Neighbourhoods

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.

Neighbourhoods in an ageing society

The UK government describes its National Strategy for Housing in an Ageing Society, published today, as 'the first of its kind in the world,' which if true is slightly depressing but these things always take longer than you expect. Anyway, this is the sort of thing this government does well.

What I like about the approach is that this is not just about building to age-friendly designs - desirable and long-overdue as that is - and supporting that with  repair and adaptation ('handyman') schemes. It also seems to be driving deliberately at the idea of lifetime neighbourhoods and 'age-friendly cities' (which is one of the ways in which the new eco-towns are being packaged).

The Government is clear that urgent action is required now to better design communities and support older people. The Strategy is key to better meeting older peoples' aspirations to remain independent in later life.

Am I being naive and over-optimistic to think that lasting initiatives promoting neighbourliness could be built on this platform? I really think it can happen.

Press release.

Street of data

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

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

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

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

Places to Go? conference

The latest Living Streets newsletter tells us that to get back to child-friendly public spaces we need 'a range of concrete measures.'

We can be sure that the real and the metaphorical will be clearly distinguished at the conference Living Streets are running with Play England, Sustrans and the National Children's Bureau:

The Places to Go? conference will explore the opportunities represented by The Children’s Plan and address some of its challenges. It will present policy and practice for professionals in planning, landscaping, play, school travel, public health, traffic and transport. It will explore links between the twin imperatives of creating a public realm that is enjoyable, healthy and accessible to children; and environmentally sustainable.

The conference takes place in London, 20 May 2008. Flier.

Memories of childhood and street parties

With the Children's Society's project on 'cherished early memories' we're sure to hear plenty about how the childhoods of many older people were happier and their neighbourhoods blessed with a more 'enfolding community.'

I don't dispute the validity of many such accounts, any more than I'd dispute the reported unhappiness of much contemporary childhood. But in trying to write about intergenerational aspects of contemporary street parties, in work I'm doing with Streets Alive, I'm struck by the feeling that childhood happiness was so often constructed in a way which no longer applies.

Some of the photographic evidence (eg) from the mid-century street parties (VE day, the coronation, the jubilee etc) suggests insights into the differences in older people’s perceptions of community and public occasions.

Typical images (eg) show children sat at a row of tables along a street or in a playground. Bunting and flags distinguish the occasion. Adults, mostly if not exclusively women, stand round, usually at the children’s backs, policing the territory. The menfolk, we’re sometimes reminded in reminiscences, had performed their roles in securing the bunting, sorting the wiring for loudspeakers, and setting up the tables, and were most likely down the pub by tea-time.

Scanning these images, it’s often difficult to discern many smiles on the children’s faces. This adds to the niggling impression that they have been corralled into this arena, been told that they will enjoy themselves, are prohibited from escaping or improvising their own entertainment, and afterwards, will be told that they enjoyed themselves.

And surely, for many, that’s how the world was. There were hierarchies of authority which knew what was best for you (not just government, council, church, teachers, extended family, parents etc, but other institutions such as the BBC and the police as well) and it was culturally eccentric to question them. The world had an order to it and street parties, like so much else, conformed to that order, that sense of solidity.

What we have here are some of 'the solids' whose turn has come, according to Zygmunt Bauman, 'to be thrown into the melting pot and which are in the process of being melted at the present time, the time of fluid modernity.' These are

'the bonds which interlock individual choices in collective projects and actions - the patterns of communication and co-ordination between individually conducted life policies on the one hand and political actions of human collectivities on the other.' (Liquid modernity p6)

If studying street parties and childhood memories (and responses to climate change, come to that) show us nothing else, they should help us understand how individual action in relation to collective initiative is changing at local level.

Commuting and local acquaintances

The other day I posted a comment over on Front Porch Forum in a discussion about the effect of commuting on local social networks. It was sparked by a post by Facebook's Cameron Marlow, picking up some Putnam material which noted that:

The car and the commute... are demonstrably bad for community life.

I was just adding a point that, if people have to travel for economic reasons, some forms of commuting are not totally detrimental to local social relations.

That same day I was at a meeting in London, after which I met up with my brother and we took the tube for a few stops. When we got out he said, wow, talking on the train, I don't usually do that, that doesn't happen on the trains I use.

