user group
• rare examples of the project advocating on behalf of refugees and raising awareness in the wider community of refugees’ contribution to the community.

This comes across as negative but I think it's a clear indication of just how long some of this stuff takes. As we'd expect from the library sector, achievements in more 'internally focussed' themes, such as reading and learning, were more consistently embedded into practice.

One hopes the momentum from practical initiatives such as conversation clubs, when extended from refugee communities to the general public, will cause a significant benefit spillover. As usual, the message is 'we're not done yet.'

Hello Bin Gents

I came across this thorough example of community communication recently, heavily taped to an outside door.

I like the way it seems to represent quite closely what the communicator would probably have said face-to-face, if they'd had the chance. I note the matter-of-fact assumption or acknowledgment of gendered roles. And most of all I like the civil negotiation of a minute change in working practice that could make a welcome difference to someone else's daily routine.

Neighbourhood branding

What's the significance of an area's 'image' when it comes to regeneration? We don't hear so much about labelling these days, but with the enormous power and influence of local broadcast media, the stench of stigma can be hard to rinse off.

A recent European project called IMAGE has just reported on the testing, use and evaluation of an 'integrated regeneration process,' including tools for branding neighbourhoods. It's argued that 'successful neighbourhoods are usually those with a definite identity,' so it makes sense to raise the notion of identity up the regeneration agenda - but from local people's perspective, not necessarily that of a developer, landlord or local authority.

The report begins with a short essay on the history of high-rise housing in Europe which is worth knowing about. The project concentrated on five neighbourhoods:

• Europark in Antwerp (Belgium)
• Barton Hill in Bristol (UK)
• Poptahof in Delft (the Netherlands)
• Ballymun in Dublin (Ireland)
• Schwamendingen in Zurich (Switzerland).

'All the partner neighbourhoods are characterised by multiple deprivation, often combined with cultural diversity. Of the physical factors, the anonymous open spaces and isolation from the rest of the city (perceived or actual) are mentioned as the most important key issues.'

In exploring these characteristics, the IMAGE project used this two-by-two typology of neighbourhood:

1. A good neighbourhood is a place of trust. People communicate well with each other. The atmosphere is relaxed. New people integrate naturally into the neighbourhood.
2. In a place of hope the problems are not that big. Residents are motivated to work together to improve the neighbourhood.
3. In a place of loss residents are frustrated by the problems. If they had the chance, they would move to another neighbourhood. Groups of residents are in conflict and are looking out for their own interests (such as young people versus old or ethnic minorities that do not integrate into the wider community).
4. In a place of crisis the problems are so big that everybody is only interested in his or her own position. People feel they need to defend themselves against the outside world.

Toolkits were developed for the overall regeneration process, branding, and self-evaluation (yes, another self-evaluation toolkit). The second of these stands out as easily the most significant to me.

'We can describe the identity of a neighbourhood through its key values, an interrelated framework of norms and beliefs relating to the specific area and the community. Well defined key values can inspire the direction the regeneration process takes over a long period. They can answer the questions: what will we have when it is finished and who is it for?'

One way of thinking about its significance is to reflect on the number of occasions when there has been a bit of community development or community activity take place in a neighbourhood, but not enough to force meaningful change: wouldn't articulated consensus around the identity of the neighbourhood have made a difference? I can certainly think of examples, and I can see the value of bringing 'key values' to the surface. Here (to coin a phrase) are the results from Rotterdam (not part of the IMAGE project):

The report says the term neighbourhood branding is used to mean “the search for the character of an area, its identity and its community.”

And this image seems to be the brand statement for Poptahof: 

Conversation: everyone's talking about it

Yesterday we held what's thought to be the the first practical experience of 'living library' in the UK. The idea of Living Library is that you can get direct access to experience or knowledge by borrowing a person, for a conversation about some aspect of their lives, personality or role.

It was a tentative start - a gathering of interested folk at CILIP (formerly the Library Association) with a presentation by Martin Field from New South Wales about how the scheme has been run at Lismore Library: followed by an experimental practical session in which participants volunteered to be 'books' or 'borrowed' someone. So we had nine or ten books, from the recently bereaved, the new grandparent, a person of faith, a vegetarian, a refugee, a gardener, living in a village in Nigeria, and so on.

There was unanimous satisfaction with the exercise and a lot of discussion about how it fits into efforts to contribute to community cohesion and contemporary calls for a more conversational democracy. There seems no reason why living library could not be run in places other than a public library (although I think being in the public realm will help to make it work); and it could be organised around a specific theme (such as a child health issue or wartime reminiscences) as well as being general. In a way it reminds me of telephone conferences, being a simple but effective communication device for achieving certain ends, celebrated by those who've tried it but curiously not widely adopted.

