Neighbourhoods

How does contemporary neighbouring compare with the past?

Emily Cockayne’s history of neighbours, Cheek by jowl, which I’ve already referred to a couple of times, is packed with little anecdotes of neighbour relations in England since the late medieval period. I’m left in awe of her achievement in accumulating so much absorbing evidence. The pace is sometimes a bit breathless as story follows story; and the author is never in a hurry to offer a theory or generalised conclusion from what she’s shared. But the style is very readable, laced with occasional dashes of light humour.

So come on Emily, we all want to know: how does contemporary neighbouring compare with the past? In spite of her general coyness as far as conclusions are concerned, this bit sounds pretty confident:

‘Active neighbouring has declined, but latent neighbouring has remained. Most neighbours still trust each other and will help out in an emergency. Who would want to return to traditional neighbouring, if that came with the hardship and lack of privacy that fostered it? Modern neighbouring has a different character because the context is different. We rely on neighbours less; we can be passive neighbours.’

Sounds about right to me, and it pretty much fits with other conclusions such as those of Mary Godfrey and her colleagues. My take on it would be something like this:

One form of neighbouring that has almost certainly declined is what we might call ‘negative neighbouring’ – a moral governing culture typically referred to now under the label ‘curtain-twitching,’ which had evolved to establish and reinforce norms, and those norms extended into gender, racial and other stereotypes.

Of course there are plenty of contemporary anecdotes about this form of neighbouring but I don’t think anyone is putting forward the argument that it is more prevalent and influential today than it was 60 years ago.

If we think of some forms of neighbourliness in more neutral terms – just knowing and recognising people whose help could be mobilised in time of need – it’s probably fair to say that the numbers of local people we know in this way have decreased. But that may not be at all critical if, as for most of us, the number of people we know whose help we can summon readily has not decreased. Even if some or many of our contacts are not going to be physically within reach in a home-based emergency, their power to engage appropriate neighbourly support may still be strong.

Finally, what about what I have called ‘supportive’ neighbouring, the sort of behaviour between co-residents in which people go just a fraction out of their way to be supportive and imply readiness to help in time of need, without transgressing the norms of privacy? I really have my doubts that this has declined to any great extent if at all.

Where Emily and I probably differ though is in the weight given to the welfare state as having ‘crowded out’ people’s readiness to offer support. It’s obvious that to some extent, formal services have taken over occasions such as childbirth when in the past neighbours were more or less forced to depend on each other. We’d expect that the nature of neighbouring would change as a consequence; but it wouldn’t necessarily have declined significantly.

My sense is that if neighbourliness really did decline over the past generation, then of all the contributory factors, the crowding out by the welfare state was not one of the most important. The availability of organised social care for those who needed it not only made life more liveable for millions, it probably had far less of an impact on positive neighbouring than did the availability and use of cars; television; new forms of housing; comparative wealth; population diversity; and a cohort of women in the labour market.

And so, as I wrote here:

‘The task is to understand how the notion of an enfolding community might be possible in an age of personal social networks with the looming challenge of living with difference, when there is less need to be neighbourly and few of us really have to be more than superficially friendly with our neighbours.’

I do believe that when residents connect through neighbourhood online networks, where those are collectively-oriented, the potential to resolve this challenge is significant.

Against that, as I’ve said before, investing in formal initiatives in order to generate local social connections may be of limited value, being back-to-front. Emily's pretty emphatic on this:

‘Good Neighbour societies are founded on a notion that organisation will bring about a return to traditional neighbourliness. It will not.’

So with all this in mind, I’m proposing a meeting about the past, present and future of neighbouring, in London in about a month’s time – just before the jubilee street party brouhaha swamps us all with romantic representations of community and soppy insistence on formal mechanisms as the key to revisiting a past golden age of neighbouring… More on that very soon.

The real costs of car use

Here’s a delightful 4 minute video from Mexico explaining how induced demand and misdirected subsidies make the use of cars so much more of a problem than is duly recognised. (Note the presence of the British Embassy in the credits at the end. Should we look to the Mexican Embassy in London to help produce a version for the UK market?)

'I want to recreate that sense of community'

I’m not doing this to be mischievous, honestly. I read the following paragraph, the sort of statement that reaches me about once a week on average:

“I grew up in [N], in a neighborhood where my family knew everyone on the block and we all looked out for each other. All the kids played together, and if we did anything wrong our parents would hear about it from one of the neighbors. I wanted to recreate that sense of community.”

And for some reason, you know how it is, this is what I interpreted:

“I grew up in Placetown, in a neighbourhood where my family knew everyone and truly nasty rumours abounded and there was a lot of obvious domestic violence that no-one talked about and if you were gay you just had to suppress it, and if you were disabled you were patronised if you were lucky but doomed anyway. All the kids played together (except of course that little disabled girl, can't even remember her name) so there was no end of bullying that you had to put up with and if we did anything wrong our parents would hear about it from one of the neighbours, who made it their business to exert control because they’d missed out on promotion in the army during the war, and my god they could be vindictive and brutal. I want to recreate that sense of community, cos I’m like that.”

Yes maybe I'm being a little unfair.. But the rosetinting of community really is unhelpful, because it stifles serious policymaking about neighbourhoods. I know that many neighbourhoods in the past were much better in some respects and much worse in others. Now, can we move on?

 

The problem of civility: a parking vignette

I thought I was lucky to grab a parking slot on the edge of a row, with a yellow crossed box marked on the passenger side. This kind of thing matters if you’re moving from place to place with a growing bairn who is hard to manoeuvre into his seat at the best of times.

I got back to the car to find a large van snuggled up alongside, leaving me enough room to get the door open about one and a half feet. Aware of the potential havoc to my back I cautiously got the bairn strapped in and closed the door. I then heard the van driver approaching to say ‘You alright there mate?’ I grumphed audibly. ‘Where do you want me to park?’ he says, ‘on the roof?’

Er, well how about legally?

‘Oh what you gonna do?’ says he, ‘call the police?’

Which epitomises the problem of respect and civility in public spaces. It’s impossible for any system of government to oversee all potential disputes, so our society depends on most of us taking other people into consideration in the first instance (citizenship), before questions of legality come into play. Some people seem to see inconsiderate acts first and foremost as either legal, or illegal-but-can-be-got-away-with.

One of the popular questions of our time is whether the proportion of the population in the latter category is increasing. I’m more than ever persuaded that this perception is related to the amount of time we spend cocconed in our cars, a peering position which subtly alters the relationship to the Other. And if it is increasing, I think the next question to ask is: where’s the tipping point?

 

Pavement parking: time for windscreen stickers?

As a pedestrian and experienced buggy-pusher living in an outer urban area that has a high car population, I'm pleased to see this: the good folk at Living Streets are cranking up their campaign against pavement parking.

I know parking options are a problem for a lot of people - inadequate housing supply often means several people in the same household who depend on their car (or think they do) for work, living in houses not designed for multiple car ownership. But there are two far worse problems I suspect - unnecessary use which suggests possible unnecessary ownership, and downright inconsiderate parking.

Because authorities have been so slow to crack down on the habit, it is seen as acceptable. What effect will the campaign have?

I suggest it needs universally available stickers issued to all buggy-pushers, wheelchair users and pedestrians with mobility problems, with a legend saying 'please show more consideration to pavement users'. The stickers could be applied to the windscreen and should not be too easy to remove: it should take at least as long for an inconsiderate driver to remove the sticker as it does for a buggy-pusher to wait for a safe moment to go into the road, around the vehicle and regain the safety of the pavement.

Another option of course would be a website with geo-located and time-stamped images - and forget that stuff about blanking out the registration plates.

 

Keeping an eye on surveillance

"CCTV usually achieves very little on its own, it needs to be part of more comprehensive security planning; it works much better in access-managed areas along with a guardianship presence, community support and a response capacity.

Policing, security and crime prevention are social relationships and if these are characterised mainly by division, mistrust and inequality, CCTV surveillance technologies are likely to exacerbate social problems and tensions."

Peter Squires, University of Brighton, in a European Urban Knowledge Network interview.

Running on the roof

'This particular interviewee explains in detail her love of running, and describes the geography of her neighbourhood, distinguished by a letterbox at the end of the road. Such are the gendered and social constraints imposed by other residents of the refugee camp, however, in a place where there is little privacy, that she is forced to run round and round the flat roof of her building instead of down the road, with her husband measuring out the distance in recognisable terms. 'Have I reached the post-box yet?' she reports herself asking, imagining that she is in fact running along the road outside her house, an activity forbidden to her because she is a woman.'