Later that evening I took the overground train to my home in the sticks, and as I left the station chanced to meet an acquaintance I've got to know over the years from our local gym. He lives about half a mile from me, so I'd certainly not classify him as a neighbour. We walked up the hill together chatting. 'Tell you who I haven't seen for a while' says he - 'Irene.' (Another long-time fellow gym-user). Nor I, says I. Hope she's ok. I know whereabouts she lives, but not where exactly. We may have just missed her. We could ask the staff at the gym.

Which sort-of illustrates not just the way local connections can get reinforced in the commuting context, but also the limits of this kind of relationship. Maybe it's not my role to check on Irene, although she's getting on a bit and always on her own. But the missing component is the communication channel which would legitimate such a role - the local online network of course.

Hans Monderman, 1945-2008

The death has been announced of Hans Monderman, pioneer of shared space. Have we learned enough to cope without his wisdom?

From the Times obituary:

Hans Monderman pioneered the concept of the 'naked street' by removing all the things that were supposed to make it safe for the pedestrian - traffic lights, railings, kerbs and road markings. He thereby created a completely open and even surface on which motorists and pedestrians “negotiated” with each other by eye contact.

Comment from Ben Hamilton-Baillie on wikipedia:

What is so remarkable about the man is that he has achieved such a transformation in thinking from the basis of a traffic engineer (not a profession famed for its profound thinking and original analysis). Through remarkable persistence, patience and professional commitment he has managed to put in place well over 100 'shared space' schemes, transforming the urban and rural landscape of his native Friesland, Groningen and Drenthe. I have never met a man so generous with his time, so modest and unassuming about his achievements, and so humane in his application of technology to the benefit of everyday human society.

Previously:

Cross with caution

Psychological traffic calming

Formal and informal in public space

The revenge of the public realm.

Eat local stuff and meet people

The beeb covers an experiment with eating locally-produced food in Scotland, including a week's worth of the Fife Diet.

The most difficult thing has been preparation time when cooking from raw ingredients. The most rewarding has been meeting people, and discovering what's available from your region.

One implication that I particularly like, when this becomes more commonplace, is that we'll all recover a stronger sense of the changing seasons. For people whose only experience of the outdoors is the few metres between front door and car, and whose diet comes out of supermarket bags, that could be a shock worth watching.

Sense of place: designing-in neighbourliness?

With all this housebuilding going on and planned, questions are raised more often about the quality of residential design and layout. Even getting that right isn't going to guarantee the promotion of neighbourly relations, but you'd have thought it was an important start.

CABE is on the case, and has just published research into the views of residents of new homes completed within the last three years. The study blends two surveys, one involving 643 residents living in 33 new developments; the other covering 704 residents at six case study developments.

A key point is that being highly satisfied with the home itself does not necessarily imply a high degree of satisfaction with the wider development, or vice versa. People may express satisfaction with their new home (and often are reluctant to acknowledge problems with it), but very significant numbers of respondents expressed negative views about their neighbourhoods.

For example, although 82% of residents thought that their development was attractive and 69%found it had a pleasant road layout:

• 40% thought that there was not enough public open space in the development
• 48% thought there was not enough play space
• 34% thought the layout of their development was unsafe for children to walk, cycle or play in the streets, and
• 45% say that they live in the kind of neighbourhood where people mostly go their own way rather than doing things together and trying to help each other.

Well, the sense of belonging on new estates is unpredictable. The received wisdom is that you usually get an initial high level of interaction because people move in at around the same time, have similar issues, and may be at a similar stage in the life-cycle (especially parents of young children). Car-based lifestyles make a massive difference of course; and after a few years anyway this sense of community often dissipates or settles back down.

But in a recent conversation at a fast-expanding housing association I was told that lack of social integration on several new developments was giving rise to a lot of problems.  I suspect social landlords are generally well aware that it won't do to lay all the blame on the designers or the developers.

Meanwhile, CABE says:

This is not about a failure of national government policy: there is a perfectly good policy framework in place, which puts a strong emphasis on the quality of residential design and layout. It is housebuilders and planners who need to take more responsibility for creating a sense of place within new housing developments.

But how? I think there is some confusion about expectations of neighbouring. First, a general disinterest among people looking for housing (and I have only contempt for the stream of television programmes encouraging people to buy, make profit and move on without a moment's reflection on the social context of the home). Cultural expectations of local social interaction tend to be low: for the prospective resident they're a matter of chance not choice. Neighbourly relations are an afterthought.