Social network gap?

Three and a half years ago I wrote: 'We're all going to have to wait a while for Keith Hampton's definitive report on the e-neighbors project in Boston.' Well yer tiz and worth the wait of course.  It's published in a UK journal, Information, communication and society, in a special issue on 'e-Relationships'.

The three-year e-Neighbors study involved detailed social network surveys in four localities, in three of which residents were provided with a neighbourhood email discussion list and a website. The paper focuses mostly on the take-up and use in a suburban neighbourhood. The great majority of ties formed as a result of people being given access to the list, were weak ties. Hampton claims that the internet does not isolate people from the parochial realm of the neighborhood:

'Internet use over extended periods appears to be an antidote to privatism – it affords the formation of local social networks.'

Of interest in this write-up is the consideration of a 'social network gap'. I've always disliked the notion of a 'digital divide' (why digital? why divide?) and Keith wisely skirts this, raising questions which get us a little closer to the issues. We know that social inclusion is not just about access to stuff but also about social connections, especially weak ties. And some kinds of neighbourhood offer greater potential for establishing ties than do others.

So here's the problem as he puts it to us:

'Those without the technology, and those in neighborhoods without an existing propensity towards local tie formation, are structurally disadvantaged twice over; they are unlikely to build local community with or without the use of information and communication technologies.'

I've always admired the measured clarity of Keith's thought and writing, and it was a privilege to have the chance to contribute some thoughts to the project at an early stage. As it happens, this paper fits nicely onto stuff I've been babbling lately about weak ties and local networks. It's time to get some decent work done on this in the UK: where, for instance, is the housing association that's building or encouraging simple email lists on estates?

Keith Hampton's site.

Previously: On Keith Hampton's 2004 London presentation.

'Social exclusion, social capital, and local online centres.'

Communication and the 'vacuum of responsibility'

To Kings Lynn, to give a short talk about information and communication, at a workshop run as part of a Young Foundation neighbourhood action network project. I made a few points about how the perceived decline of neighbourliness, and weak local social networks, leave what I call a 'vacuum of responsibility' for the neighbourhood.

How does the vacuum get filled? By formal agencies, such as the extended family of policing? With political and media emphasis on individual behaviours and parenting? Investment in skilled intervention, such as youth and community workers, perhaps? Or by investing in something vague and unpredictable which we call 'community'? Who's doing the thinking?

Participants comprised residents and staff from the Fairstead area, and the Young Foundation research had surfaced plenty of evidence of information and communication problems. There was a strong sense that information doesn’t circulate sufficiently at local level. It's a common perception which suggests that there may be too few conversations taking place.

I don't think the answer is to invest energy and resources into two-dimensional, direct forms of information – characterised by the glossified newsletter or bulletin, the unread and unloved subject of so much disinterest. One reason these products keep appearing is that they fit into the accounting framework of public spending: identifiable budget, manageable process of production and delivery, all subject to numbers which are somehow taken to stand for outcomes.

We'd make more difference by stimulating more conversations at local level, and for the representatives of agencies to be participating in them and drawing from them. That becomes a critical role for regeneration agencies - how to maximise the communication that goes on at the school gates, at leisure centres and the footie at the weekend, in the post office queue and the pub and so on; to contribute to it and ensure that local people benefit from it. No, I don't know how we'd evaluate it convincingly either. So let's get started on that too.

It seems to me that street reps could be an essential part of this mix, if sensibly supported. The role also represents the idea of local people occupying the vaccum of responsibility.

Social exclusion, social capital, and local online centres

Yesterday to the Oxford Internet Institute for a session on 'digital disengagement' and social exclusion, where I learned the following from one reported study: 11% of those whose experience of exclusion is most entrenched (ie identified on several measures, not just one or two) are 'internet users.'

Without the source I can't unpack this stat, but I'd like to see more case studies to find out more about what people in this category are doing when they are connected, and what difference it makes to their lives. It happens that I'm involved in the evaluation of a 'social impact demonstrator' at a couple of UK online centres, so may be able to contribute in due course. And Citizens Online's Everybody Online projects should provide some insights.

As it turned out, the need for more qualitative research, to get at some subtleties that were not emerging from survey material, was a lesson for the OII from the seminar. One of the nuances that concerns me is the point that, irrespective of communication technologies, we don't know enough about the extent to which people who experience exclusion are strategic in their approach to weak ties.