K.H.Adler, in 'Gendering histories of homes and homecomings', in this volume, referring to a video art project by Palestinian architect Sandi Hilal called Roofs: public private open spaces in the camp. According to this note the project was 'produced in a refugee camp in Hebron on the West Bank in cooperation with UNRWA [The United Nations Relief and Works Agency] and the University of Stuttgart.'

The image is from the Occupied Palestine blog.

 

Occupying the neighbourhood: 'everybody knows who you are'

Yesterday I was working with my colleague Hugh Flouch with some residents on an estate in Wolverhampton. They're all tenants of Wolverhampton Homes, and like many local people have been there for a long time.

Coincidentally, when I got home, BBC4 were re-broadcasting Michael Collins's sensitive and insightful programme about council housing, The great estate, which you can see here (well worth the time, I'd only seen glimpses before). Collins records the sense of worth, permanence and belonging that characterised council housing at a time when it was considered 'a step up, not a step down'.

The residents Hugh and I have been working with articulate a sense of pride in the history of their (low rise) estate, and some bewilderment at the way in which this form of housing tenure and its associated culture has become socially discredited.

I'm not intending to offer an analysis of the programme here - check Dave Hill's article and links for that. Instead I want to draw on some remarks (at about 24 mins into the film) offered by one of the contributors, who grew up on an estate in Liverpool:

'All our friends lived there. All the people you went to school with lived there. But I think, because you knew all the kids, you also knew the parents and there was a lot of respect at that time. You always called the parents, 'Hello Mrs Burchall' - you always called them by their surname. You knew them but, more importantly, they knew you. And that's a powerful commodity when you're a kid, the fact that everybody knows who you are. I think that's maybe what separated the gangs of kids from the squares where we lived with the pockets of kids which hang around on street corners now who are totally anonymous.'

It's ok, I'm not suddenly about to go all soppy about some golden age of neighbouring. But I do want to try and get a sharper focus on the connection between localness (by which I mean, day-to-day occupation of the neighbourhood) and housing, as mediated by families. This is by no means entirely concerned with 'public parenting', but the forces which stimulate connection between children and their peers' parents can be exploited for other connections in the neighbourhood, contributing for example to neighbourly concern for isolated older people. Why were these kinds of social relationships seen as the default in many places but they are not now?

Here are some contributory factors that come to mind:

• routinised lifestyles and a high proportion of mothers as housewives
• lower car ownership, with playable streets
• more local employment and local schools, to which people walked or cycled
• availability of local trade, ditto
• ties that overlapped in the spheres of leisure and workplace as well as home environment
• a heritage of deference to authority (which depended often on unhealthy, disempowering relationships)
• housing that people valued.

I do not overlook the disadvantages of close-knit neighbourhoods, but for once I am not going to bang that particular drum.

Some of the subsequent social changes are desirable, some perhaps not. Some are subject to tweaking through policy influence; others, like the transition from an authority-based organisation society to an initiative-based network society, have too much momentum and are long-since out of reach of significant policy influence.

What strikes me, reflecting on the remarks quoted and the little list above (additional suggestions welcome), is that policy makers might sensibly reduce the rhetoric about greed and responsibilities, and focus more on the circumstances of life in neighbourhoods which help to establish and reinforce local social connections - like promoting local schools to which most of the pupils are expected to walk; genuinely discouraging large supermarkets, and supporting local trade; moving far more quickly to help the beleaguered local pub trade; actively and purposefully promoting local clubs and associations, and so on. It would be good to see schemes for playable streets and some serious efforts to reduce car use. And given the wretched plight of the housebuilding 'industry', let's give airtime to some ideas for reinventing social housing.

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.

Community and archeaology: streets and people

Here's a sound idea neatly presented, the Streets Museum, tracing lost streets of Salford. Apparently over 1500 streets have been demolished in central Salford in the past fifty years. (Why?)

'We focus on  our lost cultural and architectural heritage, which are intricately related. We gather together fragments of the past, placing them in active spaces of dialogue and encouraging social networking between fragmented families.'

Presumably what this could lead onto is a redefinition of 'lost' and some archiving of the way many streets have changed from being community places to spaces reserved for privatised mobility. And from there, hopefully, to more widespread recognition of the social damage caused by the loss of streets.

But don't expect much soon - remember we have a government that pretends, laughably, that there has been a 'war on motorists' which in brain-free populist mode it wants to 'end'.

Smuggled into the new year blur was this press release announcing the abolition of parking space limits for new homes and guidance encouraging higher parking charges. More evidence of rampant anti-social policy to put the charming rhetoric of big society into perspective.

Harvest, neighbourliness and altruism

I generally treat narratives of the decline of neighbouring with cautious respect. Here's a comment responding to a post on the global Irish Central site, raising a valid point about the impact of technology on local social relations, which I don't recall having heard before:

'When I visited Ireland as a child, saving the hay was a community event. The neighbors would pitch in and help each other. The mechanization of farming has removed that shared sense of community gained from helping one's neighbors.'

There's no doubt that community involvement in the economically-critical harvest applied in many countries over centuries. We think of Levin over-exerting himself with the serfs, in Anna Karenina. Excluding imaginative aristocrats, most of the participants in such scenes would have experienced intermittent mutual dependence which defined community for them. The basis was necessity neighbouring: individuals had self-interested motivation for co-operating with their neighbour (and coercive religious practices often did the rest). Failure to maximise the harvest, perhaps with too few hands available to bring it in before the weather changed, seriously threatened the chances of the whole village getting through the winter.

We might also ask about some of the oppressive social structures under which this sometimes tortuous labour was unavoidable (no apols for sounding momentarily marxist) - who was benefitting most from this skilled, physical, coordinated effort? - and therefore the conditions under which the mutual commitment that we call 'community' arose.

By all means we should reflect on the contrasts (and similarities) between local social relations in other societies and those that prevail today. But let's at least recognise that versions of 'community' which may have become scarce and and are now regretted, had their basis in motivations that were not necessarily altruistic, and in economics that were not necessarily inclusive.

The contemporary challenge might be expressed thus: how does neighbourliness and sense of community emerge in societies that lack identifiable, manifold mutual dependence?

 

How the government is encouraging people to get more involved in politics

Some observations on yesterday's news. It's about information, poverty and power.

First, I was struck by the extent to which the government's bullying of the BBC has pushed it to the right. BBC TV coverage of events in Westminster was almost devoid of any attempt to analyse why protestors were angry. The BBC has become afraid to say anything that might upset the authorities. Luckily for them, they had a couple of over-paid celebrities to get excited about. (Incidentally, it obviously wasn't just students, there were other citizens protesting. It suits the establishment to explain the protests as just young people being over-exuberant).

I'm perplexed though at the lack of attention paid to the abandonment of education maintenance allowance (EMA), which is a proven way of supporting young people from low income families who want to stay in education. Secretary of State Vince Cable described EMA as 'enormously wasteful'. Well, it helps poor people with the objective of trying to equalise opportunity, so why would this government want to fund it? The arrogance and complacency seem impregnable. And they're surprised that people are angry.

We don't get many opportunities to be proud to be British (and frankly I don't look for them) but yesterday sort-of counts. While Wikileaks has left most of America apparently supine in acceptance of the arrogant stupidity of its bullying powermongers, in London people have come out and shown the politicians and authorities that their stupidity is unacceptable. I use the word 'unacceptable' because the Haves have been queuing up to use that word with reference to yesterday's street performances. And I use the word 'stupidity' with reference to leaders in the US and UK who have completely failed to grasp the role of new communications media in these confrontations. It's laughable how the establishment feels that the old hierarchies built on hierarchical communication systems (most obviously the bible and the pulpit, but by extension the analog divide generally) can still be depended on to keep people in their places.

Yes, the old question 'why do we have such stupid people in power?' applies as forcefully as ever, but it's gratifying that ethical hacking globally, and the use of google maps to outwit the police in central London, are exposing the powermongers' attempts to deny social justice.

One of the tenets of community development is that nothing succeeds like adversity, and this is shown to apply at the national scale. Sometimes in community development we are disappointed at people's reluctance to get worked up about things; sometimes we are taken by surprise at the vehemence of the response. I count myself among those who have been surprised, and refreshed, at the sudden and fierce discovery of readiness to take political action. It has value which is increasing in proportion to the declining credibility of those in government.