And secondly, perhaps there is sometimes a naive assumption among developers and planners that people are motivated to be neighbourly, as if it just needs an appropriately-designed environment and we all live happily ever after. There's a whole stack of sociological issues waiting to tease us for this approach.

I've always said that since it seems possible to design-out neighbourliness, it ought to be possible to design it in. But that is certainly simplistic. Perhaps we need a study of evident neighbourliness in a poorly-designed environment, and of low levels of interaction in a development described as well-designed, in order to understand a bit more.

Lifetime neighbourhoods

Many neighbourhoods fail their residents because important opportunities for development and regeneration go ahead with little consideration of age in their planning. The International Longevity Centre has published a paper arguing the case for lifetime neighbourhoods which 'involve the creation of multi-generational space where the needs of all ages are catered for with a considered, negotiated balance.'

Lifetime neighbourhoods should also constitute a preventative investment in good health for future generations... They provide both a built environment and an attitudinal environment in which people of all ages feel both comfortable and informed when taking part.

Towards lifetime neighbourhoods: designing sustainable communities for all.

Regeneration damages community. Discuss.

A community activist and local shop-owner, who is also chair of the local Neighbourhood Action Group in Sefton, Liverpool, is challenging a compulsory purchase order that is part of a regeneration scheme.

In a witness statement before the court, Mr Powell says the Klondyke community was once a friendly and viable one, with many generations of family living together in a close-knit neighbourhood.

He says it was a popular neighbourhood which was in demand for people looking for homes.

However, since the start of regeneration in 2004 and resulting compulsory acquisition of properties, he says the area has suffered from increasing anti-social behaviour, including vandalism and joyriding, and he says the trade in his shops has begun to decline. He says he has had to reduce staff as a result, costing jobs to the local area.'

Source: Planning resource.

Neighbourhood branding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everyone's welcome

From a cracking new resource on migration just launched by our excellent National Archives.

Criminalising kids: questions about risk and respect

It may be that the story about the delinquent Brooklyn sidewalk-chalker could be trumped in England. According to this BBC report yesterday, children in this country have been arrested (unh, arrested?) for:

• drawing hopscotch on a pavement
• taking a slice of cucumber from a sandwich and throwing it at another child, and
• damaging a tree while building a den.

Not perhaps in the same league, but we've also had the heinous disgrace of flip-flopped feet on seats.

Meanwhile, the risk aversion debate has received significant renewed momentum from publicity following Tim Gill's No fear, published recently. (Various links currently on the Gulbenkian home page). And some energy is being coordinated in the US with Playborhood.

Questioning risk aversion was a rumbling cross-departmental sub-theme in Whitehall in the early years of the Labour administration at the end of the nineties, but it didn't stick. Maybe the urge to control took over, and anyway the culture is highly resilient, resisting some passionate challenging, eg What are we scared of? And yes I do accept the importance of recognising, as the Health and Safety Executive put it, that the term is shorthand for 'excessive risk aversion.'

It seems as if there are two trends in tension here, with two related themes - risk and respect - but I'm not clear how they are related. On the one hand we have attempts to program most risk out of children's lives (which is profoundly disempowering, and means that many seem to grow up expecting and accepting disempowerment as what society does to them). But measured exploration of risk can be stimulating and creates bonds: games and sport, still occasionally practised in some quarters (although very much subject to risk averse policies) offer semi-formal arenas in which such exploration can be played out.

And on the other hand, we have created neighbourhood contexts in which learning the give-and-take and cheek-by-jowl rubbing-along of socialising, getting along with people you might not necessarily choose as friends, is structurally minimised. And we have overseen a degree of family disintegration so that many young people can avoid having more than the most minimal contact with older people, and the separated generations are often bewildered by each other. Result, a crisis of respect. On its own, transforming the design of neighbourhoods won't cure this combination, it seems to be a deep cultural problem.

I was having a conversation the other day with a teacher who was telling me how depressing it is to have to try and deal with young people when they relentlessly swear and spit (in the classroom or corridor, this is, when in conversation with a teacher). It's unambiguously disrespectful behaviour, which must have some basis in the sense of not being cared about or valued.

How does that square with a society which appears obsessed with protecting its children from risk? I think it's partly because systematised risk aversion is in conflict with notions of genuine caring, it reflects self-interested detachment that says - children are too much trouble to be bothered about, we must constrain what they do. Bollocks.