People of all ages and classes and backgrounds can be strategic about their need for and approach to connections and friendships, without necessarily being cynically so. Is such behaviour as likely to be found among those whose experience of exclusion is most profound? Whether it tends to be or not will influence people's attitudes to the communication technologies, for example in recognising that mobiles are brilliant for strong ties but maybe not so good for establishing weak ties.

If your personal social network is sparse, then strong ties might be the ones you crave or seem to have most need for. Perhaps also you lack opportunities or skills (or both) to establish weak ties - these tend to require some basic cultural, social or economic capital to start with. But from the early work with UK online centres in low-income areas that I was involved in years ago, it was apparent that some people were establishing weak ties with remote others online, and gaining confidence and skills from that experience.

And right on cue, here's a paper by Sara Ferlander and Duncan Timms, which contrasts users' experience of a 'local net' in a low-income area, and in an 'IT-café'.

The paper examines the extent to which use of the Internet is associated with an enhancement of social participation, social trust and local identity in the area. The Local Net appears to have had limited success in meeting its goals; the IT-Café was more successful...

The IT-Café provided a physical meeting place which facilitated social networking, especially the development of weak ties bridging different local groups, and led to decreased tensions between them. The physical aspect of the IT-Café had positive impacts upon local ties and bonding social capital. Nonetheless, visitors to the Café, in common with the users of the Local Net, mainly used the Internet for non-local networking (bridging and linking social capital) including the creation and/or maintenance of both weak and strong, and interest-specific (bonding) ties. The Internet was used for the maintenance of non-local strong bonding social capital, with many visitors using the Internet to keep in touch with family and friends outside the local community.

It's not an either/or issue of course. And as I understand it (although this is only quietly mentioned) the two resources were sequential, the café established as the Local Net failed, and the latter seems to have been on far too large a scale, so there are all sorts of reasons why the comparison is speculative. It's highly likely that many of those who used the café were already blessed with sufficient confidence and social capital to take advantage of what was on offer. Indeed the authors accept that causal priorities are hard to establish, but 'the evidence suggests that an IT-Café, combining physical with virtual and the local with the global, may be especially well suited to build social capital and a sense of local community in a disadvantaged area.'

In my view this in no way discredits neighbourhood networks, but it does put a nice big tick in the Third Place box. And it sweetly reinforces what some of us were saying 10 years ago (The net result) about the need for local resource centres; or a few years later for example in a paper to government which I co-wrote in 2002:

• Access centres function best as part of wider generic community resources that attract local people for a range of activities. It is not realistic to expect them to become financially self-sustaining without distorting their roles, although they do tend to add value to whatever funding they receive;
• Where they are part of generic community resources, access centres fulfil fundamental social roles that contribute to government objectives on community cohesion, social capital, and community capacity building. They reach parts that other agencies cannot reach, and seen in this context they justify public funding. Such funding would need to reflect recognition of their role as community sector resources rather than as centres of formal learning.

Regrettably, government lost its nerve at about that time, and funding for the centres came with badly-misconceived requirements for formal learning, wholly inappropriate for the policy objective. Now they're wondering where the social inclusion results are going to come from.

Tenant groups' telephone conferences

Sarah Bird has come up with another enticing autumn programme of telephone conferences for residents and tenants.

I've long been a fan of this format - the events are accessible and rewarding. Highlights from the programme include:

• Empowering older people, 19 October 2007, 11:00 - 12:00
• Clean streets and public places: tackling failure, 29 October 2007, 13:00 - 14:00.

There are also sessions on time banks, and on avoiding activist burnout. Check the programme for more information.

The welcome walkabout for new neighbours

I was walking with a friend in his neighbourhood last week when we came up with the suggestion that a walkabout for new neighbours might be a good welcoming device - kind of 'welcome-pack-cum-urban-safari'. You'd just invite your new neighbours and anyone else who fancies it, for an informal stroll round the area one evening or afternoon. Has anyone tried this or come across it?

I can see some advantages. Conversation is going to be easier and less stilted because you're on the move and there are different things to talk about. There's no reason why several folk shouldn't come along, whether they're recent or long-term residents. You can mix in a bit of history - 'there was a fire in that house once' - with useful information - 'Tom at no.4 has a ladder for borrowing' - and a few tips - 'that's a quiet pub, the other one's livelier'...