 

Home is where you can park your car

Royal Mail published some findings from an online (UK) survey into home moving habits recently, including these headlines:

• More than a quarter of people (27 per cent) said that car parking was most important if they had to move home, while just 17 per cent said being close to family was the top priority.
• Fifty per cent rate being near green space as one of the most important considerations for a new area.
• Seven per cent stated that they would not wish to move their pets to an unfamiliar neighbourhood. (Well blah, how's yer hamster gonna get a rounded education, appreciate diversity and experience different cultures?)

Neighbourliness designed-in

Spiegel Online has an article, 'The challenge of making HafenCity feel neighborly', about a large new city centre development for 12,000 residents in Hamburg.

It's a very protracted initiative with an emphasis on social mix, and on residents and other stakeholders having an input into the ongoing project. The sociologist involved in the development, Marcus Menzl, says:

'You cannot build a neighborly feeling. But I think that architecture can help certain processes and hinder others.'

The pic is from their photo gallery.

Almost certainly not my last word on cars

I spent six and a half hours driving yesterday, to and from a project. It was not possible to use public transport and get there in time on a Monday morning (not without bleeding the project travel budget out on taxis).

Since I very seldom drive for anything like that amount in a month, let alone a day, I just want to record here some very simple thoughts - not so much to do with the small but probably measureable negative contribution I have just made to the condition of the planet, but to do with the fact that this is an utterly ridiculous way to travel. It makes no sense. It's stressful, tiring, anti-social, environmentally-unsustainable and almost completely unproductive. Social capital accumulated? Zero.

I can't do single-tasking, I like to be doing stuff. I can single-task while I brush my teeth, because I have to, but that's about the limit. I find it scary to think that much of our economy seems to depend on millions of people shooting off in vehicles in different directions, not getting anything done while they go.

It was a brilliant project though, featuring drama work with young people looked after, so there was some reward at least for me.

Village fate

The village of Grassington, previously tipped for the prize, has now been 'chosen' for the tv programme in which twelve outsiders

“move into a house in a beautiful rural village and the residents decide who they think is the right person to become a permanent member of their community and win the house”.

Villagers have dwelt on their fate. Will it all end in tears?

Mr Isaacs, who is the studio’s creative director, said his team was looking for a handful of strong local characters who would act as mentors to introduce people to the village.

He said he would like to get as many people as possible involved in voting people off the show, but had yet to “nail down” how it would work.

“We’ll always be available to engage people before, during and after production. We want our relationship to continue,” he said. “We do care about your community, but we also want to make exciting, grabby television.”

That's 'grabby' spelled with an 'a', I checked.

I can see there are understandable views on either side of the debate, but what's striking is where the power lies. Presumably residents did not proactively invite the tv company in, at least not collectively. Now that they have apparently accepted their nomination, I imagine residents are going to find themselves with less and less influence over what happens.

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

The amount of emotional or instrumental support that you receive from your social network, and the amount that you give, can be calculated and represented on a reciprocity scale.

So you might give a lot of practical help to others and not need much yourself at the moment, scoring positively for instrumental reciprocity. You could have been going through a hard time and be needing more emotional support than you've been able to offer others, scoring negatively for emotional reciprocity.

Back in 1992, as I've been reading, some Dutch researchers plotted these scales for a large sample of older people. As we'd expect, instrumental support given decreases sharply with age. The researchers found that instrumental reciprocity began to decrease at the age of 64, echoing that rather crummy Beatles song.

More interestingly, they identified a turning point, where a relative surplus of instrumental support given changes into a relative deficit, at approximately the age of 66. Of course, you can expect your social network to decrease in size as you get older, and your reciprocity scale will also be affected by living in a care home where most of your instrumental needs are going to be catered for. The research seems to suggest that a sizeable minority of older people do deliberately seek to increase the amount of emotional support they give as their ability to provide instrumental support declines.

Unfortunately, as a society we're not very good at providing contexts for emotional support, so that too many older people experience a sense of dependence rather than interdependence, submerged below the hoizontal line in the graph.

I'm hoping there has been some follow up to this research: I've not found it yet, but would be keen to learn of it.

van Tilburg et al. Flow of support. In: Living arrangements and social networks of older adults, VU University Press, 1995.

It'll all end in tears

The London Olympics, a grotesque folly if ever there was one, is throwing up more regeneration issues than it should. Regen and Renewal reports a study by the London Assembly’s Economic Development, Culture, Sport and Tourism Committee (aka life the universe and everything) with concerns that deprived local residents could miss out on the legacy of the Olympic site. Now there's a  surprise.

The report highlights a string of no-brainers for the legacy. Like this for example -

the sports facilities in the park should be made available for community use

and, wait for it,

new homes built on the park must be suitable for, and available to, local people - not just wealthy people moving on to the park.

I know we're dealing with people in suits here, but why does it require a study from a separate and doubtless expensive committee to come up with these not-exactly-revolutionary suggestions? I guess the problem is that the regeneration industry is so preoccupied with the physical world it is trying to dominate, and people are a real nuisance.

Just a thought to be added to my recent blurted critique of regeneration.

The spirit level

Here's a fun short animation to help persuade you to get a copy of The spirit level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, which is now available in paperback.

I note that the hardback version is subtitled 'Why more equal societies almost always do better' and the paperback is subtitled 'Why equality is better for everyone'. I infer that people who view society at the macro level are thought more likely to be hardback buyers, and those of us who see things at the individual level, er, maybe don't.

I seem to recall that Ray Oldenburg's The great good place also had its subtitle rephrased between editions. I infer that publishers like to keep librarians on their toes.

Via the Equality Trust.

Pause, look back, reflect

Julian Dobson uses a handy live metaphor, a 404 on the community empowerment action plan, to illustrate the fickleness of priorities in government policy.

He points to the amount of energy that gets put into whatever is the current Big Idea until it moves into the 'file and forget' phase. I was told at the time of the empowerment white paper that more than 100 officials were working on it, suggesting a CLG equivalent of Parkinson's law, that work consumes the time of as many people as can be made available for it. Julian notes that:

'This form of leadership, sadly, appears ingrained in our political system,'

and goes on to link the syndrome to international political failure in Copenhagen.

To be fair, the CLG website is a large and very fluid organism and I hope we can forgive the occasional 404. I hope we can also recognise that not all politicians have been slow to respond to climate change and not all can be blamed for the failure of the summit.

But the connection between transitory, even capricious, attitudes to policy and critical failures of leadership is wholly valid. I'd like to add that it's part of a wider culture which may or may not be fuelled by government attitudes. This culture includes over-emphasis on novelty and innovation; reluctance to refer to the past of more than a few months, in case it tells us things we don't want to know; and systematic dismissal of the experience of older people.

It also encompasses the cultural devaluation of loyalty. Sports celebrities aren't expected to show loyalty to their teams; nor employers to their employees or vice versa; nor teachers to their schools, nor consumers to their brands. Nor families to each other. Nor, as Julian's post reminds us, do governments seem concerned to remain loyal to their policies. Only people of faith seem to be exceptions to this rule. If young people are supposed to inherit values from the adult world, this does not bode well.

This phenomenon plays out in a curious way in our hurried public language, nowadays saturated with Important Verbs. Take this for example from Steph Gray's Helpful technology blog, coralling verbs from various government departments:

At the FCO, it’s Listen, Publish, Engage, Evaluate. In the DIUS of Justin Kerr-Stevens, it was Educate, Enable, Engage, Promote.

For Steph, it's listening, explaining, engaging, convening. Others commenting think 'connect' and 'collaborate' should be in there. I've played this game meself in suggesting a model for participative evaluation (Listen, Interpret, Play back, Listen, Interpret, Report). And so it goes on. A few weeks ago DCMS published a widely-condemned document called Empower, Inform, Enrich - of which Rachel Cooke wrote 'sounds like a scented candle'.

Why are we all doing this? I suspect the media and politics engine driving this culture can't stop itself accelerating and we're at risk of losing the habit of reflection. I'm not sure I want to be on board. (Just a quick observation, feel free to tweet).

School-run parking

David Hembrow posts about a school stopping ban in the town of Groningen, NL, which he says makes it illegal to stop with a car adjacent to the schools between 8 am and 4 pm on week days.

I've only been to Grongingen once but I remember it as a fairly quiet town: the roads really aren't as packed as urban and suburban Britain. As David says, 'By British or American standards, the rate of children being taken to school by car is already extremely low.'

I always take an interest in this theme because I recall my mother campaigning on it (with some difficulty) in the 1960s, when levels of car-abuse were significantly lower than they are now.

So when I look at the (altogether typical, but scary) images David offers of examples of parking outside a school in England, I find it disheartening. The arrogant selfishness of people when they get into cars has a deep psychology to do with cocooned individual privilege and suspended denial of the interests of others.