The teacher and I reflected on the fact that we both know plenty of remarkable young people - far more mature and socially-supportive than most of us were in my day, inspiring young people who are a privilege to be with. And we were left wondering whether there is some kind of divide developing, between those who have had the chance to explore their own potential and responsible social relations, and those who haven't. I suspect I'll be revisiting this theme.

Consulting older people

On the question of consultation with older people, to paraphrase Gandhi, I think it would be a good idea. I've just found out about some interesting work that Urban Buzz funded in the London Borough of Lewisham as part of the Thames gateway development, which resulted in the publication of a toolkit and guidelines for consultation with older people, prepared by The Centre for Urban and Community Research at Goldsmiths.

It's a thorough and welcome document and appears to try and cover everything about the process they went through, which included field trips and mental maps of the neighbourhoods. It's important because the sense that many older people remain inexcusably excluded from consultative processes is widespread. But some of the tone leaves me a wee bit bothered. Like this:

'It is important that you present your project in a way that makes it relevant to them.'

Radical stuff eh? There's more.

'Incorporate older people’s knowledge in the planning process, by consulting them if an area is going to be changed. Make use of their old photos, listen to them talk about the history about the spaces.'

'Free lunches and refreshments should be provided to offer something for their time and effort.'

So long as the points get made, what am I bothered about? Well, I'm uncomfortable thinking that I live in a society where it's really necessary to make such points. It implies that there are people charged with 'consultation' for whom such things are not fundamentally obvious. But maybe the authors are right, maybe it does have to be pointed out. Many people are emerging from an embedded non-consultative authoritative culture and this is strange stuff for them. <Shudder>

If I were being picky, and it's not unheard-of, I'd have added a section suggesting that people doing consultation didn't feel the need constantly to refer to one another as Dr, Professor, 'professional' or 'expert.' The entire document is suffused with a sense of the implied superior status of such people, and of councillors, over older residents. It reinforces my desire to keep pushing for a neighbourhood-mapping process designed by older people themselves.

Online game about being a refugee

UNHCR has just launched the English language version of an online game created to increase students' awareness and knowledge about refugee situations, by putting them in the position of a refugee.

In Against all odds, the player is interrogated, hears the sound of guards' footsteps approaching, and senses the urgency in finding safety while racing against the clock.

Press release. Via Welcome to Your Library digest.

Out in the open

Many neighbourhoods in England experience occasional or persistent tensions due to the lack of adequate and appropriate sites for Romany gypsies and Irish travellers.

This year's Building and Social Housing Foundation consultation report is on the theme of providing accommodation, promoting understanding and recognising the rights of gypsies and travellers. In 2006, it says here, 21 per cent of gypsies and travellers had no legal place to park their caravan. (Although we're also told that estimates of the numbers of gypsies and travellers in Britain vary widely, with nothing like a definitive answer; so take that as 21% of roughly 100%).

Out in the open - full text download and summary available .

Young people and social networks

Recent JRF report shows both benefits and disbenefits in local social networks.

Place identity can be a source of strength, but it also appeals to the parochial.

Local connections can give some young people strong advantages in the labour market, with family and friends providing valuable support; while wider social and spatial horizons can expand the range of opportunities young people consider and improve their prospects. In more peripheral areas their choices may remain constrained because of limited employment opportunities.

The authors conclude that:

• policy needs to recognise that local, place-based social networks affect aspirations and behaviour;
• it is important that young people are aware of and can access opportunities beyond their immediate neighbourhood.

'We're most gregarious'

Some time ago I expressed a concern about the tendency to theorise and problematise social capital away from local everyday life. It's important to take account of shallow conversations and brief interactions that take place in the public realm. And now I've just been reading about some research into ephemeral relationships on the trams of Antwerp, carried out by Ruth Soenen.

Over eight months Soenen observed the kinds of brief relationships that spring up and disappear in this kind of public context - she notes for example how people start talking if they have to help one another avoid falling when there's a sudden stop, or if they see something unusual through the window. She records the catalytic effect of a colourful and talkative person stepping on board.

She tries to link this to notions of 'community', arguing that in-depth relationships 'don't have a priviliged status' in this respect:

'Duration doesn’t seem to be the essential marker for the experience of community... Ephemeral relationships can be a social base for the experience of community.'