The more people, the more information gets shared: the buses are / aren't reliable; you can get penned-in by the rubbish truck on a thursday morning if you time it wrong; there's a footpath at the back of the crescent takes you through to the shops; it's safe for the kids to use that field unsupervised, and so on. I can imagine I might even learn something from someone I've lived next to for 20 years.

Yes, there's potential for misinformation and malicious gossip, but that's always there. Might be best to all be out there having the introductions and sharing the information in neighbour-space. And come back to a few glasses of something afterwards.

Thoughts on plain English

I recently received some text back from an editor with a light-hearted and well-intentioned remark about possibly needing a Plain English version.

Doubtless regular readers here, if there are any, will sympathise with his view. But it got me thinking that one day perhaps I should write a vigorous challenge to the Plain English Mafia, for their self-righteous determination to eradicate all poetry from the everyday (I mean the quotidian of course) and from Real Issues - when it’s the opposite that should be happening.

To those beyond enlightenment, language is just a tool for constructing a rational series of points. But it’s more, it’s a form of light, without which we cannot see the acceptable ambiguity of things.

Keep your distance

Ooh look - a few years old, but maybe still of interest, an article what I wrote for the Journal of community work and development on face-to-face and online 'community' has been made available online.

The role of street reps

'Tell your neighbours the truth as you know it!' - a jotted note for a 'job advert' for street reps, contrived during a workshop exercise I ran with a group yesterday. This was in an area of intense and complex regeneration, so perhaps it was not surprising how often the notion of truth and fact came up.

In this locality, street reps see themselves almost entirely as conduits of information, flowing in both directions, between residents and agencies. Notions like 'positive gossip' and 'squashing rumours' highlighted the importance to them of information quality. Unfortunately, the nature of the renewal issues - housing allocation, demolitions, relocation, developers' timescales, planning regulations etc - means that hard facts are hard to come by. The role therefore risks becoming a thankless one and even confrontational, with local people getting worked up about change especially when they think their homes are threatened, and the street rep becoming the lightning conductor for their disquiet.

You might therefore think there'd be something to be said for the reps getting involved in positive initiatives like border planting or barbecues or street parties or similar. The fact that they felt this to be beyond their remit suggests to me that the pool of people to whom this role will appeal is likely to be quite small - limited to the kind  of person who likes to be the first to know what's going on, ready to commit time and energy to finding out and sharing the information with others, comfortable with going to meetings and committees, and willing to put up with some irritating and irritated neighbours. And just because we all know people who fit that description, it doesn't mean there are ever likely to be enough of them. So perhaps it's worth trying to broaden perceptions of the role a little.

Meanwhile, I'm looking at how the role of street rep has evolved elsewhere, and hopefully there will be a chance to bring some of the variety together to see what's common and what's transferrable.

Research that tells us things, please

It's curious how things collide sometimes. I was very recently in a seminar where two esteemed academics presented research to practitioners. Afterwards they were rightly challenged by two members of the audience to say what the lessons are for local regeneration practice: one even said that she was going to a board meeting later that evening, what should she tell her board-members?

Astonishingly the first response was that the questioner "shouldn't expect answers to questions like that from researchers." (I wrote the words down at the time, half-expecting some kind of brawl to ensue; but probably because of the status of academics and the inferiority-complex of practitioners, nothing happened). The second speaker, with ten years of research to tell us about, invited to respond to the same points, felt unable to add anything.

This little tale will re-emerge because coincidentally I've just been asked to speak at an event in Belgium about research in social work (broadly defined). It seems there is a tension - who'd have thought it? - between the incentive system under which academics provide robust, neutral, peer-reviewed bullet-proof research, and the needs of practitioners for stuff they can use. This is not to say that compromises don't happen of course: sometimes everyone benefits, including policymakers and local people.

And why should any of the rest of us expect to benefit, necessarily? Well it depends on the topic and the funding I suppose. I'm ready to hear justifications for 'pure' research in almost any field.

But in this case the issue for me is that a couple of highly-qualified researchers swallowing public money to investigate the effects of policy measures, should not have been wrong-footed by such a question but should have had it at the front of their minds from start to finish.

Community information

Community noticeboards still perform a function in many places, providing just the right channel for some kinds of information for certain kinds of people. Here's a nice example I picked up recently - plenty of variety with announcements of events, things to be sold, and services to offer.

Yes I know, neighbourhood online systems provide this and more, but there's still something enchanting about the scruffy visible publicness of this as a role for a local venue like a post office or newsagent. I think I've seen similar in launderettes and chemists, but not in pubs, which is curious; and only 'official' (not personal) items in libraries.