Steve Stradling's 2004 study in Scotland found that around a third of those surveyed would be able to shift from car to bus for short trips, but just eight per cent were 'both willing and able'.

Previously: Unwillingly to school?

School run report

Yes, kids walk

The curse of the free rider

Theft and vandalism continue to plague the Paris self-service bicycle hire scheme, Vélib ('la ville est plus belle a velo').

'The Curse of the Free Rider is everywhere' wrote Joost Beunderman on the 00 blog back in March, and in a comment I wondered if it's partly a problem of scale. The scheme in Lyon apparently has been less troublesome. (I also alluded to thefts from public libraries, which are not insignificant but not so high as to endanger the model of a public resource).

According to the Independent,

'vandalism and theft remain so rampant that Paris city authorities were obliged yesterday to come to the aid of the private company which runs the scheme. In less than two-and-a-half years, 8,000 bicycles have been stolen and 18,000 have been damaged beyond repair. In other words, each of the 21,000 Vélibs, which cost €610 (£550) each, have been replaced at least once.'

So the business model changes slightly, but hopefully the idea is not in danger. It would help if it could be demonstrated that the scheme had contributed to reduced pollution engine and influenced health.

Via Regen and Renewal.

Local delivery

Here's a tap at the door early evening, a young lady from the local dairy trying to woo me back (I feel like I'm in a folk song, but it'll pass) to having milk delivered.

I explained that we used to have milk delivered some years ago, but two things changed that - the fact that milk in glass bottles seemed to go off much more quickly than in plastic; and of course the hugely improved ease of recycling plastic.

The lady's siren song was along these lines - we now sell at the same price as the supermarkets, we sell milk in plastic bottles, and of course we deliver to your door. And it was not lost on me that this is a relatively local business, selling milk from farms not too far from here, using the wonderful traditional environmentally-preferable milk float.

I recall the grandly named United Dairies floats from my childhood, and our milkman called Alf who served the same round for I believe it was 27 years. I recall also that, more recently, the father of one of my daughter's friends, in a fit of rage, backed his milk float into the canal. I wish I'd seen that.

The pic comes from the truly reassuring milk floats site (this is what the internet's for!).

Anyway it was refreshing to be asked. Is this part of a general movement apparent elsewhere, I wonder?

Our very own surveillance

Here's a new take on the outsourcing of surveillance. The Beeb reports that a ceremony has been held 'to celebrate the installation of CCTV equipment bought by residents' after two years of fundraising.

Colville Estate Residents' Association raised £16,000 for the equipment in Cherry Hinton High Street, Cambridge.

Councillor Robert Dryden from the residents' association said: "We are the first in Cambridgeshire to have bought our own CCTV."

Gosh, I'm impressed, are you impressed? When charity begins at home, people give generously.

Let's all reflect on the use of the word 'celebrate'. And ponder a few questions. Is the £16k matching funding, or the entire amount required? If the latter, it would be interesting to know why residents did not have the support of public agencies.

Did the fundraising activities not generate sufficient social capital to obviate the need, at least in part?

Who owns the data collected by these cameras?

Busyness

Yesterday to a really buzzy conference on community development organised by Age Concern Oxfordshire, where I had the privilege of speaking alongside CDX's Amanda Greenwood. I talked about neighbouring and older people, and different understandings of 'enfolding community'.

One of the issues I've been pondering but didn't have time to cover is people's varied relative 'busyness', simply having or not having time to interact informally in the neighbourhood. It's an issue that scalds my conscience from time to time when I'm rushing to the station and can only burble a greeting to a neighbour because I've not been sufficiently organised to leave home a little earlier.

But I got plenty of insights yesterday into how older people can experience the contrast between (for many) their own sense of becalmed marginalisation and the relentless purposefulness of others' mobility, and how this affects their occupation of neighbourhood.

With this in mind, I sat on the train on the way home flicking through a marvellous report into a participative research project called Get the picture: older people's day to day lives in rural west Oxfordshire 2004-2007, written by Margaret Godel of Oxford Brookes University. And I came across this quote from one of the participants:

'One issue that stood out for me is how many hours in the day there are to fill if you are alone. One remark that came up a few times was how much time people spend looking out of the window. It's good to be able to do this but sad too that this is all there is.'

Another nuance to be taken into account in the consideration of 'curtain-twitching' or 'eyes on the street'.

After the car

I'm really looking forward to this. Publication 8 May; form an orderly queue.

More here at CeMoRe, or here on the Wiley site.

Privacy and the home

Google Street View continues to expose the fact that we haven't done our thinking about the changing nature of privacy. On Wednesday, residents in the village of Broughton, near Milton Keynes (described by the Mail, which doesn't like to burden its readers with accuracy, as being in Cambridgeshire) blocked the passage of a Google Street View car and persuaded the driver to turn around. Ah the playful rebelliousness of middle England. The Times has them as a 'village mob'.

There's an account here that is altogether more placid.

In the Beeb's report, one of the protesters said:

"If they were simply going to view the street as a street scene rather than drive almost into people's drives and take pictures of the houses - I think that's a different issue."

Almost into people's drives? That would be like what we call 'going past' then, would it?

The Mail managed somehow, don't ask me, to raise the possibility that 'it's an invitation for burglars to strike':

"I don't mind estate agents taking pictures but this shows people how to get in and how to get out."

Getting out as well as getting in? I didn't realise there was so much detail.

But don't we need to get beyond the petty mindedness of the property-obsessed, to reflect on how the house-as-home remains central to our understanding of notions of privacy, even while that privacy has been reshaped by other forces around e.g. data, citizenship and broadcast media?

The excitable defensiveness of wealthy home-owners is not enough to convince me that I have a fundamental, irrevocable human right to stop people looking in my windows. As I recall, Witold Rybczynski's book Home is a good start for understanding how very recent the idea of the private home is in human history. The privacy part of it may already be in decline - not because the notion of 'home' has changed necessarily, but because the notion of privacy is changing.

There are other confusions, such as discussing Street View with reference to the high number of CCTV cameras we have in this country (about 20% of the world's total, I heard recently). But as one comment here notes,

There is a big difference between cctv and streetview for example, number of violent crimes caught on street view isn't quite as high. It's privacy invasion for the sake of privacy invasion.

But that's my point - what do we mean, 'privacy invasion'? Where's the public debate that gets us away from knee-jerk insistence on a vague sense of interference and the self-righteous defence of property?

I can't say I'm particularly bothered about Street View, and the notion of there being people who might describe themselves as 'Street View Enthusiasts' is just depressing. But it's more depressing to have people getting pompously worked up about keeping others away from where they live. If having lots of stuff gets you so fussed about losing it, maybe don't have so much stuff.

And if I find myself feeling that the sight of a car with a camera on it is sinister, I hope I'll have the grace first of all to examine why I feel like that, before squalling for the police.

Anyway, I liked this little comment on the Mail's adjectivally-super-charged coverage:

"I'm outraged! I just saw clear pictures of my street and the houses with kids playing on the road and their little faces not blanked out.

Mind you, they are in black and white and taken in the early 1900s!"

Guerrillas against greed

The Telegraph reported the other day on a variant of NIMBYism which may have gained strength from the recession:

Protesters daubed "No More 2nd Homes", "Greed" and "Go Away" on buildings in a picturesque village where many of the properties are empty for large parts of the year.

It comes amid growing concern in some parts of the countryside that wealthy city workers are pricing locals out of the housing market and turning communities into "ghost villages" by buying up homes that they visit rarely.

Gosh, who'd have thought it? One resident commented:

"People were angry when we lost a craft shop and a cafe because we knew it would be turned into houses. And we knew they were not going to be affordable houses for young local people."

At last, the gentle English are getting fed up with vulgar greed, and they can be a tenacious and persistent lot when they get momentum. Should be fun.

I can't help thinking that the politicians who have been ignoring the arguments for so long must carry some of the blame if things turn nasty - and not just those who somehow are allowed to benefit from dubious development deals.

Another Paper has some pics.

Previously: Second homes.

 

DIY and the future of care

This morning the BBC offered us the future of car care - a garage in Norfolk where space can be hired out so that car owners can modify or service their own vehicles.

"They will save money, but they can also come and learn. The more you get into it, the more adventurous you'll become," said entrepreneur Nathan Devlin. "If you need me to help out, I charge £20 per hour."

(I'm old enough to remember, if my dad pulled into a garage to fill up with petrol, a bloke in overalls came out and served him. The man would unscrew the chrome cap from the tank using a clean cloth, then reach across purposefully for the pump nozzle. 'Service stations' they were called. It even happened to me in my early motorcycling days).