Soenen goes on to argue that there are limitations in the measurement of social capital when we ignore the potential of ephemeral relationships. Her book about this study is published in Dutch only.

Thanks Jan. My title, showing my age, is from Flanders and Swan.

Previously: Segregation in public space (with reference to buses in Jerusalem).

Social mobility

The Department for Work and Pensions has just published an extensive literature review carried out by the Policy Research Institute on Factors influencing social mobility.

Alright calm down, form an orderly queue. Emerging from the detail comes the conclusion that

Trends in social mobility are remarkably resistant to policy interventions. Those in higher social classes appear to have been able to take greater advantage of the opportunities created by policy interventions and more able to use a variety of additional social advantages to maintain their relative position.

The authors go on to point to the complex effects of a range of policy measures which require more prior impact assessment. Perhaps the most useful contribution the research makes is to clarify the need for a new hierarchy of social mobility, 'based upon both labour market participation and the quality and security of that participation.'

Oh, and I don't want to seem too picky but I do wish these things were done properly... Scanning through, I found myself wondering how come 'Murphy 2006' was cited so frequently. Must be special I thought, I should know about this. So it's a shame it doesn't get mentioned in the bibliography. Scanning the bibliography briefly revealed several other mistakes, so I decided it was time to look away. Hopefully they'll take advantage of online publishing to release a corrected version, because it looks like a valuable reference source.

Playing out

Adults were three times more likely to play out when they were young, than children are today. New figures released by Play England haven't made a big noise (wrong time of year, and I fear the world is tiring slightly of this thread), but they deserve reflection:

71 per cent of adults played outside in the street or area close to their homes every day when they were children, compared to only 21 per cent of children today.

It reminds me of a favourite quotation from She was aye workin, which documents women's experiences in early 20th-century tenements in Glasgow and Edinburgh:

You were never in anyway. When you say you lived in a room-and-kitchen, your mum and dad lived in a room-and-kitchen, but you played out in the street, summer and winter, you didn't come in till bedtime.

And my own memories, if I may, are of cricket and football in the street and late kickabouts at the rec' until we couldn't see the ball any more or hunger drove us home. Before that it was 'chicken steps,' 'pom-pom one-two-three' and other street games. Lauren Lacey's lit review for NCB notes:

There has been a decrease over the past thirty years in children’s access to the streets and outdoor areas near their homes. Increasingly their independent mobility is restricted by traffic and fear, which in turn causes them to spend much of their time indoors or at organised activities. The combination of an increase in vehicles on the roads, increased parental anxiety, and restrictions on children’s mobility in the form of child curfews and anti-social behaviour orders has reduced children’s outdoor play opportunities.

The qualitative research reported included focus groups with young people aged between eight and 18. From which comes this scary piece of news:

Ten of the participants said that they never played outside on the streets and areas near their home.

That's ten out of 64 participants. And in the light of my recent note about the importance of unstructured time, this point is noteworthy:

In all the groups, children and young people said that having the freedom to choose what to do, and where to spend time, particularly in contrast to time spent in school, was very important. Even the youngest children talked about having this freedom and time away from parents and adult supervision.

The quantitative research points to a complex range of interconnected factors such as intolerant adults, traffic, lack of facilities etc. Two things occur to me. First, I see no mention of the increasingly stifling competitive educational context in which many children are expected to complete ridiculous amounts of homework in order to try to fulfil their parents' ambitions for them, or die, emotionally, in the attempt. That's a social problem if ever I saw one.

Secondly, it's reassuring to note that in drawing attention to the combined effects of the decline in child-friendly public space, the increase in traffic, and the demonisation of children and young people, Play England don't seem to have slipped into the easy option of blaming screen-based entertainment directly. My suspicion is that for many children, screen-based entertainment is the non-preferred option often chosen for them by their parents, at least initially.

There's much more material here.

Defiance

I was being shown round a struggling estate in the midlands recently, with depressing amounts of the housing boarded-up, and came across these two examples of defiance.

In a bungalow designed for older people, someone struggles to keep up standards, with net curtains and a plant-pot outside. How does it feel to have heavy steel shutters right next door and a sign saying 'Danger - Live wires'?

Here's another, perhaps more masculine, approach: the fence, the gate (even the postman is excluded), the surveillance camera, the alarm system. Next door is boarded-up. There's a hanging basket but it seems to be empty. It all says, I live here and you're not gonna drag me down with you.