This afternoon I heard about a system in Kuwait where patients in long-term care are encouraged to become ‘expert’ in their own conditions and to support other sufferers with the same condition. Certain sources of established expertise, whch may or may not include the internet, are presumably there if needed.

Nothing surprising here really - it's the natural trajectory for the outsourcing, co-production and responsibilisation of us citizens, for too long deskilled in servicing our own bodies and societies. And no more than we deserve, I'm sure.

I'd just like to note that servicing your car in Nathan's garage, or working with other sufferers to understand the details of your illness, is likely to provide rich opportunities for social interaction - further eroding the social separateness of expert and consumer, reasserting a connection between the practice of everyday life and its direction. Which reminds me: when Monty Don remarked that

"All politicians should have an allotment, and if they don't keep it up properly they should lose their jobs"

it's the same necessary nagging at the habits of the old order.

What bothers me is that although I'm starting to come across more examples of care initiatives that revive informal social relations as a natural spin-off, few make reference to this in their descriptions or write-ups. Because we've been conditioned to not even recognise it, far less value it. That's what the quiet revolution is about, that's beginning to stir.

Why pubs need the CIA

This morning to ippr for a seminar on the future of community pubs, meaning pubs that predominantly serve their surrounding community. Rick Muir at ippr has been working with CAMRA to research the decline of community pubs, the social implications, and the policy options. The ratio of pubs to people fell from 1:201 in 1871, to 1:761 in 1971. It's gone on falling: 39 pubs are closing each week.

We could rehearse the reasons but they're not hard to list. It's critical not just as an issue for local economies, but also as an issue of local cohesion and the health of social networks.

In ippr's survey, pubs scored highest as the local places where people meet others from different backgrounds. The community pub is widely seen as a great social leveller, although it was acknowledged that they can be exclusive. It's still a somewhat gendered institution with faith and age exclusions.

Apparently the average pub raises £3,000 per year for charitable causes. A lot of business is transacted in pubs, they're essential meeting places for numerous local groups. Unlike supermarkets, which encourage less convivial drinking, pubs tend to put money back into their local economy.

And tradition matters to people - the sense of continuity and authenticity matters, the resistance to homogeneity and anonymity. People call it 'character'.

CAMRA's Mike Brenner raised the question of defining what is meant by a well-run community pub. So right, let's have a debate that generates awareness, understanding and motivation. It's apparent that pubs could be run as community interest companies, let's get a model that recognises their social role instead of regarding it as coincidental.

I took the opportunty to bang the drum for the idea of Community Impact Assessments (CIAs). I just want to see a robust methodology using social network analysis so that we can demonstrate the social impact of significant changes at local level (like road changes, large developments, provision of amenities etc). I've thumped out this rhythm often enough before (eg) and I feel that if we'd started work on it years ago, we might not have got into the mess we're now in with post offices.

Apart from anything else, having and using an accepted device to demonstrate 'community impact' could create an incentive within the pub industry to make a contribution to local community cohesion.

One of the MPs present said that it 'would help massively'. A ministerial adviser followed up with a call for the think tanks to get together and sort it out - which sounds either naive or ironic, given the way think-tanks behave, but encouraging, because I've been suggesting this for some years with understandably have less influence.

I propose to try and get a few folk around a flip chart and see what can be teased out of their brains.

Four types of deprived neighbourhood

It's theory time. Here's the new typology of low-income neighbourhoods, based on the dynamics of household mobility.

The overall level of mobility in Britain is about 11% per year, and it's mainly a function of the age structure of neighbourhoods and the life-cycle stage of households. Brian Robson and colleagues at the Centre for Urban Policy Studies in Manchester have proposed and tested a model of four types of deprived neighbourhood:

• Transit areas are deprived neighbourhoods in which most in-movers come from less deprived areas and most out-movers go to less deprived areas.
• In Escalator areas, most of the in-movers come from areas that are equally or more deprived, so that the neighbourhood becomes part of a continuous onward-and-upward progression through the housing and labour markets.
• Gentrifier areas are ones in which there is a degree of social improvement since most in-movers come from less deprived areas and most out-movers go to similarly or more deprived areas.
• Isolate areas represent neighbourhoods in which households come from and move to areas that are equally or more deprived. Hence they can be seen as neighbourhoods that are associated with a degree of entrapment of poor households who are unable to break out of living in deprived areas.

The report, published by CLG last week, draws particular attention to Isolate areas:

Isolate areas may provide the strongest case for comprehensive policy intervention to improve the prospects of all households since the areas are unlikely to improve without intervention.

In Isolate areas, especially those whose adjacent areas are also deprived... the opportunities for residents are likely to be more restricted and... the net result of in-flows and outflows is unlikely to lead to ‘natural’ improvement in the stock of households.

Also, the authors note that deprived neighbourhoods which are surrounded by other deprived areas could face greater problems and present more challenging contexts than those that are adjacent to more prosperous areas. In the latter, local opportunities – for employment, for access to higher-performing schools, etc – are likely to be markedly greater.

How does regeneration benefit local people?

Not through employment. According to Regen and Renewal an inquiry by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Urban Development finds that, while UK cities have undergone comprehensive physical regeneration over the past two decades, with resultant economic growth, those living near regeneration areas have not benefited by way of employment.

'In many cases, newly built city centres and other areas of successful physical regeneration have been juxtaposed by continued deprivation and worklessness.'

The inquiry report is out Monday 19th, check here.

Sipson may or may not be a community

I don't want to hear people banging on about how cosy and convivial is the village of Sipson.

The village is in the news because a brain-free decision by the UK government today means that if appeals fail, it will be buried under Heathrow's proposed third runway. (The decision ultimately could be close to suicidal for this government because the opposition is bound to attract votes for vowing to reverse the decision if elected).

I like what the BBC have done here in bringing the views of local people to the foreground, and I've been listening to radio reports where, with an echo of doom, residents celebrate the existing sense of community. I came across a note on London RIP from an apprentice reporter whose patch included Sipson in the 1980s:

Just a few fields away from the airport, the villages then were bucolic dots on the very edge of London. Old (Harmondsworth boasts a 11th century church and ancient barn) and surprisingly quiet (no detention centre there then), they coexisted uneasily with the airport – which was much resented by old-timers for apparently never having had planning permission in the first place. It started off as an airstrip in World War One and just growed and growed.

My job involved spending hours tramping around the villages to find news stories to fill the paper every week. This was a truly epic struggle. Cat up tree was big news in Sipson and Harmondsworth at the time.

The debate has polarised around environmental concerns and national economic competitiveness. But there are other axes, particularly the line beyond which broader national priorities can trump local community concerns, or indeed individual private rights. In Sipson there is a man in his 90s who refuses to move: I wish him many more years in his chosen, legitimate place.

And I hope that confrontational anti-expansion campaigners with global perspectives will show due respect for the residents' own, locally-focussed campaign. People live here, and don't you forget it.

But the emphasis on Sipson as a cheerful, close-knit village bothers me, because it seems to imply that without this sense of community, verifiable by visiting journalists, the place - and the people who live there - wouldn't matter. But it would, as long as people wanted to live there.

The image is by Stephen Hird for Reuters and I found it here.

Zap thy neighbour

Volunteers in a Suffolk village have been trained to use laser monitoring equipment, which records the speed and registration of passing vehicles, information which can then be passed to the police.

Such community speed watch schemes are a logical development of citizen involvement in policing. Another parish council decided not to be involved in the scheme because they felt that the public should not be expected to do the police's job.

“It involves quite a bit of cost to set up, we would be doing the police's job for them, you get people to stand out there in the cold and possibly catch their friends and neighbours which could cause problems.”

So once again the technology helps us focus in on the extent to which we've outsourced responsibilities for the co-production of safety and security in our neighbourhoods, to external formal agencies - and got so accustomed to it that we think it's right.

People are justified in getting agitated about the disregard with which motorists are allowed to speed through the neighbourhoods, but I wonder about a couple of things.

First, there's something sinister (but not deceitful) about the power of this technology to monitor other people's behaviour. Have we really worked hard enough at more human persuasive processes to encourage civility on the part of the cocooned motorist to other members of the species?

Secondly, village life being what it is, there could be a concern about the extent to which volunteers are known and identifiable. Have there been inclusive engagement exercises within the village to explore consensus around the issue and the process, so that harmful and lasting social divisions don't begin to appear?

Social interaction and mobile technologies

Keith Hampton describes research findings (in press) which suggest that social interaction in urban public spaces (parks, plazas, and markets) is likely to be more diverse than interactions through wireless internet use, which in turn are likely to be more diverse than interactions through mobile use.

I think this is just what we would predict, because the serendipity potential of the mobile is negligible compared with face-to-face, and wifi use is more open to interruption than is mobile. But that doesn't mean it isn't reassuring in a way, and you can be sure the methodology was robust.

It builds on Keith's previous paper which looked at wifi use in cafes and included consideration of the possibility of

‘contextual’ or ‘neighborhood effects’ within cafes, whereby the lack of sociability of some cafe users has the potential to reduce the overall sociability of a public space.

Local social ties have weakened, but where's the evidence?

In the early seventies, I seem to recall, the hapless Bruno Bettelheim suggested that the increasing prevalence of dishwashers and similar labour-saving devices in households was likely to reduce family cohesion as people spent less time together doing what needed to be done.

A few more observations like that over the years - for instance about the use of cars, geographical mobility, smaller households, television viewing etc - and understandably we begin to assume that there has been a decline in neighbourhood relations. It's what we would expect. All we lack is some way of proving or disproving it with robust methods.

So along comes the Changing UK report from the Social And Spatial Inequalities group in Sheffield, commissioned by the BBC, which appears to illustrate how Brits are now more polarised and live more 'among our own kind,' than we used to do.

The report is a strange blend of stolid survey-based affirmation of some gloomy, familiar social trends, with constant reference to the BBC's tv and radio areas - a peculiar geography to many of us I suspect. Presumably the client wanted some local and regional social data (tick) and some kind of news story it could broadcast (tick).

Many of the considerations are straightforward:

These trends may be linked to higher likelihoods of fearfulness because we are less likely to see and therefore understand each others' lives... The polarisation and segregation processes may also lead to stronger feelings of isolation and weaker feelings of 'belonging'.

The report justifiably links these trends with evidence of political disaffection and economic polarisation, all pointing to a rather bleak future. To be fair, it's not as if our politicians have been ignoring it all. Although the finality with which social capital was dumped as a policy issue a few years ago remains puzzling, there is a healthy amount of energy being focussed on community cohesion. There is public attention paid to the questions raised, and the BBC is playing its part.

But the evidence does matter. Take this for example, from Mark Easton's piece on the BBC site:

'The study ranks places using a formula based on the proportion of people in an area who are single, those who live alone, the numbers in private rented accommodation and those who have lived there for less than a year. The higher the proportion of people in those categories, the less rooted the community.'

Unh? That amounts to a definition of 'rooted community' which I'd be reluctant to sign up to.

What bothers me a little about this research is the bundling of assumptions about loneliness, living alone, isolation, and not belonging. For a start, loneliness is not the same as isolation - the latter implies a dearth of social ties, which some people prefer, while some people can have an ample supply of ties but experience loneliness. And obviously, living alone does not necessarily imply loneliness or isolation at all.

Again, people claiming that they 'belong' somewhere (or don't) doesn't tell us anything reliable about the strength or extent of their social relations. You may have a weak sense of belonging without experiencing loneliness; or a strong sense of belonging (“been here forty years I ‘ave”) but experience profound loneliness.

I wanted the report to be clearer about these nuances, and more critical about its measures. It's hardly contentious to note that if local face-to-face ties are diminishing, network ties may have been increasing in strength or range - you only have to watch how people make non-business use of mobiles.

So I'm left unsure what the research offers. It tells us that local social relations have weakened, which is a message we're primed to hear anyway; but it does so with an unconvincing voice.

Hyperlocal, ultralocal, local online, whichever

Further to my last, and previous - more reflections on the theme of local 2.0 from William Perrin on Ultra Local Voice and from David Wilcox.

Local 2.0 workshop

I ran a workshop today on 'Local online' for Simon Grice's mashup* event - not exactly designed as I only got the call to facilitate a couple of days beforehand. In fact what was more of a challenge was being slightly unfamiliar with the language and issues that the system builders, content providers and media companies represented around the room are working with on a daily basis.

But I took along my local-social-interaction credentials, flashed a few pictures to stimulate some thinking about communication at local level, and away we went. William Perrin kindly stepped up with some thought-provoking slides about the King's Cross Environment site, and we started to get some buzz.

In terms of getting a neighbourhood information site going, he offered this as a key lesson:

'You've got to find the activists who have the burning need to communicate. It's hard but it's not that hard.'

In discussion it was immediately striking that although they thought they hadn't come to discuss this, people had lots to say about 'community'.

I'm interested in this theme because (as mentioned a couple weeks ago) I see a contrast between two groups looking at the unrealised potential of local online.

There are the systems folk who are waiting for whatever 'local' is to break out at commercially-rewarding levels. Plenty of ambitious investment going on there. Then there are the policymakers, sociologists, thinktankers and practitioners who've been waiting for the apparent potential of neighbourhood online networks to contribute to community cohesion and social capital. They're watching the same door, but they might not both recognise whatever eventually walks through it.

Simon and I busked a workshop exercise to surface the issues. There were about 50 participants and they thought the key issues were these:

• definitions of local
• ownership of systems
• monetisation
• moderation of discussion and content
• marketing
• local trade
• news and broadcast media
• engagement, awareness and audience.

Then it got interesting, because no-one, all afternoon, went to the table designated for discussion of 'moderation' (where issues of trust had also been assigned). And only with some persuasive effort did I manage to get anyone to talk about ownership. Geographical scale, understandably, popped up as an issue in several groups. 'Monetisation' (which as I understand it is not to be confused with the conversion of lilyponds to expensive impressionist artworks), marketing, media, and engagement of users were the best-sellers. Well of course, that's what folk came for.

But at the end of it I found it hard to believe that any of the companies represented, large or small, has a commercial model that will deliver sustainable local online communication with an acceptable framework of ownership, in sufficient density to help compensate for the current inadequacy of communication channels at local level.

I won't mind being proved wrong, but I begin to suspect we will not be able to crank this up to the next level without engaging the public sector (local government and the housing sector).

Living in interesting times

As the overlap of housing crisis and economic crisis blurs and separates like lights in the rain, political hopefuls agonise over the "walk on by society". It no longer seems simplistic to note the connection between an economic system which encourages buying-to-let on the basis of greed, and neighbourhoods with dangerously low levels of informal social control.

It all feels so depressingly predictable - not the economic crisis in its severity perhaps, but the almost visible connection between mindless consumer capitalism and the feeling of lost civility. It's obvious enough: if as a society we systematically encourage antisocial values and behaviour (I'm referring to ASB as practised by financiers) and we don't know those around us and don't trust them, prosocial behaviour and social norms are harder to establish, identify with, and reassert.

John Harris, no relation, has a detailed and lengthy piece in today's Guardian on 'the rise of exploitative landlordism' and the drastic lack of housing, which includes the thoughts of one Rita Giles, who has lived in her three-bedroom council flat for 32 years. Rita 'stayed put, and watched as a once-solid neighbourhood has been replaced by an ever-changing community of people who often appear to be simply passing through.'

"The people who bought the properties don't live in them any more," she says. "This is the biggest problem. They buy them, they do them up, then they sell them, and they get rented out. A lot of them go and live abroad."

"Now," she says, "you might have two or three families in one three-bedroom flat. I've seen that happen on our estate. We get a lot from Africa. A lot of short-term people come from Kosovo. The problem is, any sense of community is utterly eroded. Once, you could walk down the road and everybody who spoke to you, you'd know who they were. People still speak to me: they'll say 'Good morning', and I'll say 'Good morning' back, because it's in my nature to do so. But I couldn't tell you who they are, because with 95% of them, it's the only time I've seen them, and I might not ever see them again. They just disappear."

Another respondent in the article talks about the homes bought and re-let:

"People don't take pride in them, because you've got this six-month transit-camp situation. There's no community cohesion, the neighbours don't know each other..."

If the recession brings an end to rampant property speculation in a time of wretched levels of homelessness - and an end to the gormless glut of tv property programmes - that at least will be a blessing.

There are two ironies in today's news which only seem to bind these themes even more strangely. The first is that the person who was killed when he went to the aid of a 35-year-old homeless Lithuanian man in Norwich was a banker with a company which manages assets worth £133bn.

The second is that just as members of the conservative party reflect on the claim that 'too many people making "genuine attempts to prevent crime" had been arrested or prosecuted' they appear to have decided that Margaret Thatcher was 'the greatest Tory ever'.

Now if there's one person whose highly-publicised crimes merit immediate arrest and detention, I'd have thought she was a strong candidate. Lord Baker, who served as her education secretary, apparently said Lady Thatcher was not really "sympatico with ordinary people". Well, it's not like anyone would have regarded that as a criterion for political stature, is it?

Social interaction and traffic: essential evidence

This is the new essential graphic detailing the impact of traffic on social relations.

Nearly forty years ago Appleyard's Livable streets research was published, including the now famous illustration of the impact implied of light, medium and heavy traffic on social interaction.

Working in San Francisco, Appleyard found that on 'light' street (2,000 vehicles a day) inhabitants had three times as many local friends and twice as many acquaintances as those on 'heavy' street (16,000 vehicles a day).

Quite often in recent years I've referred to his material in presentations and provocatively suggested that we don't really need research like this because we all know it, it's obvious. All we need is the graphic.

No-one ever mentions that the research was methodologically scimpy (only 12 residents in each block were interviewed) and there are nuances (eg to do with the location of corner-shops and the age of residents on the different streets) that tend to be overlooked. But hey, basically we know it, and all we really needed was the illustration.

Not true of course, because there's a difference between something being self-evidently true, and people taking any notice of it. So we should all be thankful that Josh Hart came over from San Francisco to Bristol to replicate and develop similar work. Judging from some of the coverage today (Guardian, BBC, Daily Mail even) it looks like the message is immaculately timed and could have the impact it deserves.

Hart's study looked at three streets in north Bristol with light, medium and heavy traffic. He found that motor traffic has a 'considerable negative impact on quality of life, particularly for residents living beside heavy motor traffic flows'.

Hart selected streets measured at 140, 8420, and 21,130 vehicles per day. He considered vegetation, parking, reported crashes, noise levels, pavement width, building setback and various other factors; and he interviewed ten households on either side of each street.

And guess what, traffic makes a huge difference. We all knew it, now we can point to it and quote from it. The report is full of detail that sparks insight, like this graphic for instance, showing the variation in social connections by street. Nice job Josh.

What we need next: two or three replications of this study, plus a couple of before-and-after social network analyses of home zones. As I've said before, it's a disgrace that we're not evaluating home zones properly. And it will be revealing to see if this material is referred to during the main political party conferences in the next couple of weeks.

You can get hold of Hart's full report, Driven to excess, via the news page at the University of West of England.

Keep Trade Local photography tour

Alison Benjamin on Joe Public today notes that between 1997 and 2002 specialised stores like butchers, bakers, fishmongers and newsagents in England were closing at the rate of 50 per week - more than 2,000 a year.

'Community! Community!' cries the government while, according to a campaign by the Federation of Small Businesses, 42% of small towns and villages in England no longer have a shop of any kind.

So I like this idea - a photography tour sponsored by the Arts Council England, using disused shops and town centre market days to echo how the spaces could be better utilised were it not for small businesses being driven out of our high streets. Catch it at Melton Mowbray; Haslemere; Castle Market, Sheffield; Truro; Darlington; Coventry; Huntley, Gloucestershire; and Harleston, Norfolk.

More info. Petition.

'The weather is nice here': New Orleans and social capital

As New Orleans shows the world how to organise for, and minimise, potential disaster, it's worth remembering that some of its citizens are still in post-Katrina recovery. The systematic creation of a ghost city got me thinking about levels of trust and social capital.

They'll be busy at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, where scholars have been crunching material from hundreds of interviews following Hurricane Katrina. That output is summarised neatly in an article here by Kimberly Hendrickson:

At the core of the project is a deep interest and faith in civil society and a rejection of the pessimistic view of social capital popularized by Robert Putnam. You can sense this optimism in a piece about Vietnamese-Americans’ attitudes about culture, linking New Orleans East’s rapid recovery to residents’ take on adversity and self-reliance. It’s in a piece about public opinion in the Lower Ninth, suggesting that the predominantly poor, black residents of that ward have a strong sense of community that survived both the storm and government malfeasance. It’s in a report commending Latino arrivals in New Orleans for their entrepreneurial spirit. This work is important, because it takes urban politics to a place many students of cities do not want to go: a serious examination of group and neighborhood values and of the diverse cultures within larger cultures that give places vitality and character.

This paper by Emily Chamlee-Wright and Virgil Henry Storr, about the powerful expressed sense of place among returning residents in the heavily-damaged Lower Ninth Ward, refers to the importance of the 'signalling' effects of key services and businesses returning:

When a grocery store returns, for example, people come to expect that the community will rebound. In turn, this positive expectation reduces the perceived risks of returning.

Sense of community in times of adversity is not going to surprise anyone, but it will be interesting to see what social capital effects there are in the present context and the next few weeks. Meanwhile, I quite liked this interview quote:

New Orleans people come outside because the weather is nice here. And they come outside. They do their flowers. They wash their car, and they just sit out on their porch. You notice how a lot a people sitting out now? ...And even in the evening, they do their work in the morning and they come out and they sit out and they listen to their music and their radios and stuff like that. And it be pretty outside and they fellowship with one another. They just don’t stay confined in their house.

The pic above is by Eric Gay: source.

'We would like a say in our way of life'

Over on Podnosh Nick Booth points to a short film produced for the Edgbaston Constituency in Birmingham on the impact of post office closures. It was designed to be used as supporting evidence submitted to Postwatch.

It struck me as I watched it that the defence of local post offices needs to be packaged not just as an older people's issue but in other ways also.

One of the participants understandably says that 'pensioners are being pushed on one side for money.' But at the same time, it's an issue to do with the provision of a range of services at the appropriate local level, through outlets that contribute significantly to people's sense of community. Ideally perhaps there should be far more 'whole-neighbourhood' campaigning because all generations will miss these resources if they go.

One of the participants describes the post office as 'part of my heritage'. It's a remark which would be easy to gloss over, but I suggest it's worth reflecting on.

What I think it means is that this person places significant value on the role of the post office in his social life, over a period of time, in that locality. Some people place similar value on a pub or a park or their library. This is not a selfish version of heritage, it is heritage valued as a shared resource. What kind of society declines to recognise such value and support it where possible?

As another contributor says, 'We would like a say in our way of life'. That too is an expression of a value, articulated here by ordinary people and also, as it happens, apparent in government intentions - in the empowerment white paper, for instance.

Government and media have for years been lamenting the decline of local quality of life, so I don't understand how come there is so little political support for the post office network. Just because the commercial model of the post office is wobbly, it doesn't mean that the social argument in favour of providing their services at the most local level is difficult to grasp.

Previously:

• Post offices, informality, and participation.
• Please serve yourself: rural post offices.
• The local post office: a brand in jeopardy.
• Post offices and social value.

Help with mobiles

I’ve just been going through some responses to a ‘community survey’ about learning opportunities, with an open question asking what courses people would like locally, and I came across this response –

‘Help with mobiles/telephones.’

I think it’s quite enlightening in several ways. Culturally, we share a peculiar pretence that mobile phone technology is user-friendly. But many of us (certainly including me) can only get started by virtue of our connection with a knowledgeable young person or techie. No-one seems to offer short courses with follow-up support, even though the basics are common to  most devices. And who do you turn to for advice on selecting a tariff or contract?

We know enough about this technology to see how it can help many people to sustain connections that otherwise are hard to maintain. But we don't necessarily think about appropriate support.

In my experience, very little of the policy debate on 'digital exclusion' (as it is sometimes called) refers to the use of mobile devices. Having the cultural capital, we deny or elide these cultural exclusions, and ageism is one of the more depressing reasons for that I suspect.

I think someone saw this little questionnaire as an opportunity to stick their hand up quietly and say 'help' - 'this technology could help me, but where do I start?'

If there are colleges and community centres out there running such courses, I'd like to know about them. The pic is from the Grameen Foundation's remarkable Village Phones project.

Carnival, charivari, democracy

I just caught up with an absorbing post by Ian Bertram over on Panchromatica exploring the history and meanings of carnival, and rightly expressing concern that it is becoming assimilated and controlled. See also Ian's previous posts, on charivari and notions of justice and on carnival and festival generally.

Carnival represents the tradition of collective celebration with relatively little structure, heavily-dependant on people's inventiveness and the enjoyment of outdoor spectacle at walking pace.

Ian also links to this paper by Nicola Frost which draws attention to

the tendency for popular festivals and carnivals, in many parts of the world, and in many historical periods, to be characterised by risqué reversals of hierarchy, ludic mimicry, flamboyant and celebratory cultural expression, and a sanctioned overstepping of conventional rules and norms of behaviour.

That last phrase strikes me as important. I can't help feeling that in a de-structured age of wobbly social norms, where consistent overstepping of rules (watch a top-level professional football match, for instance) is thought desirable, rewarded and lauded, it would be helpful to try to understand this.

In past societies where religious and other power structures exerted rigid social control, it's interesting that crowd-rowdiness still burst out in sanctioned forms at decreed moments. How might we re-invent carnival as pertinent for a less-structured age preoccupied with forced spectacle - where the binge-night-out and the knife-fight are described as a 'good time'? Anyone for jousting?

Charivari, meanwhile, seems to be more about summary community justice, like the 'rough music' tradition in England. (This illustration, I seem to recall, featured on an episode of QI).

I should think it could be quite scary and like much vigilantism, not necessarily dependent on sound evidence. I quite liked this description from Dark Stories, at the limit of my understanding of French:

Le charivari, ou « confusion de bruit », est une forme de justice populaire par laquelle les membres d’une communauté expriment leur désapprobation à l’égard des mariages ou de couples mettant en péril les valeurs de leur société.

I suppose we need to try and capture the community-involvement-around-collective-values component without the summary-justice-which-could-be-based-on-well-spread-rumour-or-just-plain-nastiness component. Ah, democracy.

The enriching sense of neighbourliness? Robin Hood Gardens again

Architects can be great fun, because of their love for argument, but maybe they should stay in more. Today we have the secretary of state's decision on Robin Hood Gardens, the brutalist east London estate threatened with demolition, which I mentioned back in March.

I find myself reflecting on the connection with this quotation:

Belonging’ is a basic emotional need - its associations are of the simplest order. From ‘belonging’ - identity - comes the enriching sense of neighbourliness. The short narrow street of the slum succeeds where spacious redevelopment frequently fails.

According to this article by Ian Millis, this comes from the architects themselves, the Smithsons. When you've chewed over the irony of that, here's what the BBC correspondent David Sillito told me after his visit there in March (thanks David) from material he was unable to include in his piece:

One resident, AB moved in 35 years ago.  He’s African-Caribbean and he told me that the problem was the arrival of ‘foreigners’... Everyday chit chat was impossible. He would smile at them while tending his garden but he said it felt like a prison as people hid behind their front doors.

There was then the delivery man who stood for 15 minutes outside a flat banging on the door. We both saw there were people inside, and they were expecting the parcel, but they were too nervous to answer the door. I have never been to a place that had so many people in flats who wouldn’t even answer the door. However, when you got inside, the rooms were really quite nice and spacious. The problem is the outside design that forces people in to ratruns and dangerous-appearing dark corners as soon as they leave their front doors.

Various illustrious architects (and they're never wrong, are they?) have built up a clamour of self-important defence for the place, apparently on the basis, as I said before, of prescribed lifestyle as artwork. Reading through some of the arguments for the defence can be alarming. Take this for example:

'If the issue is poor maintanence why not put some cash into upkeep of the building? Then perhaps those living in it might start valueing this masterpiece of English modernist architecture.'

Tsk, they have the privilege to live there in misery and they don't even value it. Somehow I'm reminded of a comment made I believe by George Orwell, apropos of something (source please anybody?) -

'You'd have to be an intellectual to believe that. No ordinary person would be so stupid.'

According to yesterday's Times Online article by Fiona Hamilton, Lord Rogers even claimed that the structure was 'as good, if not better' than any other modern building in Britain. I can imagine that, if he'd said that in a roomful of ordinary people, who had politely said nothing, he'd probably have taken their silence as consent for his wisdom. If he's right, he really should keep quiet about it.

The profession seems to be behind him, but I think the Sesquipedalist puts one and a half fingers on it with this observation:

The debate is not about Robin Hood Gardens, it’s about the profession’s projection of architecture, its image, and the construction of its history. The profession has closed ranks and almost unanimously agreed that keeping RHG is the right thing to be done in the interests of the profession. These interests, of course, do not necessarily coincide with those of the public, some of whom have to live there. It’s also a knee-jerk reaction based on a wish to maintain authority and power.

Perhaps the solution is for all these architects to be required to live there - not for just six months, as has been suggested, but on the sort of tenuously-permanent basis which dooms so many residents of such places.

What's most depressing about it though is that the louder the architects clamour, the less faith the rest of us can have that they will in future pay due account to what it's like to live there.

Who lives in affordable housing?

The Housing Corporation has looked at the future of social housing and is expecting

• a growth in ethnic diversity
• a decline in the proportion of older people, and
• increases in single person and single parent households.

This is from a recent report, Who lives in affordable housing? quietly published by the Chartered Institute of Housing, deceptively dated April 2007.

Civilised streets

Is it actually possible to design a street that meets everyone’s needs?

'Most of our streets are not civilised, enjoyable places to be. They are mainly noisy, polluted, hazardous and unpleasant – with serious social and environmental problems the result.'

This is from a new CABE briefing on Civilised streets.

'This briefing is about the sort of streets that are – or are intended to be – used for a range of different purposes, such as walking, driving and shopping... It is about why, and how, we should be creating streets that are civilised...'

CABE rightly argues that streets that have no casualties simply because people have deserted them are actually failures in terms of their social function.

'We think it is vital that streets are designed and maintained in a way that attracts people and we support street design that encourages users to consider others.'

I gave someone a lift in my car recently and she was bemoaning the high cost of petrol. When I told her I thought the price should be considerably higher to reflect its real cost, it shut her up completely - I suppose because some people find it hard to think beyond their own lifestyles.

So given the gloomy prognosis that the voice of the car lobby will for some time remain dangerously strident, this document is for me a contribution to the sound tactic of undermining it by subversion rather than confrontation. We may well come to be very thankful for the political balancing acts that outfits like CABE are playing.

What Robin Hood did for the poor

There's a short BBC news piece by David Sillito about growing disagreements over the proposed demolition of Robin Hood Gardens in east London - yer classic slab estate, or a masterpiece of twentieth century design? As David says:

It's a familiar process, blowing up the sixties' and seventies' mistakes.

Cut to Lord Rogers taking the chance to tell us how marvellous the architecture is. More here on the campaign to get it listed. Hang on, what's it like to live there? According to Sillito 80% of the residents don't think it should be saved.

Here's an alternative take on the architects in question, the Smithsons:

Robin Hood Gardens, a 213-home council housing complex in East London, gave them the chance to practise what they preached on a grand scale. It was disastrous. The brutalist concrete structure turned out to be defective, but the social aspects were worse: Robin Hood Gardens became a hotbed of crime. The Smithsons were exposed as both arrogant and fallible.

I'm not qualified to conclude what would be best here, but I want to just note the way in which the architects' arguments tend not to give primacy to the question of what it's like to live there. There seems to have been thirty-five years of accumulated misery for a lot of people, but that's not necessarily part of the equation. The terms of the debate about Robin Hood Gardens, for the professionals, risk putting housing as artwork (or perhaps prescribed lifestyle as artwork) right in your face, non-negotiable. Which is interesting because the lifestyle prescription was problematic precisely because so little of it was negotiable.

Here's a flavour of the recognition for the building (from):

As a crucial part of the very small built oeuvre of Alison and Peter Smithson, it is hardly impossible (sic) to overestimate its value, esp. with regard to the international debate on modern architecture in those years.

We're invited to help save this building because of its iconic aesthetic status, according to standards largely independent of the quality of everyday low-income life. Maybe there could be an argument for such detachment, but it gets clouded by the economics of social policy. I guess the folk at CABE work all the time where these tensions are crackling.

And the trouble is that as soon as you see Peter Smithson mouthing about it as 'an exemplar of a new mode of urban organisation' (in a spooky clip reminiscent of Peter Cook) you know you're up against that fundamentally stupid human habit of telling other people how they should live and using some system to try it out on them. (Stupid in the sense of repeating an approach that has failed in the past). Modern architecture was fatally corroded by insistent rhetoric (still echoing) about brutalism, which sought to deny variety.

One of my lasting early memories was of going round some east end estates with my dad, delivering christmas parcels for Stepney Old People's Welfare Trust: I didn't know it at the time but I glimpsed a moment in the exhaustion of working class culture. The ghostly poverty that brushed against me was very modern in its disconnectedness, which I suppose is why we were there, being hesitantly philanthropic. At a relatively tender age I knew about not imposing, about what I now call 'allowing people', but I didn't realise the architecture was the supreme imposition, the supreme way of not allowing. What I think I did understand vaguely was to do with people's right to be different within their commonality. And the way we built in those days was unmistakably trying to deny that right.